See the gallery and now, Cambodia for photos from this post.
I’ve recently come home from Thailand, but it’s not what you think…. I was only there for a few days, and “home” is now Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Somehow, something unbelievable happened, and the thing that I hoped for actually happened - only better than I imagined. After a very long five months of application rigmarole, I was offered a one year contract with a Cambodian organisation as Communications Advisor, and in total contrast to the long vetting process, I was given two weeks’ notice of my departure date, and so here I am. The trip to Thailand was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up ; an added bonus of the outrageous number of public holidays observed in Cambodia, but I’ll come back to that.
A quick recap of the months (somehow seven!) since I left Sangkhlaburi…. I had a week on Koh Pha Ngan to assist with my transition from the jungle to the rat-race, and then returned to Sydney in the first week of May to find winter descending and everything really difficult to relate to. Two weeks was more than enough of that, although it was great to catch up with friends, and especially lucky to coincide with visits from some U.S.-dwellers who happened to be in town at the same time. Winter-proper I spent in Queensland, which was no doubt my best option, climate-wise, but was still a serious challenge for my equator-warmed blood. My real challenge, however, was to find a way to sustain myself when my rapidly-dwindling financial resources expired. It was a constant source of amazement to me that I had managed to live for a year in Thailand on around $10,000, yet in three months in Australia, without paying for accommodation, or little else, I ploughed through $5k at an alarming rate. With the piggy bank empty and no success with the jobs I’d applied for in Australia, I was offered this role in Phnom Penh, and before I knew it I was on the plane heading back to Asia.
Again time has passed at supersonic speed, and it’s been three and a half months since I arrived here. The first four weeks were consumed with Khmer language classes, which was like having vocabulary hurled at us like tennis balls from one of those training devices for four hours each day, and other Cambodian-context learning; gender and disability inclusion, corruption, child protection, just the day to day stuff. I don’t know if it’s possible for a foreigner to ever really understand this place, and most days I just have to shake my head and accept that I just don’t really get it.
For those initial weeks I was staying at a hotel, and when I wasn’t trying to learn things for eight hours a day, I was looking for somewhere permanent to live. We (me and four other volunteers who arrived at the same time) were lucky enough to share this in-country orientation with a Cambodian-Australian man, now in his early sixties, who happened to be originally from Phnom Penh and was at the university on that fateful day in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge barged into the city and overthrew the government, heralding the beginning of the darkest years of this ravaged country’s history. In the forced total evacuation of the city, he and some of his family were relocated to a distant province until 1979, when he managed to make his way into a refugee camp on the Thai border, and was eventually sent to Australia in 1981, arriving (as he says) with a flimsy shirt and speaking scant English with a French/Khmer accent (zee cat, zee dog!), courtesy of the French colonization of his country before all this other business started. It is unbelievable that someone who has been through so much, would have the capacity to return (not only to the country but to the very province he was forced to) to offer what he can to try to help to rebuild his scarred homeland. Anyway, he’s a real comedian who when asked where he’s from, responds in his still substantial Khmer accent (not so much French anymore) that he’s from the outback, and phrases like “cost an arm and a leg” roll off his tongue in a way that can’t help but make me laugh. I am privileged to know him and am grateful for the insights he has shared.
My weeks at the hotel were seasoned with the interactions with the front desk staff, some of whom made it their personal project to help me with my Khmer language studies. The same two young guys always seemed to be there, no matter what the time of day, and when I asked them about it they told me that they work from 5:00pm to 8:00am seven days a week. “We enjoy it!” they said. I just shook my head and accepted that I don’t really get it.
Cambodian people have an uncanny knack of being able to immediately assess whether another person is older or younger than them when they first meet, and this forms part of the process used to determine who has the higher status and how they should address each other. Somehow I seem to be older than most people, and so am “bong srei” (older sister, or older woman) to just about everyone I encounter – market sellers, tuk tuk drivers, whoever. It’s a matter of just get over it, shake my head and accept it. It’s a term of respect, but a bit challenging to get over the fact that pretty much everyone is acknowledging that I’m older than them, and one of those cross-cultural differences that can take a bit of getting used to. I quite like it when I tell myself they’re calling me “older sister”, but “older woman” is a bit harder to warm to.
While we were doing our four weeks of in-country training we were lucky enough to be shuttled off to Takeo province, about an hour and a half southeast of Phnom Penh toward the Vietnam border, to spend two days and nights at a homestay with an incredible family at their beautiful home surrounded by a coconut grove in the rice fields. Our language teacher came with us so our morning classes weren’t interrupted, except by the chickens scratching around in the dirt nearby, and the afternoons were spent visiting the local primary school and pagoda, and the market to try with embarrassing results, to practice our atrocious Khmer language skills. Next to their house is a huge crater, formed during the US’s covert carpet bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war, when a B52 bomb exploded in their backyard. Somehow surviving that, the family then endured a terrible fate during what a lot of people call “the Pol Pot years”; a story they generously shared with us one night when we sat around after another amazing meal. And still I shook my head.
It’s funny sometimes how stuff works. In “developed” countries we pay a premium for produce grown without pesticides or other chemicals, yet in Cambodia, this is what you get by default because Cambodian farmers can’t afford to buy the stuff. Regardless of whether or not you could call it organic, it’s absolutely seasonal eating, which is such a revelation these days. Cambodians turn their noses up at produce imported from Thailand and Vietnam (neither of whom, coincidentally do they like very much at all, owing to their long and confrontational history), which is often cheaper, but always (they say) grown with chemicals. When you’re talking about a dollar for a massive bunch of bananas, I’m happy to get the locally-grown stuff, but no doubt it makes a big difference to Cambodian people, most of whom live on less than less than $3 a day (um ,that’s for a family, not each person. And the vast majority of the rest manage it on less than $1).
So between all the learning and my personal attempt to eat in as many different places as possible (and when you live in a hotel you get to do that three times a day), I found an apartment, moved in (easy to do in a tuk tuk when all you have is a backpack), bought the essentials (ice-cube tray, water filter, mop, furniture etc) and called it home. I was looking for a one-bedroom place, but was shown this two-bedroom and decided that it was in a great location for me, and signed (well, red thumb print – that’s the way you do things here) on the dotted line. It’s a five minute walk to my office and practically on top of the Russian Market (one of the better-known markets that tourists visit), but despite this is much less touristy than some other parts of the city. It’s quite amazing; after a year in Thailand with really not even a sniff of what I now think of as “luxury”, I have my own apartment with a balcony, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, both with hot showers and flushing western toilets, a kitchen with a sink and running water… yin and yang, I suppose.
To mark the end of our four weeks of language classes, we went out with our teacher to a sort of nightclub called Riverhouse for some Friday night dancing. The music was a bit (ok, a lot) questionable, but we gave it a shot. I gave a few tequilas a shot too, hoping that might help, but it didn’t really. I persevered until 2:00am then ran the gamut of waiting tuk tuk drivers and tasked one of them with delivering me home. Security here is a big deal, and to get into my building, which is accessorised with razor wire, as most are, I go through a gate which is secured with the biggest padlock you’ve ever seen. So on this night I put my key in the padlock, turned and, snap, the key broke off in the lock. I stood there looking at the broken key in my fingers, with nothing but disbelief running through my mind for a good minute or so. Then came denial. I’m not sure what the rest of the classic stages of trauma processing are, but my next thoughts were along the lines of how I could get through the gate without a key. Clearly the whole place is set up exactly so you can’t do this, so then I quickly moved on to what am I going to do? No, really – WHAT am I going to do?? It was 2:30am, the neighbourhood is a ghost town, and even if it wasn’t, what good would that do me. I tried calling out to the people who live on the ground floor, but they were having none of it. So then it was back to what am I going to do? Then I got a text message from my language teacher, asking if I got home ok. Ah ha! I called him and told him what had happened, and he then got on his bike, rode 20minutes across town and picked me up, and took me to a friend, Paula’s, who I had phoned, woke her up obviously as it was now almost 3:00am, and asked if I could spend the night in her spare bed. Of course that wasn’t the end of it. When I got back to my place the next morning and showed the landlady my broken key, her eyes widened with recognition (the culprit! – how they got out of the gate in the morning is beyond me), lots of head shaking and lots of things in Khmer that I didn’t understand… She sent someone out to get me a new key, which was brought up to my apartment a short time later. Next came an exercise in humility, as the young girl, who brought the giant padlock up to my apartment with her, proceeded to give me a lesson in padlock unlocking. This was quite detailed and lasted for at least one minute. I could see the pitying thoughts going through her mind…. “poor barang….doesn’t even know how to use a key….” I received continued support in the art of padlock unlocking for some weeks – every time I came home after about 9:00pm when they put the padlock on the gate, I would get my keys out but before I could even get them anywhere near the padlock, someone would rush out and do it for me. No doubt to save me the embarrassment of not being able to operate the key, but possibly so they didn’t find themselves with a key broken in the lock again. It looks like they now believe, due to the extensive training and support they have provided, that I have now got the hang of it, and they pretty much leave me to it.
It had to happen sometime, but it turns out that I’m now forty. As in years old (more head shaking, but this time nothing to do with Cambodia). I decided well in advance to take a leaf out of my friend, Andi’s book and call it 20:20 instead. Much more manageable. So for the 20:20 I was joined by twelve new friends for lunch at the incredible Romdeng restaurant (they train former street kids in the restaurant trade) and followed by happy hour (well, four hours of happiness every day) at the fabulous Raffles Hotel for cocktails. And then it was home for an early night in preparation for the start of my new job the next day.
Why was I somehow not surprised when the 4th day of work saw me rolling into a national conference at 7:30am? The more things change, the more they stay the same…..The organisation I work for was presenting and exhibiting at the 2010 Development Research Forum, so I went along to see how this kind of thing works here. Much the same as everywhere else, apparently, although the ballroom had a mini shipping container parked to one side, to house the translators who would convey the presentations from Khmer to English or vice versa, obviously depending on which language was being spoken on stage, into the headphones of those of us not quite non-bilingual yet.
The conference clashed with a regular meeting of the team I’m working with, so to accommodate everyone, a boardroom was booked at another (slightly less 5-star) nearby hotel, so we could all meet over lunch. While the team leader and I waited in the frosted glass-walled, Japanese themed boardroom for the others to arrive, the recessed ceiling speakers hummed with Jack Johnson and I had to keep reminding myself where I was.
Every day I venture out for lunch, and quite often go to a place I call Red Corner (it’s opposite a place I call Green Corner), and one day there I shared my table with a man who quite enthusiastically struck up a conversation with me. It turns out that he’s a missionary from the Philippines, compelled to come here after a group of American missionaries in the Philippines alerted him to “the need” as he put it, here in Cambodia. He told me that he’s a pastor at home, but he’s moved his family here to address “the need”, which happens to be a race of sorts. It seems that they (the Christians) have it under good authority that “the Muslims” have a goal to convert 50-60% of Cambodia’s population (almost entirely Buddhist) to Islam in the next 5 years. Ambitious. So, in a counter-move, the Christians have decided that instead the population must be converted to Christianity, and so they are earnestly teaching people English through the Bible, and no doubt praying overtime that they beat the Muslims to the punch. Funny how people often don’t bother to ask the people involved what they want. To be left to their Buddhism, I would imagine.
After a couple of weeks I went with two of my colleagues to Siem Reap, to observe a presentation they were making to an NGO network there. We drove up on the Sunday, arrived in the late afternoon, checked into a hotel, then drove out to the Angkor temples. At 5:30pm foreigners are allowed to go in for free (Cambodian people can go for free anytime – rightly so!), so we casually drove around in our car, checking out the amazing ancient ruins, in much the same way as people cruise up and down Campbell Parade in Bondi, looking at the beach. It was a surreal experience. When I was there in March, I had my list of temples to visit and duly inspected each of them with the reverence you reserve for viewing eight hundred year old ruins, was suitably awed, and went on my way. Somehow, driving around them so casually in the fading afternoon light was a different experience all together. I realised that if you lived in Siem Reap, you could do that all the time. Just drive out to the temples, and enjoy them like you’d enjoy your back yard. It was weird.
One Sunday, a few of us decided that we would take the boat over to Silk Island (Koh Dach), hire bicycles and ride around for a few hours checking out the silk weaving that goes on there, and hence the name. We followed the instructions we were given – go to Nagaworld (a massive casino complex on the river), turn left, after about a hundred meters find the ferry, pay 800 riel each, take the ferry over the river, get off the ferry and walk straight up the road until arriving at a bike hire place, ride around. We did all of that, but didn’t see any silk weavers, went the wrong way, got really sunburnt, and were greeted more times than I have ever been in one day. For four hours children called out to us from every house “hello! Hello! Hello!” It was lots of fun for a while, but once the sunburn and lack of places to buy anything to drink set in (about the three hour mark), the novelty wore off a bit and our responses were less enthusiastic. However, we enjoyed the day, seeing donkeys in fancy headgear pulling carts (standard mode of transport), a wat with a big prawn at its front gates (see my photos), and just getting out of the city. I just about fell off my chair laughing the next day when I got an email from one of the friends who had come along, telling me that she had done a bit more research online, and doesn’t think we went to Silk Island. So I checked it out, and indeed we had not. No, we just went to the peninsula in the river, and Silk Island is about 15km upstream. I don’t know what it’s called, but in memory of the not-potato in Sangkhla, I’m calling it not-silk island.
Cambodians and Thai people like to think that they are very different from one another, but in many ways they are very much alike. For example, they have the same three favourite pastimes – sleeping, eating and shopping. Eating has featured quite highly on my activity list since I’ve been here, and I’ve done my best to try as many different places and things as I can. I’ve found what is quite probably the best roast pork I’ve ever eaten, I’ve become quite a fan of fried frogs, especially stuffed ones, and tree ants and their eggs are ok too. I remain unconvinced about tarantulas and bee eggs/larvae, and am yet to hear an argument compelling enough to persuade me to give them a go. Eating here is often quite a noisy affair. Whoever marketed the idea in the west of eating quietly being polite didn’t make it to Cambodia. Soup, noodles, rice, all drinks, BBQ, whatever, there’s lots of slurping, sucking, lip smacking to accompany every meal. I forgot about this when I offered gum to my three travelling companions in the car going to Siem Reap…. You’ve never heard anything like it and I could barely keep a straight face.
For the Cambodians who don’t have to support their family on less than $3 a day, pursuing education is a popular activity. Most of the people I work with have, at the very least, a bachelor degree and one masters, and many continue to study for further qualifications while working full time and raising young families. Qualifications don’t always equate to great pay, though, for example, many university lecturers have other full time jobs to enable them to live, as their university salaries often earn them around $50-$100 per month. Primary school teachers generally make between $25-$50 a month, and charge students 500 riel a day to come to class, to enable them to make enough money to live. So for many children, this is where they first learn about the culture of corruption that pervades almost every part of this country. High school teachers might make between $50-$100 a month, but my rent is $300 a month, so I’m glad I’m not a teacher. These are some of the reasons that pretty much everyone lives with their parent/s or in-laws.
So I started off by saying that I had just returned from Thailand. One of the very many (I think 23) public holidays celebrated in Cambodia is Pchum Ben, or festival for the dead. The whole thing goes for about 15 days, and everyone takes offerings for their ancestors to the pagodas every day, prays (I’ve read that they pray for the spirits of their ancestors, but someone told me that they pray to their ancestors to help the living person in whichever way they are requesting, probably to become rich), the monks chant, and everyone leaves Phnom Penh and goes back to their home province to spend time with their family. My closest thing to family around here is in Sangkhlaburi, so I endured two days of bus travel to get there which was really quite vile, but I got there eventually and had a beautiful 4 days in the jungle. Travelling through the Cambodian landscape for a whole day then in the same day swapping it for Thailand, it becomes very obvious how much more together and affluent Thailand is than Cambodia, and this even trickles down to the number of rotund kids you see in Thailand. The welcome I got from everyone in Sangkhlaburi was a bit overwhelming, and really drove home how much genuine love some people are willing to give you, just for showing them a small amount of kindness. It was so great to see the kids again, and to spend time with my friends there.
And now I’m quite settled into my busy life in Phnom Penh. Work is frantic but rewarding, there are always more eating and drinking places to try, and my spare bedroom is getting booked up for the coming months. Time is flying by, and I have only 9 ½ months of my 13 month assignment left. I just don’t think it’s going to be long enough.
