Social Activities

The thirteen volunteers in my group have formed a very sociable group, and we regularly organise activities. Some of our evening activities have proved to have cultural complications. For example, it was difficult to find questions that people from England, Finland, Cambodia and the Philippines could all answer equally on our quiz night, and our Blankety-Blank night left some nationals (who have a different sense of humour) very bemused! My attempt to introduce everyone to the joy of Caption Competitions was also met with a mixed response! Bingo and karaoke have, however, been universally understood and appreciated and our Halloween party was a great success.

We have arranged a couple of trips out together. One day when we had no lessons, we took a boat over the Mekong with our bicycles, and explored a very rural and primitive island. Tomorrow, we are hoping to hire a couple of speedboats to go up-river to visit a silk-weaving village and a famous pagoda.
We shall all be sorry to be going our separate ways after next week, and are planning some weekend get-togethers in the future.

Food

Food here is excellent, and much healthier than back home. While we are on our induction programme, we have been spoiled with a cook who spends all day creating 3 delicious meals for us. Breakfast is either French bread with fruit (mashed banana for me!), peanut butter and jam, or pancakes or omelettes. Lunch and dinner are fairly similar affairs: we help ourselves to a spoonful of each of six or seven cooked dishes plus loads of steamed rice. As we have a couple of vegetarians in our group, there are always several vegetarian dishes (e.g. mixed veg, ginger, tofu, soup), usually something fishy (e.g. pieces of fish with giant mushrooms, fish and coconut soup) and some meat dishes (pork, beef and chicken, cooked with various vegetables, fruit and sauces). We always have fresh fruit afterwards: pineapple, papaya, banana, rambutan, water-melon. No meal has been the same, and all have been delicious. Once I move to Kompong Thom, I will be cooking for myself, so my diet will probably be much more boring. Fortunately, my house is next to the market, so I will be able to buy the best fresh food at 6.00 a.m. before going to work. It is quite normal for volunteers to employ their own cook, who would also do cleaning and laundry, but I am not planning to do so. No doubt I will be disappointing a few hopeful Kompong Thom ladies!

Motorbike training

On top of the five days motorbike training I had in the UK, I have had two training sessions out here. The first session was no fun at all as it had been raining, and I ended up slipping and sliding along a hazardous muddy road, although I did manage to stay on! The second day, however, was great, and I now feel able to bike through herds of cows in the road and to dodge the rest of the traffic at crossroads, even with a passenger on the back! I can also now ride side saddle as a pillion passenger - the only way to sit on the back of a bike if you are a decent lady, although I don’t plan to do this often!! Traffic is really chaotic out here, and one of the golden rules is that you never stop even at roundabouts and junctions, as it confuses everyone else! Also, the road surfaces are awful and even the best roads have huge craters. Consequently, no one goes very fast, which is good. VSO insists that volunteers always wear helmets, and I’ve gone further and wear an armoured jacket and gloves! The locals don’t understand this concern for safety at all! I should be getting my own motorbike when I move to Kompong Thom, hopefully a new Honda Dream 125cc.

Peasaa K’mai (Khmer Language)

My Khmer language training course (part one) has almost come to an end, and it is amazing how much I have learned in such a short time! The teacher, Dara, is fantastic. It helps that Khmer grammar is mainly simple:
- There are no tenses: one just says "tomorrow", "yesterday", etc, to denote tense. Even conditional tenses are straightforward, unlike in English.
- Nouns don’t have genders (except with reference to people, of course!)
- There are no plurals
- One word can be used for many meanings, e.g. "knyom" means I, me, myself, my, mine, etc
- There is no need to get spelling right, as I just write down phonetically what I hear from the teacher for my own use.
However, pronunciation is very difficult. There are lots of sounds that are not used in English. Sentence construction is different as well, although quite logical, e.g. "Doctors how many work in hospital this?" There has been no attempt at learning written Khmer, as there are 30+ squiggles denoting vowel sounds and a further 30+ denoting consonants. Even numbers are written in squiggles! Definitely only for the advanced learner!
I have been learning Khmer in a class of seven people, four of whom are Filipino. Not only is English their second language, but they all have different accents, which makes for challenging group lessons.
I now have a grasp of several hundred words and am able to construct fairly complex sentences and questions. However, as soon as I get out of the classroom and start trying to talk to Cambodian people, my competence magically disappears!!! My language isn’t nearly good enough yet to use in a work environment, so the plan is that I will have a translator to work with me for the first five months. I shall be returning to Kampong Cham at the end of January for two weeks of further language training with Dara. In the meantime, once I’ve moved to Kompong Thom, I hope to arrange a couple of lessons a week with a local language teacher which I will share with my fellow volunteers, Rachel and Bram.

Visit to Kampong Thom

I had a successful 2 day visit to Kompong Thom, the town where I will be working from 28 November. KT is on the main road between the two main cities of Phnom Penh (3 hours) and Siem Reap (2 hours), and has a population of 66,000 although it seems much smaller. While there, I made a short visit to my new employer, CODEC (Cooperation for the Development of Cambodia). The office building is down a rough track in the middle of a field, and is extremely basic - a wooden building on stilts! A meeting was held to introduce me to some of my new colleagues, none of whom speak English. I managed to introduce myself in Khmer, and I shall hopefully be getting a translator who will be employed to work with me for the first five months. Amazingly, there are three (old) computers in the office, but no internet or any other technology.

My other big excitement in Kampong Thom was finding a house to rent. Rachel, Bram and I will all be based in Kampong Thom, and we were taken on motorbikes to see a range of possible homes, some of which were not fit for animals to live in. It was a bit like being a participant on “Location, Location, Location”! In the end, we were very pleased with the houses we secured. Mine is a typical modest Cambodian small house, with two bedrooms. There is one main living room with a very high ceiling, one bedroom sits on top of the other with a mezzanine balcony and there’s a simple kitchen, toilet and shower room behind the bedrooms. Both the house and the yard in front are a bit of a blank canvas, so I hope to make the place my own for two years. The owner’s sister lives with her family on the same plot, immediately behind my house. (In the photo, she’s wearing pyjamas even though it’s 5 p.m. - something that Cambodian women seem to wear all day long!) The owner has agreed to do a bit of upgrading before I move in at the end of November. The house is right in the middle of town, and only a few doors away from Rachel and Bram’s plush pad, and it’s great for us all to be so close to each other.

Meeting the British Ambassador

On Friday, all recently arrived VSO volunteers were invited to lunch by the British Ambassador in Phnom Penh. David Reader, the Ambassador, gave a talk on the political situation in Cambodia and he described the pros and cons of all the corruption and manipulation in the government! He explained that the Prime Minister, Hung Sen, has been at the top for 30 years. Hung Sen was previously a leading light in the Khmer Rouge, but since then he has kept switching allegiances and reinventing himself in order to stay in favour with the people. The Ambassador’s residence is fantastic - air-con (bliss), wedgewood furniture, servants and even a swimming pool (the first I’ve seen here!). We were treated to a fantastic lunch in the garden, including roast pig complete with snout.
In the evening of the same day, VSO threw a Welcome Party for the new volunteers to meet other volunteers and reps from partner organisations. We were again spoiled with a sumptuous banquet - sadly too much rich food all in one day! However, it was good to meet the others and find out what living and working is like here.

Brush with Buddhism

A high ranking monk, Sopheap, gave us a talk about Buddhism, and then showed us round one of the local wats - fascinating!! My first faux pas was offering Sopheap my hand to shake - monks aren’t allowed to touch females at all, even accidentally! 95% of the population here are Theravada Buddhists, and Buddhism is a really important influence on culture and the way people live and work. The majority of Buddhist monks were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s and most of the wats destroyed, but Buddhism re-emerged as the state religion in the 1980s and many wats have been rebuilt in the last few years. I found the decorations at the wat we visited very tacky, and some of the rituals seem a bit daft to me, but the locals treat it all very seriously here. The monks go collecting food and money from local people early every morning, cannot eat after midday and can’t drive themselves, and can get around on motobikes, bicycles or other vehicles as long as they are driven by someone else.