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.