Quite Random

No news is just no news

There’s little to report at the moment – life goes on, it’s getting so hot that everything is starting to feel like hard work, and Siem Reap remains a curiosity, a town that’s developing fast while remaining random, quaint, and cut off from whatever I thought was reality. Coca Cola want to put big promotional awnings up at our local bar, KFC are moving in to Cambodia, and in five years this place could look like Vegas or Piccadilly Circus, Starbucks serving frappucinos to hoards of Koreans and employing security guards at the door to keep out the children selling roses for one dollar. Who knows.

Some observations:

1. Someone told me that Khmer family planning was what happened when you can’t fit any more children on your motorbike.
2. Being in Cambodia means accepting a permanent state of greasiness.
3. I got all disgruntled when, in my first couple of weeks here, a Khmer official from the Department of Animal Welfare was five minutes late for our meeting. Now I think he is one of the most punctual people I have met here.
4. Khmer weddings appear to last for three days because a) if you had a twenty minute window like in England no-one would show up (see 3), b) they’re getting their money’s worth, c) no-one can drink dozens of bottles of Hennessey and Johnnie Walker Black that fast, and d) it takes three days to recover from the effort of putting up the purple marquee and loudspeakers the size of family hatchbacks.
5. The Macarena is compulsory listening at all Khmer weddings, and parties.
6. In Cambodia, all amplifiers and speaker systems have been modified allowing you to turn them up to 11.
7. In a rural area a lady may be sat under a large Coca Cola parasol with an ice box. Ask her for Coca Cola and you will receive sugar cane juice. It is better that Coca Cola and possibly contains less sugar.
8. Attempt to communicate with some people in Khmer and you will either be a) immediately understood with a loud exclamation of “oh you speak Khmer!” b) laughed at and corrected with what sounds like exactly the same word or c) expected to wait while someone dashes off to find their brother who speaks English because what you just said went straight over their head.
9. The Khmer words for apple, vagina and fart sound very similar, leading to potential difficulties if ordering fruit, gratification or medication. Other words that sound similar include monkey and mango.
10. I ate lunch in the market the other day and was served by a boy who likes men but not boys and a girl who dresses like a boy who likes girls but not boys. So that was a gay boy and a gay boylady. No sign of any ladyboys, they’re not usually out at lunchtime.
11. Common exchanges in Khmer include a) ‘hello pretty girl!’, ‘hello handsome man!’ b) ‘you’re crazy’, ‘no, I’m not crazy you’re crazy’, or c) ‘you’re a monkey’, ‘no, you’re a monkey’, ‘you just called me a mango’.

Stories of pens and cowboys

I started running PSHE (personal, social and health education) sessions this week - PSHE is a fairly big addition to the curriculum of the Young Adult Preparation Program aimed at providing the students with a more rounded outlook on life, good self-awareness and evaluation skills, and ideally a good state of health and wellbeing. We’ll be covering everything from law and order to drugs and alcohol, sex, friendships, and personal safety. I’m loosely basing it on the UK PSHE syllabus, but it goes without saying that the UK and Cambodia are miles apart not just geographically but culturally, so a lot of the material has to be contextualised, and in some cases won’t even be appropriate for use. There has been a lot of fantastic work done in some areas including sexual health education by organisations like Friends International, which saves us work and has the added advantage of already having been developed locally. As I have got more into this project I have realised that Cambodia is not a complete wasteland when it comes to existing programs or resources - it’s just knowing where to look.

The first theme is friendships, so this week we have been discussing friends and how they can help, or what they do for you. I told the group they could write down their ideas in English or Khmer if they preferred - which many of them did. Not having to translate into a second language when talking about some important ideas makes life a lot easier for them, even if it means that I need a translator - a lot more lessons will be delivered in Khmer as we go so more translation will be needed, but the ideal result at the end of the day will be Khmer language lessons delivered by a Khmer. We haven’t got to that yet as I’m developing the program as we go.

So, today I asked the group to give me examples of problems they had encountered in the past and how their friends had helped them. Lots of furrowed brows for the next ten minutes. If nothing else, these new sessions are enjoyable because the students are thinking about new things, thinking for themselves. Up until now we have concentrated on English and computer skills teaching, which is prescriptive and doesn’t require much imagination. The English books, Headway, are very good and use various themes to cover different grammar or vocabulary, but it’s all there laid out in the book and after a while starts to feel quite samey. Especially when asked to think about examples from their own lives or from the environment around them, they are much more responsive than when checking the grammar in a passage about McDonald’s hamburgers.

After ten minutes came the stories. The first was one of the boys who told me that he had lost his pen in school and so his friend had lent him one. As good as it was that he’d thought about things, however briefly, I hoped that the rest of the stories wouldn’t be about lost pens. Fortunately, they weren’t. One boy told me about how, before he came to the orphanage, he’d been a ‘cow boy’, herding cows in the countryside. Climbing up a tree to get a good look around, he fell out to the ground, was knocked unconscious, and woke up at home having been carried there by his friends. Not a tale riddled with moral complexity maybe, but the great thing was that it was told by a boy who is not normally the most confident in class in the most incredible way - he told it in English, had his arms out wide, really cared about what he was saying, and said it beautifully. I started thinking I’d been missing something in all of these English lessons, rote learning grammar and vocabulary, but it seems like maybe they’re paying off now and the group are genuinely getting confident about expressing themselves.

I’ve started taking Khmer lessons, meanwhile. My Khmer is obviously hysterically funny to Khmers because as soon as I’ve completed a sentence, puzzled expressions melt into uncontrollable laughter. I get that a lot.

Skiing and sleeping and bastards

But that’s not the main reason I’ve never been tempted to go skiing: it’s the people. The moment anyone tells me they’re going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I’ve constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy’s iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.

I’m in a rage right now because I’ve stopped smoking.But some people are aching for a fight all the time | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Hurrah for Charlie Brooker.

He’s furious because he quit smoking for the twentieth time. I’m furious because whatever passes for normal, healthy sleep patterns have passed me by and I’m currently living like a cross between a shift worker and an elderly cat, sleeping at random times, not eight hours during the night, just as and when I happen to be standing near my bed and conveniently go catatonic before collapsing onto the thing and rolling around in my own sweat for four hours if I’m lucky.

I’m furious at the lack of sleep, furious at the bloody awful tourists around here who respond to Mr Duch the armless bookseller’s friendly ‘hello how are you?’ with a blank expression, furious at the three dogs from the house opposite mine that only wake up a few times a day to go and tear another weaker dog limb from limb, furious at myself for being so utterly utterly shite at getting on with my course work, furious at my rubbish beard, furious at the hopelessly crappy shower in my bathroom that is not unlike standing under a micturating concrete cherub, and furious that you just can’t get decent milk anywhere on this side of the planet.

Fuckety fuckety fuckety fuck. Pardon.

Return to the Reap

Bad sleep, a rubbish shower, permanently dirty feet, inbred lunatic dogs tearing chunks out of each other and being laughed at by strangers on motorbikes. Yep. I must be back in Siem Reap.

I watched Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia this morning because I couldn’t sleep - it’s a documentary filmed by John Pilger in Pnohm Penh in 1979, Cambodia just having been liberated from the Khmer Rouge. Interviews with survivors, captured Khmer Rouge executioners, aid workers and others all showed the blank faces of people utterly in shock. The whole thing didn’t have to happen. The US first created the environment in which the Khmer Rouge could thrive by bombing and killing thousands in nothing more than a muscle-flexing exercise, then the world ignored Cambodia while it self-destructed, and finally did nothing to help after the Vietnamese invaded, choosing instead to continue recognising the Khmer Rouge as the de facto government and refusing to offer aid to millions of people starving to death unless their killers, hiding near the Thai border, also received aid. In the UK, only Oxfam provided aid without a raft of conditions attached.

Fast forward thirty years, Cambodia is still struggling, and the West, led by the Pea-Brain in Chief, is now buggering up and destabilising a different part of the world. You’d have to laugh if it wasn’t so bloody tragic.

Khmer people crack me up. They are a constant source of amusement, and barangs (foreigners) are a constant source of amusement to them. We seem to spend the whole time laughing at each other, but there is rarely if ever a malicious feel to it. Khmers are, generally speaking, good-humoured and kind people, and several of them are just a little bit insane. Never was the idiom ’still waters run deep’ more appropriate than when used to describe Khmers - the placid appearance and sweet smile, while mostly genuine, seem to conceal something else beneath, like a good poker face. In Ray Zepp’s book Experiencing Cambodia, he describes Cambodia as being like a Russian doll. Just when you think you understand it, out pops another doll to confuse you, then another and another. This place does keep you guessing, not least because you can’t help but try and understand how a country that collectively went through one of the most brutal genocides ever can continue to function at all. I suppose the answer is, because it had to. I’m no expert on Cambodia, and I don’t think I’ll ever have this place sussed, so rather than try and analyse it, I’m going to carry on entertaining the locals and being entertained.

On a related but separate subject, last night I got into a conversation with a friend along the lines of ‘how come everyone in the UK is so pissed off, people are terrified of children, children are unhappy, everyone’s drinking themselves to death and no-one trusts anyone else?’, then it moved on to comparing the situation in the UK with the situation here, before naturally reaching the conclusion that if people in the UK just had a bit of perspective they might pull their heads out of their backsides and feel better about their lives. Of course, the whole conversation was a waste of time, but the one question that cropped up was ‘when did it all start going wrong?’. Was it Thatcher or something else? Is the UK really that screwed up, or am I being a bit Daily Mail about it?

In Heathrow

So I got here early, a maniac getting onto the Piccadilly Line in a personal best time, and now I’m loafing about the place surrounded by bored children and boreder adults, sitting in an overpriced Internet booth-type-thing, a Krispy Kreme doughnut having sunk to the bottom of my gut like a sugar-coated lead weight. I resent eating anything from a place that can neither spell ‘crispy’ nor ‘cream’ correctly, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I’m thinking about the guy who has lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport for the last ten or so years due to a mix-up with some paperwork, surviving on MacDonalds food and living out of suitcases in the corner of an arrivals lounge, and all of a sudden this doesn’t seem so bad.

The flight is eleven hours and I’m hoping for a few good movies, a quiet seat (so not one next to any babies), half-way decent food and some sleep. I’m already trying to convince myself that I am seven hours ahead, which makes it nearly 2am. I might not sleep too well because I forgot to do the padlock on one of my backpack compartments up when I checked it in, so I keep envisaging the bag coming open and a pair of crocs, two boxes of Yorkshire tea and some fine new pants being scattered to the wind on the runway.

The coin-operated computer is telling me that I should pump more money into its greedy guts in order to carry on using it, which I just won’t do. Time to stare blankly at some souvenir biscuits or try and work out why everyone looks so miserable when they’re supposed to be going on holiday.

Time flies

So it’s back to Asia tomorrow, and just when I’d got used to being back. Time is not just flying, it is careering by at a ridiculous speed, and never faster than when I have things I should be doing. I’m racking my brains for things I have managed to achieve while I’ve been back, and all that comes to mind is a successful trip to M&S for new pants.

Back in Cambodia I have a course in International Development, a new charity, and the young adult project to work on, and this despite having the concentration span of a newt. I need mental blinkers.

Indyyyyyyy!

Woo! New Indiana Jones movie trailer. Indy now definitely not old enough to be carrying off those stunts, but never mind, inner child satisfied for the day.