Luxury living in Kampong Cham

After four initial days in Phnom Penh, my fellow volunteers and I moved to the quieter town of Kampong Cham, where a large modern house has been rented for us while we are starting to learn the Khmer language.

The first impression is that the house is pretty luxurious, but it is quite poorly constructed, and things keep breaking! However, it is a wonderful roomy place to live in.

I share a large room with Jo, a fellow management advisor for the fisheries, and we have our own bathroom. The best place is the huge balcony, where we spend most of our free time. There are even electric sockets on the balcony, so that we can use our laptops out there.

We have a cook, a security guard and cleaners - we are certainly not roughing it!!! Our food is excellent. Breakfast usually consists of pancakes or French bread and fruit, and lunch and dinner are rice and then several different vegetable or meat dishes.

There are enough bicycles for us all to use, so that we can get out and about easily. Everything is in easy walking distance from our house, but nobody in Cambodia walks at all!

We have been split into two groups for our language training. I am in the afternoon group, along with two English volunteers and four Filipinos. It is interesting to learn a new language with others who do not speak English very fluently! The garage has been converted into a classroom, and we have a fantastic teacher, Dara, who is helping us to make very fast progress. Dara was recently interviewed by the BBC (on a five minute programme called Witness), when he talked about his experiences in the Killing Fields.