I come from the future

Since the poll returned joint winners for what the next blog should be (1 vote each), I'm writing about something totally different. But rather like Series 2 of The Wire, it may not be the best, but if you want to understand everything that follows than you have to read it.

Before departing, I was explaining to a friend, Liane, what I was going to do - assist an educational charity with campaigning and advocacy. Then she asked a basic but rather meaningful question - why do they need you to do that? I scratched my head and hummed a little. Now I have an answer - it's to do with breaking the space-time continuum and travelling faster than the speed of light.

A while ago, I attended a seminar given by a guy called Matt Ridley (Zoe, I've still got your book!) who has written brilliant books about genetics, was the Chairman of Northern Rock when it went bust (kind of the UK's Lehman Brothers) and then wrote a book advising that all countries will become wealthy given time and avoidance of North Korea like policies. As countries join the development conveyor belt, a series of good things happen that lead to more good things happening that leads to us all having a good time. Woo hoo!

It's just a matter of time before we're all rich

We've made it!

Ridley is really saying that the explanation for different countries having different levels of wealth is because they are at different stages in their political development. The UK has had political stability, democracy and commerce for centuries. Cambodia would count this in years, months and days. Einstein may have thought that time and space cannot be separated but actually some countries sharing the same space are in different time periods.

For Cambodia, which has had about 15 years of peace after decades of war and centuries of colonisation, is it just like being in the US after their War of Independence in 1783, or more like 1865 and their civil war? Maybe Cambodia is like the UK in 1745, when the Jacobite rebels were finally defeated and the UK found political stability.

When we wonder why some countries cannot just sort themselves out and stop being poor, we should think about what our countries were like when they were at the same stage as Cambodia is now. A few men ruled, corruption was common, power came from wealth and force, rule of law was absent, the streets were dirty, the masses were uneducated and irrational beliefs were common.

But this does not mean that Cambodia has to wait 200 years to become a functioning, developed society. Although Cambodia may be at a different time to the developed world, they do share the same space, which means that people of the future (from the developed world) can travel to Cambodia and share with them the learning and skills that are common in the future. In this way, Cambodia can travel faster through time and catch up with the developed world quicker than they otherwise would.

Don't worry, it's Claire that is driving

Cambodia and Cambodians have not had the chance to reap the knowledge or learn the skills that we have accumulated over centuries. That is why I'm here. I come from the future to share what has taken us centuries to learn.

Gordon

PS, because this blog is maybe stretching credibility a little and a bit 'off-beat' I've added a couple of random videos to entertain you. The first is us out for a cycle through tobacco fields near Kompong Cham.

And the second is a tribute to the start of the rainy season which was this week. But since Claire has the camera away with her in Mondulkiri, we're making do with a rain storm when we were walking through the national park in Kep.

A trip to Kep-sur-mer

Cambodia used to be a French colony but since so many people died during the 1970s, there aren't that many old people left who lived under French rule (ended in 1956). So now, French is only spoken by a few and whilst there may be slightly more French people here than would otherwise be, Cambodia does not feel French in any way. Except in Kep.

Fishing boats and seafront restaurants in Kep

We went to Kep for the New Year and it's a lovely small town on the coast and is also where people go from to the virtually uninhabited Rabbit Island for an idyllic escape. It also is a tri-lingual place with quite a few French people living there, and English being the conversant language for all non-French tourists.

As some of you may remember, I used to be completely fluent in French but alas when faced with the choice of speaking to the French husband or Khmer wife who owned the restaurant, it seems that we now find it easier to speak Khmer. Testament to our Khmer teacher, but doesn't say much for our combined 6 years of French at school.

Kep is famous for its crab market and fresh seafood, although it's a bit pricey. A main meal generally costs between $1.50 and $4 dollars depending on where you eat. But here, the shrimp is $5 and crab $7. Expensive considering there's not exactly any transportation costs.

Crabs for sale at the market

There are two strange things about the people who fish the crabs. Firstly, they are virtually all women and secondly they are fully clothed when they go into the sea to collect their baskets and nets. Although, most Khmer adults go into the sea fully clothed because it is the fashion here to be as pale as possible. They actually even use whitening in skin products such as sun tan lotion.

Who needs swimming trunks?

Kep also has some rather brave, inquisitive gibbons that came down and fed off the scraps of the holiday makers. One came right up to us, maybe only three feet away, but rather than take a picture, we jumped away from something a tenth of our size. These gibbons were also less timid than the monkeys in the national park for whom we stopped for aaaages to look for in trees. Unsuccessfully.

Not a totem pole but a road sign

So after hiking through the national park in mid to high 30s heat, what should you do next? Yep, get some rather powerful cocktails for $2 and look out at the sunset over the Gulf of Thailand. I'm not sure what our excuse was every other night mind you.

The sailing club where we had our cocktails and the national park behind it

We were actually at the sailing club for New Year and as we had our own little countdown we wondered what would happen as the clock struck 7:11. The only Khmer people there were staff mind you so we weren't expecting much. But there was actually nothing at all. There was no congratulations amongst the staff or semblance of celebration and when we asked Khmer people back at the hotel, they said there wasn't any kind of partying for New Year other than food and drink with family.   

Sunset over the Gulf of Thailand - so warm that even Claire swam in it

This is probably not much use for our readers outside of Cambodia, but if you go to Kep, do stay in The Boat House. Gorgeous little hotel close to the beach, crab market and national park. A little haven. And for the rest of you, do tell us via the poll or comments below what you would like to read more about, or if there any burning questions about Cambodia. 

Gordon

A New Year brings monks with gadgets

At 7:10pm on Friday 13th April, the clock ticked over to 7:11pm and the new year of 2556 was welcomed in Cambodia. 


Khmer New Year is a big deal, kind of like our Christmas. Everybody heads back to their family "homeland" and there are three or four days of celebrations. But before all of that, it's time to call in the monks for a blessing.


Before new year, it is traditional for monks to bless the office and staff. Claire was first to experience this and she came home with tales of fruit and sweets bouncing of the heads of the kneeled, bowed staff after being thrown as part of the blessing. The fruit is literally called rich and is meant to bestow wealth and the sweets represent sweetness of life.

Stole this from Google Images because we were far too respectful to take pics

So during the blessing in my office, I was sitting head bowed in a horribly awkward position comforted only at the prospect of fruit and sweets. Except it was water droplets that soon hit my head. I looked up to the ceiling only to realise that it was the monks flicking the water at us, quickly followed by flower buds.


I sat respectfully bowed and motionless with cramp setting in, whilst all around me staff were answering their mobile phones and throwing flower buds over other staff or in the gap down the back of people's trousers as they bent forward. I had become used to Khmer people answering their mobile phone no matter where they are when it rings, but I was shocked by what I saw next.


As one monk was chanting and blessing us, the other one was sitting beside him chatting on his mobile phone. Yep, not all monks are the propertyless, wizened old men that we mythologise. 

Some monks just chilling

In fact, rather than attainment of monk-hood being the result of lifelong study and sacrifice, any male of any age can just walk into a pagoda, shave their head, don some robes and hey presto you're a monk. And if you get a bit bored, you just change your clothes, walk out the pagoda and that's the end of your monk-hood. Until you maybe want to become a monk again.

I was asking him if that was the same robe Obi Wan Kenobi had

Some families send their sons to the pagoda to get educated; others go for shelter and food; and we've been told others go to avoid a jail sentence. The idea of not owning property is quaint and observed by some but others have laptops and motos etc, whilst the illusion of monks being pure was shattered on day 3 here when I saw one having a fag. Worse, vulnerable women who have gone to a pagoda for shelter have subsequently become pregnant. How this was achieved when monks are not allowed to touch women is particularly impressive. 


Despite this reality, monks still enjoy the highest reverence here. There is a special word to greet them and even the King (or God-King as he officially is) must bow down to the youngest monk. Restaurants give them free food and shops give them money. 

Monks getting a free lift

We met a monk in our first week who had survived the Khmer Rouge and walked hundreds of miles to reach Phnom Penh and a pagoda he wanted to join. He spoke passionately about Buddhism and explained its teachings. He was clearly committed and sincere about his beliefs, it just seems that there is the odd one or two that aren't how you imagined them to be.


Happy New Year
Gordon

care packages and finding a house - what more could you want!

Last week I received my first care package from home - so exciting! It only took two weeks to get here (which is quite impressive given the number of packages that we've heard about going missing forever / AWOL for up to six weeks) and arrived just in time for Easter, complete with Cadbury's mini eggs and creme egg splats. I literally could not have been happier.

When I was in Namibia (ten years ago this year!) I was very lucky to receive lots of letters every time I got back to basecamp. I spent a lot of time writing letters when I was there too as, back in the day, email and laptops just weren't the norm. (This was also before digital cameras got affordable too however, I digress...) It's lovely getting letters and I'm only sad the postal system is slow and expensive to send mail through otherwise I'd be sending postcards and airmail letters to everyone!

There were other practical things that I'd asked for too, such as stain removal liquid, some clothes that I thought would be useful to have and rubber gloves (I wasn't sure you'd get them here which is a bit ridiculous, but you never know!) Mum and dad also enclosed birthday cards from my family and some pics from home including some of my newly painted flat. They've been very busy since I left cleaning the flat and repainting everything (or just painting a lot of things given that I never quite got round to painting my bedroom or living room in the six years I was there...) It's looking fantastic (thanks again folks) and my lovely new tenant has moved in and is hopefully going to be very happy there!

and another of me with all my exciting things!

We've been house hunting ourselves here. As I mentioned in an earlier post it may be me being fussy but I just hadn't seen anywhere that felt like home. This is mostly because the apartments are all empty and therefore hard to imagine how they would look homely, generally quite dirty (you'd think sweeping up the dead cockroaches would be the least you'd do if you were trying to rent out your apartment!) and because some of them are just plain not nice. And also because we had seen fellow VSOer Clare's place and then stayed in it for a week while she was on holiday, and I sort of fell in love with it. There were two problems - Clare wasn't leaving until mid-end May and we didn't want to be in our tiny, cheap guesthouse for another six weeks, and Gordon wasn't sure he wanted to be in BKK1, the area the flat is in which is basically expat-land (or Barangville as it's commonly known, Barang being the catch all term for foreigners).

Before we moved to Cambodia we'd chatted quite a lot about how we could integrate into a Khmer community living in a city. Once we came here we kept having these discussions and slowly we've realised that it's just very difficult. We've heard lots of stories of volunteers with similar thoughts but who have just not managed to do it. It's not that Khmer people aren't friendly, far from it, but all I can assume is, they have their own lives and their own friends and they're not particularly fussed to make friends with foreigners. There are obviously exceptions but I've realised that any Khmer friends we make will take time, and where we live actually won't make the difference as the chances are it will be people we meet through work or mutual friends, not through chatting to them in our street.

Anyway, on Saturday, after looking round MORE apartments with a new agent, all of which I'd already seen with another agent, we finally decided that we would take Clare's. So, all going well, we have a house, with some really great (ex-pat) neighbours that we can move into sometime next month. In the meantime, after some panicked hunting, we have moved into the Cheeky Monkey for the meantime. It's like a posh hostel where we have our own room with bathroom and can use the kitchen and living room etc. It's lovely and we've got some good hostel-mates including a Korean girl who is interning at one of the Ministeries, and a French girl, who speaks five languages, and is working at one of the Ministeries and the UN! We really are the poor relations here.

It's Khmer New Year this weekend so we've decided to head to the beach. More of that next time! In the meantime, all this started with talk of a care package. Not that I'm fishing (much) but it is really exciting getting mail here, so if anyone fancies going old school and writing a letter our address is:
Claire and/or Gordon
VSO Cambodia Programme Office
PO Box 912
Phnom Penh
Cambodia

I can't promise I'll be able to post anything back as, bizarrely, sending seems to be even trickier (and way more expensive) than receiving (I think they take the money but don't actually put the stamps on for you...) but you will have our eternal gratitude!

Sua s'dey chinam t'mei! (literally hello year new)

Home life - Cambodia style

After my first full day in Cambodia, two VSO volunteers not based in Phnom Penh told me that I was doing VSO-light.

Phnom Penh is a city like most in the developed world – restaurants, shops, cars, electricity, modern housing and sanitation etc. But outside of Phnom Penh, life is a bit different and 80% of Cambodians live rurally.

Houses are traditional wooden houses on stilts, underneath which and around, any cow(s), pig(s) and chickens are kept for subsistence. Electricity is uncommon; squat French style toilets are a step up from the forest; and showers are taken using a bucket.

The life Claire and I will witness in Phnom Penh is not life for most Cambodians. So to introduce us to this life, VSO arranged for us to stay with a family in a village for a day and night. 

We ended up staying with the chief of the village so their house was rather nicer, larger and more modern than others in the village. The big challenge was that they spoke no English.

Our home for a day and night

On arrival, I was kept upstairs for serious talk with the man of the house, whilst Claire was taken away to meet his wife and various kids. The game for Claire was to work out what relation all the kids were to the adults and each other.

Sherlock Wilcock discovered that one boy and girl were grandkids looked after by grandparents because their parents were working in Phnom Penh. The parents could not afford for their kids to be in Phnom Penh meaning the kids see them very rarely in the year. It seems that there were other similar situations like this in the village. 

Can you guess which one isn't from Cambodia?

The problem for us came when Grandpa started to ask about our wedding, including how much it cost. Saying we weren’t married wasn’t an option.

So I explained to him that 120 of you lot were there and were very expensive to feed - £50 p/p no less!  Claire’s dress was a whopping £1000 and actually looked quite like the dress the granddaughter was making for her 18^th birthday, which was actually really pretty. 

However, there were two saving graces to keep the conversation flowing. Firstly, I had taken balloons which seemed to go down a hit with the kids. This has been a hit with some of the kids of the staff at our hotel in Kompong Cham so I'm taking them with me wherever I go now.

Lots of debate about how to write our names - they usually think I'm saying Golden or Garden

The second saving grace was that the Gran, who was a school teacher, and granddaughter decided to teach Claire how to write Khmai. Somehow, I was spared this.

However, I was not spared the agony of eating whilst sitting on the floor cross-legged. It was the ultimate torture for me because I was literally torn between sitting there longer to eat more of the wonderful food (I had 12 fish in 24 hours) or saying I was full so that I could stand up. 

In the end I kept eating but couldn't get up until Claire was up and the family were out of sight allowing me to struggle up like a bow-legged 90-year-old needing both hips replaced. Agony. Plus, Gran wouldn't allow either of us to uncross our legs while eating - despite her sitting with only one leg crossed. It was like a test of our willpower to survive in Cambodia (melodramatic?). 

Princess Claire in her mosquito net. We slept upstairs on the wooden floor.

At night we spend a bit of time watching kickboxing with Grandpa. The Khmai guy got beaten by the Thai guy in quite an explosive 5 rounder. I kept on wanting the guy to do 'The Crane' but evidently that's a different martial art...

Then it was up early, 6am, a bucket shower to wash away the cobwebs (or scorpions which we awoke next to outside our net), and a massive breakfast. As well as the fish there was rice, a kind of tamarind sauce and egg and pork mixed up which was also put into a packed lunch for us to take away together with five mangoes and some lamot fruit from their garden (see Claire's post about fruit, aka golden kiwi). Obviously a different breakfast to your average cereal but I guess encountering "strange" things was the point - I would love to read their blog about us!

Strangely yours

Gordon

A happy coincidence and a library that's getting me excited!

Today is the last day of our In Country Training (ICT) and as of Monday, we're on our own! Since we arrived we have been looked after by the Programme Office staff here who have organised our timetable for what we're doing every day. From Monday nothing is organised for us anymore. Gordon goes off to work and I properly start the job hunt (although in the meantime I'm going to be doing some work at the VSO Office, helping with a new communications strategy which I'm really looking forward to).

This morning, the volunteers had meetings with the their Head of Sector (all volunteers work either under Education, Health or Livelihoods) and I had some free time on my hands. I've spoken to some agents who are helping us look for a house (we've seen lots but none that are right. Possibly we (ie me) are just being fussy, but I have hope we can find somewhere we love). I had great plans to write lots of emails and catch up on lots of things but the lure of Google proved too much and I found myself reading the blog of a certain Danny Murphy...

For anyone who went to Crieff High with me the name will be familiar - our 'headie' for a few years the name had come up in conversation a few times when we arrived here (mostly because he had a lovely apartment!) but it was only one night after a comment about a past Scottish VSOer who worked in education that it finally clicked who it was. This morning I've spent a lovely hour or so browsing through his blog and reading about his first few weeks here in Cambodia. For those that are interested I can highly recommend it:  http://dannymurphyvso.wordpress.com/

I've also spent quite some time looking at the books in the Programme Office library. I've not read a thing since I came here which is really strange for me - I normally get through a book or two per week and had expected to have finished all the books that we brought with us both in traditional form and on our fab Kindle.There is nothing I like more than lbrowsing books and the fact that these have all been left here by previous volunteers just adds a certain something to them. I've recommended a few to some of the other volunteers who are heading off into the sticks and are stocking up on reading material (another thing I love doing although more fraught with panic as I have no idea what they like!).

I'm really quite excited about reading some of the books as there are many that I've been meaning to read for years, or feel that I "should" read. I think I'm going to start with Iain Crichton Smith's Consider the Lilies. I've not read anything by Crichton Smith and it will be a nice reminder from home. There's also a novel by Robin Jenkins that I have my eye on - I read The Cone Gatherers in SYS English and loved it and am looking forward to reading more by him. Straying away from Scotland Jack Kerouac's On the Road has been earmarked for a perusal at a later date and there are loads of other interesting books that I can't wait to get started on. 

Anyway. Enough ramblings. Gordon should be finished in a few minutes and we're off out for a 'working lunch' as we evaluate our ICT and language training.

Surviving the Killing Fields

If you only ever read one blog post of ours, then read this one. It is one man’s story that represents a country’s history, and explains its present ails.

Dara is our language teacher. He was born in 1960 and his father was an officer in the Cambodian army when General Lon Nol was in power from 1970-1975. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol after a long civil war that claimed 500,000 lives.

Dara - our teacher and survivor of Khmer Rouge

Dara’s father, like most of the nation, welcomed the Khmer Rouge believing they would bring peace. As such, Dara’s parents called their newly born baby “Peace” but there would be no peace for decades.

For four years, the Khmer Rouge divided families, drove people from their homes and worked them to death in labour camps. People survived on a few grains of rice and whatever grass, tree bark and fruit they could find without guards seeing them. One of Dara’s brothers did not survive the starvation and his father who was separated was never seen again.

Dara was moved from his work camp to a prison where he was blindfolded and marched out into fields. He felt the grass beneath his feet and knew that he was entering ‘the killing fields’.  However, his walk continued so that instead of feeling a rifle pressed against his head, he felt stones under his feet and he was back in prison.

He was alive but knew he would be dead soon unless he escaped. So he jumped a barbed wire fence, dodged bullets and didn’t stop running until he found his way back to his mother.

There he was forced to work in camps and did so until Vietnam began their invasion to defeat the Khmer Rouge. Dara fought the Khmer Rouge for three months seeing three of his friends blown up by a mine just a few yards in front of him.

In less than the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, before they were overthrown in 1979, approximately 2million had died – more than a quarter of the entire population.

And still there was no peace as civil war continued throughout the 1980s between rival factions.

First, Dara lived in a camp near the Thai border where he walked 60km each way to take 15kg of food back to his mother and brothers. This was until the civil war forced Dara and his family to become refugees living in a refugee camp of 350,000 people just over the Thai border.

Even there Dara was not safe. There were three refugee camps and each one was controlled by one of the factions fighting in Cambodia. Under a pseudonym, he started a petition calling for neutral control of the refugee camps but, in 1990, his real name and photo were published by Western journalists covering the story.

Dara had to flee for his life. And the only place he could run to was back to Phnom Penh and the heart of the civil war. Family and friends would not hide him as refugees from the border were thought of as enemies by authorities. He turned himself in and after days of imprisonment and questioning he was let go.

For twenty years Dara’s life had been the war and death that engulfed Cambodia. He began working as a teacher in the 1990s and Cambodia began to find peace. But this was not quite peace as we know it – there were still tanks being blown up in cities, rockets and guns being fired, and too many people dying.

Looking at Dara and Cambodia today, you may never know their history. The pain and loss are not immediately apparent meaning their effects can be un-noticed.

Dara with us at a thank you lunch - happier times

But I am learning it affects everything. I once scolded myself for asking a man of my age what his parents did - it was highly likely they had died under the Khmer Rouge. But more importantly, it affects the rules of this society, how people behave and how they work. Death literally touched every family in this country and that will take a long time to heal.

Gordon