'Tis the Season (for Dengue)

VSO Programme Office, Phnom Penh.

My toes ache so much that I’ve considered trapping them in the door just to change the feeling in them. Yesterday it was my heel that was causing all the pain and the day before my forearm. I expect that tomorrow it will be my little finger or some other equally trivial part of my body which I usually never give a second thought too until this “Break Bone Fever”, otherwise known as the Dengue fever virus, decides to manifest itself there.

Anyone who saw me at 6am last Thursday would be forgiven for thinking that I had just crawled in from an extremely heavy night in Heart of Darkness and the other watering-pits of PP. Clutching my head, bouncing off walls on the way to the bathroom, each time uttering progressively worse expletives, and eyes so bloodshot Frankenstein’s Monster would have run scared – it must have looked like the worst hangover in history. The truth is that for once I’d been tucked up at 7pm after taking antibiotics and hoping to be back at work the next morning. Now, having been confirmed to have dengue, it looks like I’ll be off for at least two weeks.

Caused by a virus carried by the Aedes mosquito, prevalent in both urban and rural environments during the day, there’s not much you can do to prevent dengue except for walk around in a giant mosquito net every second of the day. Being a little too fashion-conscious for that, I’ve chosen to stick to just wearing DEET mosquito spray but unfortunately this hasn’t been enough. Now, I’m just one in a long line of volunteers who’s been on virtual house arrest in the Programme Office during these months of “Dengue Season” whilst I rest and wait to feel better.

While I feel ill and that’s obviously never pleasant, the timing is also particularly bad. I’ve only done 3 day in my office at work and really just want to get stuck in. The real reason for me coming out to Cambodia to start with seems to be getting further from my reach with each passing day. I know I have to be patient and I’ve been told by so many serving volunteers “don’t stress – work’s never as exciting as it sounds when you have to do it” but still, I’m getting frustrated. At least my colleagues in Mlup Baitong are all sympathetic. Most of them have had krun chiam – blood disease – before so know that I’m not just being a pathetic foreigner and I really do need to rest. Even though I sound miserable, I really am in the best pace to be ill. There are people in and out of the PO most of the time so word has spread quickly that I’m ill and in between the DVDs and the Disney Channel I’ve been having phone calls and messages to keep me entertained. In fact, within half an hour of coming back from the doctors with my results, I had texts from volunteers in 4 different provinces wishing me a speedy recovery (if you ever need a message taken from one end of Cambodia to the other, VSO vols are by far the fastest way to do it – we should start our own communications service). So, having already had two visitors today, Richard and Alan, I’m worn out from socialising and plan to go back to bed for another few hours.

Home Sweet Dusty Home

Village 5, Treng Treung Commune, Kampong Speu.

My aircraft hanger of a house (second gate on left in picture) is starting to feel and look more like home. The front room is still bare except for the two rucksacks I haven’t unpacked, my bike and the huge heavy bench and chairs which sit at the edge of the room. I keep meaning to move them into a circle rather than a straight line so it at least looks like maybe people will socialise around them but the space is proving useful for me skipping and Becca, the German volunteer at Mlup Baitong, to work out in. I suspect the front room will remain a garage/gym for the rest of the year. It’s far too dusty from all the trucks outside to be pleasant and it’s difficult to stay away from prying eyes in that room even when the 8’ tall double glass doors are shut.

Instead, I’m spending a lot of time in my tiny kitchen at the back which feels like mire with all the ‘luxury’ items like pasta, sesame oil and, of course, peanut butter* from Pencil market in Phnom Penh. I’ve got a 2 ring gas stove to cook on although one hob doesn’t work unless you poke it with a knife first. I’m not sure what this does to it that makes it work but it seems to be the magic trick so I’ll carry on doing it. I’ve also got a charcoal-burning pot in my back yard but I haven’t had time to find where I can buy charcoal yet. At the moment it’s just decoration which makes my home look more typically “Cambodian”, along with the reed sweeping brush, string hammock and multitude of plastic plates, sieves, draining trays and boxes specially designed to keep ants out of cans of condensed milk. I never knew how much every kitchen needs these “bits of tat” as I’ve previously dismissed them until I was trying to balance dirty vegetables, soaped vegetables, rinsed vegetables and a bowl of pasta on 6 inches of work surface in front of my toothbrush and wash bag (the kitchen sink is the only one in a house with 2 bathrooms which is actually connected to a water source). Nevertheless, I still fail to see how every third person in the market can make their living from selling these life-saving-bits-of-plastic-tat.

My bedroom is also starting to take shape out of the grubby mess. I have a huge desk/dressing table and a big double bed neatly enclosed with the VSO standard issue mosquito net and a fan (in the same sun-faded blue as all the plastic-kitchen-tat). There’s no chair for the desk or anywhere to put my clothes so I’m still living out of a rucksack but hopefully that’ll get sorted soon.

So, that’s my house. There’s also another 2 bedrooms but they’re so full of dirt that I can’t even bear to open the doors at the moment but don’t that put you off visiting. The door of house 2, Village 5, Treng Treyung Commune, Kampong Speu is always only 3 hefty padlocks away from being your home away from home in Cambodia.

* You do not know the use peanut butter has in a multitude of recipes until you’ve been stuck in the Mekong Hotel for 6 weeks.

Forty Barangs on a Boat – “Go Go VSO!”

VSO PO, PP (there's never too many acronyms in Cambodia)

Piling into a cattle truck in our luminous pink t-shirts and spotless white caps the VSO boat-race team, all 40 of us, looked more like a gaggle of overgrown nursery-school kids being on a day trip than serious contenders in Cambodia’s most prestigious sporting event – the Phnom Penh Boat Race. Years ago the annual race down the Mekong was held to identify the strongest and bravest Khmers who would serve as the king’s personal guards. Today, the prize at the end of three days of racing is monetary rather than a job promotion but the prestige remains the same. Provincial teams qualify throughout the year in a series of trails and Phnom Penh teams are given places based on previous years’ merits, ability to pay and the closeness of their relation through marriage to those in power. Unsurprisingly, Hun Sen’s cronies had two boats in the race. Then there was us. And the Army boat. And the Navy boat.

Luckily, we weren’t actually pitted against the Cambodian Navy but against Kandal Province, who, kitted out in their professional looking red and blue uniforms only served to make our bright pink affairs even more laughable. One benefit did come from them however; it made our impending failure seem less great as it was made clear from one glance at us that we were not in this with any expectations of serious sporting prowess. They must have jumped for joy at being drawn against the only Barang boat in the competition. It was effectively a free ticket into the next round.

After being pretty much towed up the river by our opponents and setting off back downstream, they were ahead of us by half a boat length after just a few strokes. Finally, we reached the end of the course (although missed passing between the actual finishing flags having veered off course sometime before) and had an official position of 3rd out of 2 boats due to our being overtaken by the winning boat of the race behind us. Nevertheless, this is a considerable improvement on last year’s 7th out of 2 boats so it’s a considerable achievement in my eyes!

Even if our race was a debarcle, the atmosphere whilst we were squeezed in the boat rafted up between some of the best rowers in Cambodia exchanging pleasantries, jibes and dodging flying bottles of drinking water which I think were thrown in generosity, is not something I will forget soon. Yet again, I feel privileged, if slightly uneasy about it, that I have experienced something that even most Khmers won’t get to take part in.