Hello All,
I’m now 2.5 weeks in and already have quite a lot to share
with you.
Ive been working in the office for over 2 weeks now, trying
to get a feel for all of the work that HCC does. The staff at HCC are some of the most
wonderful, goodhearted people that I have ever met. I get the impression that they function like
a little family. I’ve been very lucky to
have been met with such kindness and support.
The work I’ve been given is also very satisfactory. I’m pleased to see that I am actually going
to be doing the kind of work that I wanted to.
Also, I’m now an avid Phnom Penh Cyclist. It took a bit of hesitation to get on the
roads, but being a barang (that’s the Khmer word for “French”, from the days of
Indochina, but they now use it to refer to white/western people), most Khmer
avoid me on the roads. There is a
strange rhythm to the chaos that I’ve gotten used to pretty quickly. I’m going to try and put together a video
with a friend of mine to show you what driving on the roads here is like. The best way I can describe it is for you to
imagine you are walking down oxford street on a Saturday afternoon. The way that people walk in Oxford St is the
same way they drive in Phnom Penh. As
with Oxford St, you just have to sort of find your way in the chaos.
The flat is great, and it is really nice to begin feeling
settled. I live with a French and an
Italian, and they are great fun. There
are many evenings spent on the balcony listening to music and drinking
tea. The tuk tuk drivers outside of our
house are now less harassing, and much more friendly. As I live so close to the entrance to Tuol
Sleng, the first week I moved here all I heard when I left the house was “Tuk
tuk”, “Tuk Tuk”, “moto” from about 15 different drivers. Somehow getting on my bicycle wasn’t quite
enough of an indication that I didn’t need a lift.
Last night I returned from a field visit to Svay Rieng
Province, where some of our projects are in the works. We arrived Monday afternoon to a town very
close to the border with Vietnam (about 20km).
We were met with about 16 gigantic casinos, and very little else. The town is a popular stop off point for
migrants and travellers heading towards Ho Chi Minh city, and is a bit bleak,
to say the least. I didn’t realise that
when you are at any border town in Cambodia (and probably in the whole region),
there are 2 languages frequently spoken.
So in our town, all signs were in Khmer and Vietnamese (as was the
cuisine). I have a new found love in
Vietnamese coffee, which is everywhere in most parts of Cambodia (due to high
migration rates and the former invasion of the Vietnamese at the end of Pol Pot’s
regime). In the border towns, you are
never very far from a great café. For
those of you who know me well, it was a great relief to find good coffee.
On Tuesday morning
(at 6:30am L),
after battling with a very unhappy tummy, we headed out to the remote communities within
the province to conduct some awareness raising events, in order to prevent
sexual and labour exploitation and blind migration (migration where you do not
have a job lined up before you cross the border to another country). Our first stop was a school, where one of my
colleagues was giving a day’s workshop to teachers, students and school
directors. The aim was to give them the
communication skills they needed to arrange further events, meetings and
discussions regarding the issues.
Pulling up to the school was very funny, as the children there had not
seen many “barang”. There were about 70
little faces peering through the classroom windows, smiling and staring at my English
colleague and I. They did eventually
become a bit braver and started shouting “hello” at us, to show off their
impressive English skills. We then
visited another school and did a session with children on the dangers of
migration.
We also went to a local village meeting, headed by the
village chief, to give a discussion on domestic violence and its effect on
children, the family and the community. It
was a big shock to see the kind of poverty that existed in this village and in
the villages we passed. The roads are
really dire (we nearly tipped over into a rice field a few times). The houses were also poorly constructed, with
many made out of clay and palm leaves, others of sheet metal, and a few of
wood. Many young children were running
around barefoot and naked. Many people,
young and old, had nearly all of their teeth rotted out. The toilets were also a new experience for
me. (I will leave you guessing on this
one).
The Khmer women are so very shy and it was difficult to get
them to speak out in the presence of the men.
We did see quite a lot of involvement from them, but I couldn’t understand
most of it. I did have the wonderful
translations provided by my Svay Rieng colleague, Wootee. The funniest thing on this day was running in
to a Peace Corps volunteer who was from Georgia and went to the same
undergraduate university that I did! (Valdosta State University).
On Wednesday we went to a few schools to conduct more
awareness raising activities with the children, had another village meeting on
domestic abuse, and conducted a few home visits to families with children at
risk of not attending school. The home
visits were the most fascinating to me.
HCC works not only in protection of children/young people who are
sexually/labour exploited, but also in PREVENTION programmes, aimed at curbing
the likelihood that the children will be sold, pulled out of school, sent to
work abroad. Many of the families sell
their children or send them away because they need money for medicine, food or
other basic necessities. Therefore, we
have a few programmes aimed at helping them improve their financial
situation. We give families 1 cow,
vegetable seeds, and agricultural training.
We then monitor their progress to see if they are managing to earn more
money. It was nice to see the programme
implemented, but unfortunately our field staff in Prey Vieng are under huge
resource constraints. The province is
quite big, and most of the villages they serve are very remote, and impossible
to get to if there has been a lot of rain.
Therefore, in conducting the trainings, awareness raising, monitoring
visits, meetings with chiefs to identify at risk families, they simply do not
have the time in the day to gather the needed data in order to analyse each situation
entirely. We are hoping that in sending
a volunteer to Svay Rieng, it can help spread some of the work load that these
two incredible people are doing. We then
had another meeting with the local village, at the Buddhist monastery, to again
speak about the consequences of domestic violence and migration. It was funny to be sitting next to a Buddhist
temple with the orange robes hanging on the washing line. For those of you who do not know, Cambodia is
a primarily Buddhist country, and all of the monks wear beautiful orange
robes. It is also considered to be the
greatest honour for a family to have a male child join a monastery and become a
monk. Unfortunately, the greatest honour
that a female child can achieve is to marry.
Last night, before heading back to Phnom Penh, one of our
S.R. colleagues invited us to his family home to join them for a traditional
Khmer dinner. It was such a lovely
evening, filled with fantastic food, beautiful scenery of rice fields, and
truly wonderful company. One of our
colleagues is in his 40s, and shared some of his experiences of the Pol Pot
regime and the following civil war. As a
teenager in 1975 he was sent to a camp for other teenagers to learn how to work
in the rice fields. Later on, he was
trained to become a soldier. He didn’t want
to say much about what happened, but only told us of a few horrible things he
witnessed. For instance, as part of the
KR (Khmer Rouge) policy, religion was not allowed. If any person was caught worshiping a Buddha or
conducting any religious ceremonies, they were killed. If a man and woman wanted to get married,
there were 1 or 2 days in the year where all of the marriage ceremonies would
happen on the same day. If a man and
woman were seen not to get along (if they were fighting/unhappy) in their marriage,
they were killed. If you were not
working hard enough in the fields (stopped to take a break for a few minutes)
you were killed. They worked incredibly
long hours in the fields (more than 12 hours per day), in the horrendous heat
and worst conditions. I cannot even
begin to imagine the fear and suffering that these people experienced. I feel in many ways that this is still very
fresh, as a lot of the older generation who were caught in the midst of the
violence are still alive.
Lastly, I’ve just finished a very insightful book on the sex
trade. It is by Siddharth Kara and is
called “Sex Trafficking: Inside the business of modern slavery”. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sex-Trafficking-Inside-Business-Slavery/dp/0231139608
It provides a good introduction to what the trade looks like in many parts of
the world, and I highly recommend it.
I will leave you all with that for today, and pictures are
on their way.
Take care and thank you for reading!
x S
