Quite Random

August

One month in, and I have had some illusions shattered, itched a very great deal, learnt some Khmer, bought a motorbike, found a lot of crocodiles in my back garden, nearly been eaten by dogs, said hello to a lot of monks, refused approximately fifteen million tuk-tuk rides, swam nearly every day, got stuck on a broken down boat, had some meetings, heard a lot of stories, and not achieved a great deal.

I don’t remember the last time I was this frustrated. The project I originally came here to do isn’t going anywhere fast – snippets of information to pass between parties, that’s all there is. I came here to try and help, and all I have done so far is sit blogging in an air-conditioned cafe, sit drinking in bars with other expats, sit at home reading, trying to work out how the hell this place works and how, if, I fit into the picture. Cambodia could drive you crazy, but as a friend said this morning, you accept things the way they are, or you leave.

Many volunteers come into town having paid thousands for the privilege of offering their time to help people in need – and that sums it up. You have to pay if you want to help people, just showing up isn’t enough, whether you’re here on your gap year or you’re an NGO. As Ray Zepp describes in his book Experiencing Cambodia, NGOs must in many cases go through the absurd sounding process of negotiating with beneficiaries just what incentives they require in order to accept help. An example is street children. Often the main breadwinners for their family even at five years old, you can’t just offer them free education. You have to offer them free education and food - their parent’s aren’t prepared to release them to come and learn, sacrificing earnings, unless they’re getting fed, so saving the parents money.

NGOs and Western donors are seen as a necessary evil, a great source of income for local NGO directors who were trained in the forests of the Thai border in telling Westerners with money What They Want To Hear, agreeing to virtually anything if it has funding attached. I read a great story about a Western donor who decided that all of the schools in a particular district needed long-jump pits. Long-jump pits? Funding was available, so they were built, used by the children at the school for one sports day when colourful photos were taken and sent back to the satisfied donor, and then left, flooded in the rainy season, soon turning into huge mud holes in the playground. Did you ever hear of a Cambodian long-jump champion?

A very significant chunk of Cambodia’s income is aid money. Aid is a business, and it’s big business here. It is depressing that such a small percentage of money donated to charities ends up actually reaching the people it is intended to help – twenty percent, if that. The rest of it is eaten up by salaries, beaurocracy, and corruption. It’s very easy to become cynical and wonder what the point of all this is, sit on the street drinking a two dollar coffee and telling some pathetic women she can’t have 1000 riel for rice and vegetables before either leaving in disgust or staying and developing a drink problem. Sounds melodramatic and I don’t intend to do either, but thousands before me have from what I can see.

I haven’t abandoned hope yet. This month has taught me a lot about how the whole ‘doing good’ thing works, and there are still organisations in Siem Reap that genuinely do do good. I’m investigating work with an orphanage and education centre outside town on training and developing young adults, a place I know with people I like and trust. I told myself that when I came out here I’d give it a month and come home if things didn’t work out, but I still want to travel more in this part of the world, and I might still be able to do something useful. What I can say about this first month – it has been educational.

Good mornings follow a good Nytol

Ah, Nytol, my new best friend. Yesterday was a grim day after not sleeping at all the previous night, so last night I went to bed armed with Nytol, hydrocortizone cream and talcum powder. I slept like a baby. It’s incredible what good sleep can do for your perspective.

Today, everything seems a bit better. The kids hawking books are recognising us so we get hassled less about buying books and postcards, some of the tuk-tuk drivers know us so we get less offers of “tuk tuk sir?” and “tuk tuk lady?” every time we walk down the street, and Mr Douk, the former policemen who had his arms blown off by a mine and now sells books from the basket hanging round his neck is content just to say a good morning and a how are you.

I’ve just worked out why Internet access is so slow here. All the dudes who run the Internet cafes spend all day watching Cambodian pop videos on YouTube…

Night noises

2:52am.

I can’t sleep. I’m sat in the kitchen typing this by the light of the laptop’s monitor. My legs have been itching like crazy – aftersun, freshly chilled from the fridge has put out the itching for the moment, but I still can’t sleep.

The window is open, mozzie grille up, and the back garden and beyond are flooded with moonlight. The crickets provide a constant background noise like static, punctuated by the calling of frogs. Once in a while a dog starts barking frantically, then another starts howling like an air raid siren. The crocodiles in the back garden stir occasionally, splash into the water, or groan a deep, reverberating groan. About ten minutes ago two gunshots rang out and echoed around somewhere, and thunder came from the west about twenty minutes ago. Someone is talking somewhere.

The noises here could drive you insane if you let them.

All creatures great and small

A walk home at night yields a cornucopia of fauna - lizards scuttle into the bushes before you, a yellow snail about four inches long was at our front gate the other night, fireflies flashed around the garden last night like drunken shooting stars, and the local dogs are always willing to announce to the entire neighbourhood that you’re back home. One night recently two of them charged at us, growling, so all we could see approaching us from the darkness was a mass of teeth and eyes. They sidestepped us at the last minute and got into a fight of their own, but I have since been advised that, when approached by an aggressive dog, the trick is to bend down to pick up a stone. Simply bending down is usually enough to send them running.

The dogs in the house opposite are nasty swines that start fights with any other dog that walks past. I remarked on this the other morning when Hannah asked me if I had heard the noise earlier in the day. No, I said, I think I recalled a lot of yelping at one point but I thought that was during the night, another dogfight. It turns out that the neighbours had been sufficiently concerned about their aggressive dogs to call someone round who lightly sedated them, leaving them staggering around, before pinning them to the floor and cutting off their canine teeth. Never did it occur to them to get the dogs castrated.

Hannah has visited the man who runs horse-and-carriage rides around Angkor Wat, to check on the health of his horses - he is in danger of going out of business because no tourist in their right mind wants to get into a carriage that is pulled by one of these pathetic, underweight, whipmarked creatures. He is doing his best to pay more attention to their health, but it has taken imminent ruin to bring this about.

People here for the most part aren’t deliberately cruel to animals - they have a very different relationship with them to most Westerners, one based upon the animal’s usefulness as a tool or a commodity, though more people are starting to keep dogs and cats as pets. There are only about three non-Khmer veterinarians in the whole country - this according to the one who works in Siem Reap. While in the West we have the luxury of being able to say that people’s treatment of animals is an indicator of their level of compassion towards humans, here, people’s treatment of animals is an indicator that many hardly know enough about maintaining their own health, let alone that of their animals.

The landlady showed us what we have in our back garden the other day. A crocodile farm with around a hundred and fifty crocodiles of all sizes. Don’t go sleepwalking here.

Vroom vroom… bugger

Upsy-daisy, downsy-daisy. I’m having a bad day. The new motorbike and I are not getting along so well, due to my useless clutch control and nerves. Hannah and I went halves on the bike, the idea being that we can ferry each other around. Most people, I suspect, would learn to ride a bike on their own and then take pillion passengers when they were confident enough, but we haven’t done that, we’re riding in tandem already. I feel a bit like I’m trying to do two things at once - not screw up, and not get my passenger into trouble. The extra weight on the back of the bike also makes a difference. The traffic in Siem Reap is slow, if unpredictable, so you need a combination of looking where you’re going, anticipating what happens at junctions where there are no traffic lights, changing gear, braking… and trying to ignore the inevitable crowd of ten tuk-tuk drivers sat around by the side of the road laughing at you when you stall the bike.

Progress elsewhere is painfully slow, and I am having to ask myself some questions about why I came here, what I expect, and what I can really offer. This is against the background of dozens of conversations with people here about NGOs, voluntary work, and life in Cambodia. Depending on who you talk to, NGOs are corrupt, unhelpful, and unsuccessful, and large charities and foreign organisations are throwing money at dozens of projects that never go anywhere, or move at such a tectonic pace that people move on, continuity is lost and the whole thing goes belly up. Khmers would be quite right to be suspicious of the motives or level of dedication of yet another person who has a great idea about how to fix their country, yet still they smile sweetly and go along with it.

Coming up in my next blog entry, I hope: no cynicism, all optimism, progress, and smooth gear changes. Oh, please.

Mine of trivia

In Cambodia, you count in fives, so counting goes like this:

Muy (one)
Pii (two)
Bei (three)
Buan (four)
Bram (five)
Bram muy (five+one=six)
Bram pii (five+two=seven)
Bram bei (five+three=eight)
Bram buan (five+four=nine)
Dawp (ten)
Dawp muy (ten+one=eleven)

Sixteen is therefore dawp bram muy.

In a strange coincidence, one million is muy lian, which almost sounds like million.

The official currency is the riel – the unofficial currency is the US dollar. You get around 4000 riel to 1 US dollar, so when something costs $1.50, if you hand over £2 you get 2000r change – prices refer to amounts in dollars and cents, but the cents are in fact riel. You end up with a mix of dollars and riel in your pocket, either of which are accepted by most shops and market traders. The 10,000 riel note is worth $2.50 and is not to be confused with the 1000 riel note, which is worth 25 cents.

A pack of ARA Red cigarettes, the Cambodian equivalent to Marlboro, costs around 1000r - about 15 pence. I don’t know how much Nicorette patches cost, but I’m willing to bet that they cost exactly the same as they do in the UK. Willpower is free but hard to come by.

The standard local beer is Anchor draft, which costs between 3000r and $1. It’s good stuff. When asking for Anchor you pronounce the ‘ch’ as you would in ‘cheese’, to avoid confusion with the other beer, Angkor, which usually comes in cans and bottles. Likewise if you prefer Angkor, you ask for it by name pronouncing the ‘An’ as an ‘On’ as if you were asking for it in a French accent.

It is currently mango season. Mangos are hanging fat and bulging from trees all over the place. Our local bar is currently doing mango daiquiries for $2.

The pork is organic, and of very high quality. Pigs are brought to slaughter after having had a pouch of a narcotic substance packed into their mouths, so from what I understand they are as stoned as dreadlocked backpackers when they’re dispatched.

We’ve bought a motorbike, a Honda 250cc dirt bike, to get around. A quick top-up of the tank can be achieved by visiting a stall at the roadside where a Johnnie Walker Black bottle full of petrol may be added at a cost of $1.

Top cheap eats are fantastic fried rice with vegetables and pork from one of the street stalls for around $1, and noodle soup or moreish fried aubergine with minced pork from a small Dim Sum place at the end of Bar Street for $1.50.

The top hotel in town costs over $1000 for a room for the night. When Mick Jagger came to see the Angkor temples he booked out the entire hotel.

The Khmer for ‘cheers!’ sounds a bit like the Khmer for ‘one fuck’, hence correct pronunciation is advised in bars.

It ain’t half hot, Mum

It is hot here. Hot, hot, hot. The sun is strong and burns you quickly, but you still get burnt even when it’s cloudy and you can’t even tell where the sun is. The rain comes nearly every day in the evening, preceded by strong winds that rattle the palms and kick up the dust in the road. Then the dust gets pinned down and turns into mud that keeps getting in your sandals as the moto drivers huddle under trees and huge puddles appear in potholes in the wink of an eye. Then the rain stops, the air is crisp and clear, and everyone starts fishing. You see people by the sides of the road with simple fishing rods. I haven’t seen them catch anything yet.

The heat is doing me in. I have rashes, bumps and bites all over me, and so far a combination of antihystamine, talc, and harsh words is having no effect. It could be the heat, the mozzies, whatever the laundry washes my clothes in, but the result is that I would very much like to shed my skin like a snake and start afresh.

We took a trip on Saturday to Kompong Phluk, a fishing community ninety minutes by boat from Chong Kneas, on the edge of Tonle Sap. This was the trip we were meant to do before the whole incident with Bella, the floating puppies and Naked Saturday. The houses are all built in stilts – big, big stilts. The stilts are a mish-mash of wood that crosses and juts out at all angles, making it all look like the biggest game of Jack Straws ever, where if you pull out just one piece of wood, it all comes crashing down. It looked like a film set, part Vietnam war movie and part spaghetti Western, with a wide, open, dusty main street that looked perfect for a gunfight. The place was eerily quiet – I assume everyone was out fishing on the lake.

We hardly got to see the place – within minutes of getting off the boat, we were monopolised by two ladies who were very anxious that we get on their small wooden dugout boats to see the nearby flooded forest, a gang of children who wanted to sell us sweets and Coke, and a monk, the English teacher in the village school, who wanted to practice his English on us. This is the thing with visiting a community, not a museum – people want to talk, to stare at your funny white legs, or sell you Coke for a dollar, so it’s difficult to actually look around – plus you feel intrusive for turning up and staring into the places where people live.

Hannah and I both got into small boats and were taken to see the flooded forest, a quiet, cool area of trees that have been flooded by the rising waters of Tonle Sap. The light from the canopy above from diffuse, the atmosphere incredible. Another cinematic comparison might be with a Zhang Yimou film – I half expected to see sword-wielding maidens in long robes hopping through the branches above, but instead I met a mother and son in a small boat pulling what looked like catfish from the water.

Work-wise, things are moving slowly, slowly, but like someone said yesterday with their shoulders raised and a look of resignation on their face, “this is Cambodia”. I’m pulling together some more information on the rural development project, looking forward to the return of more friends to Siem Reap, and swimming every day to try and get rid of my gut. Cambodians are lovely people, and surprisingly frank – more than one now has poked my belly and said “when you have baby?”.