It's been a long time....

Not really sure how come it's been so long since I last posted on my blog... it's not as if I've been run off my feet with all the thousands of different tasks calling on my time.

I suppose I just haven't had a moment when the desire to write something has happened to coincide with having the time and opportunity.

But, for some reason, today I feel like writing, and I also happen to have some time as well. So here goes.

Well we've been here for over a year now. Well over a year. And it's strange how time morphs. For me it seems to be accelerating, as if the last year was somehow much longer than the coming year.

In actual fact Mel and I came to a big decision just yesterday, which may be somewhat linked to my desire to write. We decided to cut short our stay out here, and come home a little bit early, by about two months.

Mel's trip home to Melbourne (which somehow managed to go via both the UK and France... which is a pretty skew whiff indirect kind of route!) was probably what it all hinged on. Way back before Christmas Mel was having a bit of a hard time of things... actually that's probably a fair description for pretty much all of her experience here unfortunately. So I suggested that maybe planning a trip home around or just after the one year / half way point would be good as something to aim for, and to mark the point, I hoped, that time would start to go by a little quicker - being able to say 'this time next year we'll be back in the uk' I reasoned, would make quite a difference.

The trip to Melbourne became a chance also for Mel to take her first exam for what will become a diploma in massage therapy - her new chosen career.

As it happened also, we moved to a new house at that one-year point. A lovely wooden one, upstairs from a Cambodian family.

So just after moving in we headed off to Kuala Lumpur for a weekend away, and I returned to Pursat while Mel continued on to the UK. Mel had to transit in 'KL' anyway, so it seemed a good excuse for a 'city break' (it felt more like 'escape to civilization' - never before have I enjoyed public transport systems quite so much as in KL!).

Unfortunately on her return, the new house and having passed the all-important '1-year-to-go' point didn't quite have enough of an impact to make living out here enjoyable for Mel. There are so many contributing factors, that it's hard to know where to start to explain why it's hard living here. I guess I can only sum it up by saying it's not a total breeze getting used to living in a developing country, and Mel (by her own admission) has tried with all her will to adapt but hasn't been able to.

The biggest factor is the heat, and I must admit that I felt like I was hanging on to my sanity by my fingernails only at the peak of the dry-hot season. The temperatures soar to around 40 centigrade around the end of February, and stay there till sometime around June when, to the entire nation's great relief the rains arrive and the hot-wet season starts.

We were dreading having to go through that again next year, and thus the reason to bring the end of my contract forward to the end of February (rather than circa 19th April).

Mel was worried I would be sacrificing too much at work, which is after all the whole reason we're here - albeit I was also hoping it would be an enjoyable experience. Actually I am kind-of enjoying being here, though there's a limit on how much you can enjoy things, when your partner slash love-of-your-life is feeling down.. it's a shared experience, so Mel's experience is also mine.

Actually it really isn't much of a sacrifice, as I've not really got any major projects etc that I'm working on that need me to be here right up to April. It's more just trying to help out where you can, without interfering too much or indeed even taking on too much responsibility. The basic mantra in development is that you want to 'build capacity' by helping people to see how they can do things better, but if you take on too much of the work yourself your colleagues come to depend on you, which feels great, and like you're really helping. But the problem is that when you leave, they don't have the know-how or even desire to keep things up, and you risk having done more harm in the long term than good.

So far there are precious few things that I can really claim to have changed for the better. Well, there are a few that I'm really proud of, but it's mostly quite modest. I did help them (along with a contact of theirs from the UK) to write a successful bid which brought in money to support half their staff's work for at least the coming year - the money of course is great, but its not really 'building their capacity'. I've built up the confidence of one of their female staff, so that she now not only feels confident to deliver business skills training on her own - she actually would like to make training a key part of her career in the future. I've helped them to structure some of their work better, and I've made a small amount of headway in helping them understand how to improve their staff recruitment. There are a few other things too, including things that I've actually done with VSO specifically rather than with my NGOs (I'm actually working with two NGOs at the moment).

Over the coming months I'm hoping, with the main NGO I'm supporting, to help them get a monthly management meeting happening regularly, and to use that as a basis for improving their forward planning. I'm in the throes of helping them set up a profit-making division, in the form of a college teaching English and IT skills, which should help give them an additional source of funding. And most importantly they have to get better at fundraising, so hopefully I can help them not only get some more money, but actually learn how to write bids.. though that won't be easy because they don't actually have any dedicated fundraising staff, so it's all work on top of the day-job, so (believe it or not) there's actually major resistance from all the key staff involved in bid-writing. They rather see it as a distraction from their 'real jobs' of going out to the community to help people put enough food on the table. Of course it kind of is a distraction, but one that makes the job possible in the first place... and of course without it they'd all be out of work!

So in a way that's the state of play. Now just 8 months to go. Then (with a little bit of R&R in-between) it's on with the rest of our lives... me setting up my new business as a wellbeing coach...and Mel as a massage therapist.. in Melbourne... I can't wait! (well, I'll have to of course)

‘What are you missing the most?’

We were asked this question yesterday, but a dutch couple we’d met. I didn’t need to reflect on that one: “My friends”.

On trying to love somewhere

The last week has been pretty cool, though not altogether successful. The King’s birthday brings with it yet another public holiday, this one taking most a week so we decided we’d skip town and explore Cambodia a bit. We settled on going to the remote mountain forest area of Mondulkiri, to visit an elephant conservation project there, and to tie this in with a day and a half in Kratie, which is famous for being home to some of the endangered Irrawaddy Dolphins.

The thing is that even after just two weeks of Pursat we were starting to feel really jaded and in need of a few creature comforts. As it turned out we rather out-did ourselves with our first choice. A few days in a really swish place in Phnom Penh for Mel’s birthday – in fact we accidentally booked an insanely posh room, complete with its own swimming pool, more of a large plunge pool actually but a nice surprise all the same.

Then it was on to the beautiful, temperate, lush mountains of Mondulkiri where we spent a day trekking around the forest with a handful of elephants*, watching them wandering around (knocking down the odd tree as they went) and doing the stuff elephants like to do, like wallowing in ponds and throwing water and mud all over themselves. We also got to get up really close and feed them watermelons, mangoes and pineapples. That was pretty mind-blowing, and well worth the fairly pricey $50 for the day. Marred unfortunately by the fact that Mel had eaten something dodgy on the way from Phnom Penh which had her feeling pretty unwell the whole time and meant she found it really hard to keep any food down the whole time we were in Mondulkiri. First night ate at a place run by a tottally batty dutch woman, with more than a few expletive-laden colourful stories about her life living in Cambodia. We also stayed at a fairly wacky place set up by a eco-loving European and her similarly nuts-about-nature khmer husband. Instead of a hotel they have a selection of A-frame huts on stilts in a field populated by a menagerie consisting of plump chickens (say bye-bye to that lie-in!), cats, a big gorgeous well-kempt Alsatian, several horses, including an absolutely gorgeous stallion. At the entrance to their field they have a round-shaped thatched wooden bar/restaurant (with no walls, of course), with some very fairy-tale style nobbly chairs and tables, including a few hammocks. Various of the animals also enjoyed frequenting the bar, including not only the cats and the dog, but also the stallion which we were led to believe was hanging around in the hope of some meusli, but ‘never pooping or peeing in the bar’. Which was quite a relief really. Add to all that the colourful and exotic-looking planting surrounding and throughout the place and the dazed children-of-nature-in-a-dream demeanour of our hosts and the place seemed pretty surreal in a somehow slightly kitch kind of way.

After another white-knuckle bus journey during which even the bus driver was clearly not totally convinced he would be able to get the bus through, we got to Kratie – a place where the only game in town is going to see dolphins of whom its pretty much impossible to get more than a second-long glimpse somewhere a long way off from wherever you are. Most people hire a boat to go out into the middle of the water, though from what I could see this doesn’t actually improve your chances of seeing anything. But it does at least help you feel like you’ve made an effort, and are therefore not to blame for the fact that you aren’t really seeing a great deal.

We went with a little clutch of other westerners, and after about half an hour of sitting in silence and whipping your head around whenever someone pointed cried out ‘over there’, only to see a little fin barely arch out of the water and the disappear almost immediately. I think we all at some point claimed to have ‘got one’ of a dolphin with our varied array of photographic and video equipment, but I think in truth none of us actually did, certainly not anything worth actually looking at again. I did succeed in getting a few pictures of Mel’s finger pointing out toward a bit flat expanse of dolphin-less water. So anyway we then gave up on the dolphins and took up the boatsman’s offer of relieving us all of a dollar each to go and see the ‘rapids’. Well as it turned out I wouldn’t have described what we were taken to as ‘rapids’, or even as ‘quite-fast-reallys’, but the water was certainly ‘going somewhere’ and after a little goading we all plunged in and sat around chatting in the two-foot of water (the german in the group even brought his passport, and money, in his money belt). And somehow this made it all worthwhile.

It was quite a relief to be able to talk to some other westerners. And so having set out to try and de-stress and to try to see the country that will be our home for the next two years in a more positive light, we didn’t quite manage either. Though we did have a nice time, despite the hotels all being a rough, and Mel feeling ill half the time.

Maybe that’s how this experience will shape up, tough but with a few little gems sparkling through. There ARE definitely things we like, just lots of other things that are annoying/frustrating/tiresome. It’s still early days, so perhaps with more time to acclimatise we can come to like it in a more wholehearted way – it’s just difficult to imagine that right now.

 

 

*the elephants we saw are being looked after by the project after being poorly treated by their owners.. it seems as a general rule where Elephants are worked they are usually highly prized and there a real love and respect for the animals, but that there are many misconceptions that lead to ill-treatment – things like the consensus that a good owner keeps their elephant clean all the time (‘to keep off the bugs’) when in fact the mud that elephants like to cake themselves in acts as a natural barrier against insects.

Mel’s news!

A few weeks ago I was on the phone to my contact at VSO and she asked, ‘does your partner have marketing skills and would she like a job?’.. which was altogether I think the strangest start to an interview process Mel has ever had. The job was to take on the position in Pursat being vacated by the person whose house we have taken on - she had decided to go back home to Kenya as her young daughter kept getting ill and she couldn’t bear to be so far away.

Anyway I explained that Mel’s marketing experience was fairly limited but would they consider her anyway, which was fine. So we sent off her CV and a couple of days later we heard that they really liked the CV and she had been approved from the VSO side, so the funding for Mel’s position was there, and the final step was for the NGO Mel was to be placed with to rubber stamp the deal.

We were still waiting to hear when we went to have a look around the organisation during a few days we had in Pursat town, away from the language training. Mel and I both (for different reasons) went to meet the whole organisation, and to our astonishment in front of the entire staff of the organisation it was quite casually announced: ‘actually the board has approved your post, when can you start’… So it was jubiliation all round on the way home.

When we got back to Phnom Penh a few days later I set about arranging a surprise party for Mel, which was no mean feat given we were living in each other’s pockets. I barely had the opportunity to send the few surreptitious texts to my partners in crime – a few of Mel’s friends here who I’d roped in to help me out. On the appointed day of the party, however, we happened to share a ride with the head of VSO Cambodia, Alice, on our way to meet the British Ambassador (interesting guy, but that’s another story). We happened to mention Mel’s new position and her face dropped and she explained that there had been a mix-up in communication and that the funds for Mel’s post had already been allocated elsewhere so it was quite possible it might not go ahead after all. Our heart’s sank – mine not least thinking of all the effort everyone had put into arranging the party. But I had to call it off and we went for quiet ‘cheer-up-Mel’ drinks instead.

Well to cut a long story short, some four weeks of waiting later it all went through, the money was found from somewhere, still not quite sure of all the details but Mel started two days ago, and so far seems to be going really well. Is quite a stretch for Mel as it’s pretty different work to anything she’s ever done before – but she came to Cambodia looking for a change of direction… and she’s certainly got that!

On Cambodian culture (when it clashes with Westerners!)

An interesting thing just happened… am in this coffee place near our hotel… the service is quite slow even for Cambodia… these two Americans just came in with a Cambodian guy… they ordered some food and sat down, after a little while the food appeared but I think at least one of the orders was wrong and they felt they’d waited too long. So one of their party kept going up to the bar and raising his voice in English and waving his arms around. He kept saying something about needing to get back to work.. until eventually he gave them a final earful, and the whole group left.. refusing to pay. The Cambodian in the group went up to try and pay but was told not to by the American.

It may be that they are indeed here on work but I reckon they’re pretty new here cos it really wasn’t that much of a wait by Cambodian standards. Plus when they came in they were trying to ask if this place is a ‘franchise’… which seemed a little naïve, I don’t know about you but I don’t know the word ‘franchise’ in many other languages! Plus this place definitely feels like quite a one off.. it’s actually the poshest place in town pretty much, it does Lavazza coffee, ‘New Zealand Natural’ ice cream, as well as fried chicken served with rice (which is quite a western-style dish I think from a Cambodian viewpoint).

Another oddity is if they are here on work, Cambodian lunch-breaks are generally two hours, so I’d guess they’d squandered their time… the two hours by they way is I think traditionally so you can have a siesta or at least a break from work out of the heat of the hottest sun of the day, many people eat with their families, but in practice it often means people have a little more time to do things like go and work on a second job!

The other thing is that there aren’t many place open today as currently everything is closed for Cambodian new year, so unless their Cambodian counterpart is particularly familiar with the town they’ll be going hungry, plus of course wherever they go they’ll have to wait.

The Cambodian guy with them didn’t say much, but I think he probably sees the Americans as higher ranked than him, either they are his employers or else just more senior in the pecking order.. so it would not have been polite for him to overtly speak out.. in Cambodian terms he most probably gave them all the cues that they were making asses of themselves but I expect they didn’t notice. It was interesting that he still tried to pay, and I have a feeling he gave a mild apology in Khmer as he left, or rather what he said sounded like an explanation in a relatively patient (rather than scolding) tone of voice.

I think this is the quintessential impression many westerners give of themselves in Cambodia, inscrutable and brash.

One month in!

As of today (9th April) we have been here exactly one month. We’re going out to eat some Khmer food to celebrate later (?!?).

So what’s it like to be 1 month in? Difficult to describe. A big swirl of paradoxical feelings. Have this sense that everything’s normalised too quickly.

In the first few weeks everything felt quite alien, although simultaneously surprisingly familiar, perhaps from having visited Vietnam before, perhaps because in my naivety I kind of expected nothing to work quite the same... does that sound mad? So the fact that you can go and sit in a cafe, and order a fanta (in English) and go back to your hotel room, switch on HBO and watch American movies (yesterday we watched Jo versus the Mountain, which was actually quite entertaining), gives everything this veener of familiarity. Operating in English as well keeps the ground steady under our feet – not forgetting of course that there are two of us, and we’ve made our own little bubble of normal that we walk around in.

So I’m both relieved and disappointed. Everything is strange and yet familiar. I find myself wishing we had gone somewhere that was MORE of a challenge culturally, and yet I know I would feel the same feelings of rapid normalisation there too.

I can’t quite shake this notion that we prepared, or rather we WERE prepared (by VSO), too well. Isn’t an adventure supposed to be full of the unexpected?

And yet I remind myself also that though I may relish the excitement, the ‘experience’ isn’t actually what brought me here. That I came here because I wanted to help in some way, and you look around and it’s undoubtable that help is needed and done right can be useful
in a straightforward
practical
kind of way…

 

Ok, so here’s some perfect timing, right. Mel’s just interrupted my typing with a case in point (though she’s no idea what I’m typing about): I’m sitting in our favourite bar at the moment, The Mekong Crossing – we call it ‘Joe’s’ after its American co-proprietor. And I’m writing this on my laptop, in fact I’m sipping a lovely banana smoothie in case you’re curious – slightly naughty given one of the ingredients is ice, which you’re supposed to steer clear of. The bar has a great view of the Mekong river, into which (our view that is) a few moments ago a guy just casually strolled, turned his back to us to face the river and urinated.
So here’s my point: a few days ago I was jogging along the same path and someone did the same. My reaction? I was mildly appalled, though after a few moments I thought to myself ‘Why not I suppose’. Now it’s happened again and Mel just saw it for her first time. Her reaction: the same as I had.
And yet to me it seemed already so commonplace. In fact I found it hard to even recall my own reaction, though it was only a day or two ago.

 

But here’s the flipside, and it’s paradoxical again. I’m finding that right now while I’m rueing the loss of a certain sense of wonder (and the little tinge of fear and distaste that came with it), the familiarity that’s creeping in is helping me chill out, relax, stop thinking so much about everything I do, and to start to notice and enjoy my surroundings in a way I couldn’t before. So the other day we went on a ride into the countryside on a tuk-tuk, a kind of motorbike-drawn cart, and I started to realise how beautiful I find traditional Khmer houses, which are generally wooden and sit on stilts to keep them from the floods – I remember them from stories my mum told me about Vietnam and Laos growing up.

And today we were walking through the market and I couldn’t help but appreciate the sight of all the fantastic fruit and vegetables and other goods laid out, often just on trays on the floor. They just look fantastic to me.

It’s difficult to explain, but perhaps you understand.

 

 

 

- the view across the Mekong from Joe’s

Monkey

It turns out that a monkey lives in the trees opposite our hotel. He seems quite a civilised sort of chap, sometimes to be seen strolling casually up and down the boulevard, sometimes nibbling pensively on a banana. I hear from a local guide that he is of the banana-eating persuasion. Apparently other monkeys are given to eating much more exotic foodstuffs, such as mango and sugar cane. But not our monkey, he’s just not that kind of monkey.