Hello from Cambodia 10
on Chris and Jon in Cambodia (Cambodia), 03/Feb/2008 11:26, 34 days ago
Happy New Year.This blog is being written in our room in the Mekong Hotel in Kampong Cham. We are back here for 2 weeks for the second part of our language training. Getting all 17 of us (David hasdropped out) back together again at this time has probably been a very good idea. We are all realising that the honeymoon period is over. The initial excitement of being in our placement has faded and optimism has become rather jaded as we are coming to terms with the enormousness of the problems we have to face and a realisation is dawning that we are not going to be able to revolutionise the Cambodian education system by Christmas. There has been a lot of group hugs, metaphorical and real and mutual affirmation that there is some point to our being here. (See photo of Baz and Mairead (the long and the short of it) Also by discussing our problems with each other we realise we are all encountering the same frustrations and try to devise some strategies to make something happen in this infuriating country.We remind each other that at the VSO training in England and since we have arrived here we have continuously been told not to expect anything constructive to happen in the first nine months and we should just observe and build confidences and“drink tea”. As most of us werequite dynamic, hard working professionals in our previous lives where we are used to making things happen fast, it becomes very frustrating when through apathy, misunderstanding and mistrust your best laid plans keep smashing into brick walls. It hasn’t helped that due to cut backs by VSO London, our budget has been greatly reduced so many of the projects we had planned have had to abandoned or severely pruned.Moaning aside, we have had a lot of fun. We are taking advantage of the fact that gin and tonic isvery cheaply available in KPC as are Snickers bars and digestive biscuits. The evenings have been spent playing Helen’s Game and Werewolf, which is a Dutch form of Mafioso. We are also taking the opportunity to give each other mutual support when taking our first course of de-worming tablets. We have included a few photos of the sights of KPC. When we arrived we were surprised to see how much the water level inthe Mekong had dropped since we were last here exposing the base of the huge bridge that the Japanese built opening up eastern Cambodia. Every morning and evening the river was swarming with littleboats illegally drift netting tiny fish. Also the drop in the water level means they have been able to build the bamboo bridge that runs between the town and an island in the river. Every year this is swept away in the floods and replaced in the dry season. It appears very fragile and wobbly but is strong enough to support a car.We came here via PP where we had a 2 day education Inset, which was just about as exciting and useful as Inset in the English education system, with the added disadvantage that half of it isdelivered in a language you don’t understand – or perhaps that isn’t such a difference. As we travelled on to KPC through the paddy fields of the Mekong flood plane it struck us that Cambodia was lush, green and very beautiful, something we had forgotten in the brown bean fields of Phnom Preuk. Much as we love our little adopted town, returning to the clouds of dust generated by the unmade roads which coat everything with a thick brown film is going to be very difficult after the pink and purple bougainvillaea of KPC.(Photo:What you can but to eat on the road to Kampong Cham)The language training hasbeen constructive specially since Chris changed to a more differentiated, child friendly group (see photo). We are now aware of the, potentially disastrous, mistakes that you can make by slight mispronunciation. Eg. Can I help you? = Khnom chong chuey te? Whereas Khnom chong chouey te? Means can I f..k you? Also hot and penis are only the slip of a vowel away from social suicide.Even though we have been here for nearly 5 months we don’t feel we are any closer to knowing Kampuchea. On the surface, the preponderance of motos, western clothes, TVs, mobile phones and Coca Cola suggests a confidently emerging developing nation but just scratch below the surface and you find extreme poverty, high illiteracy, endemic corruption and anational fatalism that makes you despair that anything will ever change. People who have lived here a few years say that massive progress is happening, but when you see entire families living in a dirty one roomed shack with little or no life chances it is difficult to feel optimistic about this place. We hope that our work in the education system is a tiny step towards improving the prospects of the next generations, but realistically until there is a change in the political system and the corruption that is emasculating the country at every level it is unlikely that Cambodia will ever be able to pull itself out of its third world status.For those of you who are still wondering what the hell we are actually doing out here, whichprobably includes us, here is a potted explanation. We are working with the district education office in Phnom Preuk helping them to implement a programme that will result in all Cambodian children receiving an education. Practically this means we work with individual schools on schemes which will increase the numbers of children actually being enrolled and reducing the numbers who drop out before they reach Year 9. We are also helping teachers to use a more child centred methodology in a more child friendly environment. Well that’s the idea anyway. Howthis is achieved with a highly de motivated work force trying to battle against minimal funding is another matter. We will let you know how we get on. While we were in KPC we visited a“model school” which was very inspirational but also very daunting. Here are photos of a “model” classroom and one in a school in PPk, spot the difference.On a brighter note, here is a David Attenborough, an introductory round up of the wildlife in Cambodia. Mainly it is very, very small, you only know about them when they bite you. We are all continually slapping ourselves exclaiming,“Shit, I’ve just been bitten!” Fortunately thisusually results in itchy red lumps and no one yet has succumbed to Malaria (except Bas who had to be flown from his placement in the jungles on the Vietnamese border to hospital in PP. He made a miraculously recovery after 4 days) or the dreaded Dengue fever. The larger livestock tends to come in swarms. Depending on the season or weather, clouds of insects of all shapes and sizes smash themselves into any light source or failing that, your head. The most dramatic of these was the plague of flying beetles, the size of golf balls that crash onto our balcony then rocked around on their backs, like weebles, unable to turn themselves over.Currently a recent freak rainstorm has brought out the flying ants that emerge in a blizzard thatat night turns KPC into a snowscape resembling the Russia steppes in January. However on a more positive side the huge painted butterflies, the giant praying mantis (see photo) and the columns of tiny ants that march around our house have been a source of great pleasure and fascination to us. The lecture on the Fauna of Cambodia will continue in another blog.By the way the photo of the 2 lads at the computer is of Sophen and Sophea, our lovely translators without whom our job here would be impossible.Hope we haven’t been too negative in this blog, but as we said earlier, the honeymoon is over. We still love being here and we believe we do have a positive role to play but maybe it’s going to be a bit harder than we thought. We will see.