A confession

Sometimes, while sitting in our Khmer language class, I catch myself wishing for break-time.

Opening a bank account

So I think I’ve had four bank accounts so far – two in the UK, one in GermanyCambodia.
(which may still be open, for all I know!!), and now (fanfare please) one in

Actually I did also have another one with the Co-Operative bank but that doesn’t really count since all I did once it was open was spend the overdraft and never touched it again except to pay the overdraft and close the account.

My first account was with ‘TSB’ for storing my precious £2-a-week pocket-money. And I’m guessing the next account I open will be in laid-back-Australia – where I expect all you have to do is turn up at the bank with a friendly smile and can of Ozzy beer and they’ll give you an account on the spot.. fair dinkum… probably.

One thing you learn quite quickly about the whole process is that it’s much, much harder if you’re a Johnny Foreigner. We’re not trust-worthy you see. Unlike fifteen year old boys (I don’t remember having the slightest difficulty opening my first account!).

In Germany, where the official form and the rubber stamp reign supreme, I had to get a stamped form from both the local authorities and my university to open the account. Sounds straight-forward enough, right? Except that to complete your registration with either, you actually needed forms from the other! Plus the local government office would only deign to let you have such a form if you turned up on the morning of the correct day of the week - and of course the only way of finding out the correct day is to actually visit!

To add to the fun to register with the university I had to queue up a total of FOUR times in the same office. Made both easier and more frustrating by the fact that all the queues were all next to each other. At each window you would collect a new form, and have any you already had decorated with various scribbles and stamps. Then you could proceed to the next queue to go to some other little window to queue up for more of the same.

When I finally reached the bank with the appropriate pieces of paper a rather stern lady directed me to a particular queue in a manner that said ‘well isn’t it obvious?’. Whereupon reaching the front of said queue (and of course collecting a couple of rubber stamp-marks) I was advised I needed to take a few steps across the bank to join a further queue to complete the process!

No blooming wonder Kafka was German!

So after that, I was blithely confident about the process of opening a Cambodian account. After Germany, I reasoned, this is going to be a piece of cake.

Well, I wasn’t quite right.

The first thing I learned, prior to my arrival in Pursat, was that to open the account I needed a letter from my employer, which would be written for me before I arrived to meet my new boss. Except when I arrived it took some fifteen minutes discussion to discover that although initially we were told that the letter was of course written, the actual state of affairs was that the letter had been requested that day. And of course my boss, the director, doesn’t speak English so the letter would subsequently need translation. So I said I would be happy to wait until the next day - seeing as that seemed to be my only option! And that's when the fun really began.

As you will have guessed of course, the letter had in fact not yet been wrtten, so in the course of my meeting with the director the next day he also dictated it out in Khmer, which was translated straight into English. The director also explained that under Cambodian regulations foreigners are not supposed to be able to obtain a bank account until they’ve been in the country for three months. And also no-one could work out the house address, neither my landlord, or landlady knew it - and even my new colleagues (their office is on the same street as our new house) could not even confirm the road name. ‘The bank is going to love this’ I thought to myself, in spite of the assurances that no-one bothers about postal addresses in Cambodia, since your post is delivered to your post office rather than your address.

I should point out that Pursat, where I was to open the account, is a pretty small town. It’s all ramshackle buildings and dust and it takes about five minutes to cycle from one end to the other. It has one bank, and is the home of the one-and-only internet café in the whole province.

So we later merrily headed off to the bank with my passport my official letter and a faint sense of hope that my ‘white’ face would help smoothe things along. Well that last thing at least didn’t quite have the intended effect. Once we got to the front of the queue we were advised that, although apparetnly the lack of address posed no problem, the regulations had been changed and that, seeing as I was a foreigner, we would need an official document certifying my residence in Pursat, which could be obtained from my landlord.

So we jumped on our motorbikes and headed to the workshop of my landlord-to-be. Luckily he was there and listened attentively for the ten or so minutes it seemed to take to explain to him the situation. After a little discussion he explained that he was not able to issue the form himself but that this could be obtained from the village leader so he and a colleague headed off to negotiate this with the village leader. And we were left to sit on some diminutive plastic chairs, and sweat, and chat, and drink the little bottles of complementary water I seemed to have been amassing over the course of the day.

The chairs were of the type Mel has dubbed ‘the national chair of Cambodia’ because they’re absolutely everywhere, every house has some, every school, every business, they litter the streets, the cafes and bars. They’re pretty small, Cambodian’s being a bit shorter anyway, but they also seem to do sitting differently too, they don’t like being too far from the floor – which judging by their chairs may well be because you can never quite trust them to actually hold your weight!

When they returned from their discussions with the Village Leader the news was not fantastic. The village leader had said he could not give me the certificate I needed without first seeing my signed lease agreement. This was a bit of an issue, given the main reason to want to open the account in the first place was so that I could have my deposit transferred, in order to secure said lease on said!

So without the bank account - no lease – but I needed the lease to get the bank account! Stumped!

Thankfully my landlord was willing to break with convention and sign the lease without the money. So with a little sense of dare-devil-ish-ness about us, having broken the rules just a little bit, off we then set to undertake the painstaking process of signing the lease on the house.

Signing your rental agreement in Cambodia is an altogether different affair to what you might expect. Partly you are supposed to negotiate, often extensively, over the price – luckily we had already done that part with the landlady the day before. The women generally being the ones who own businesses – this despite Cambodia being a male-orientated society. That’s a balance that will take a while for me to get my head around!

So all that was left to do was complete the process of going around the place with the landlord negotiating what changes or additions they were willing to make before we moved in. This often takes several hours, but we were in a hurry so managed to get it all wrapped up in just over an hour.

That done, we set for the village administration office to get the certificate the bank needed. As we drew up to the place on our scooters I spied a couple of people who were just leaving who glum-facedly informed us the administration had gone to a workshop. Yes, they were supposed to be there, like we’d been told they would be, but, no, they didn't know where they were or when they'd be back.

It’s actually accepted practice because of the pitifully low wages of officials that they supplement their wages with attending workshops and training, which they are paid extra to attend, and taking bribes.

We tried calling the officials but to no avail. Now what. We sat around helplessly for about ten minutes. I should point out that throughout all of this we were a team of between four and six: myself, a contact from VSO, two office staff from my new workplace, and at various points we were joined the head of finance and at points of course also my landlord. What a hapless posse we must have seemed – six of us, and yet we still coulnd’t manage to get a simple bank account opened. Things were getting frustrating. My mood sank.

Eventually we resolved to go back to the bank and plead with them to let me have the account anyway without the official form.

At the bank the atmosphere among our team was tense, this was our last shot, the culmination of collectively tens of hours of work, hanging on the say-so of a disinterested-looking bank clerk. Initially things looked good, she started tapping away on a keyboard and even got a colleague involved, the two of them conferring and tapping things into their respective computers. But then things took a turn for the worse. She asked again for the form we didn’t have, and when we still couldn’t produce it (where did she think we would magic it from?!?) she tried calling the office of the village leader, perhaps disbelieving of our story – of course she couldn’t get through either and things ground to a hault. She called her boss for advice.

Then a glimmer of hope. Though her boss didn’t seem to be particularly helpful, we could all tell from the tone of her voice that she was on our side. I couldn’t understand a word of course, but I imagined how she was rebutting his objections and deftly parrying his counter-arguments. She seemed to be on the phone for an interminable time, and gave no sign of the state of affairs when she finally put down the receiver. However, a few minutes later came the breakthrough, she asked for my passport, and a colleague turned to me and said ‘It may be possible’. I smiled but didn't want to count my chickens too early.

Sure enough, though, within about ten minutes I was shown an account number. The deed was done!

So after about two and a half hours, five motorbike trips, and having pretty much exhausted all of our patience and ingenuity – we finally succeeded in opening my fourth bank account!

I thanked everyone profusely and even did a bit of back slapping in my excitement.

Actually the story doesn’t quite finish there though, because no more than a few hours later the bank called me saying that they had forgotten to get me to sign one of the forms, so I returned the next day only to find that my signature on the return visit was not sufficiently similar to the day previously. Luckily the clerk was understanding and let me have a few practices until I could get them a bit more uniform and I re-signed everything. Then a few days later while I was on the bus back to the capital, Phnom Penh, I also got word that the original letter from my employer was supposed to have had my passport number on it and that everything was going to go wrong if I didn’t get the number to them immediately. Luckily Mel remembered that my passport number was on my ID card in my wallet, so we managed to get it through to them – and that’s as much as I’ve heard… for now…

First Blog, First Post

First things first: thanks to everyone who took part for the fantastic send off. I'm so glad I got to see so many of you, and particular thanks to all the people who came from London and Brighton and to my sister and to Hal for making it so far. The party was just awesome, and finishing our last night as UK residents with everyone joining in on 'Hey Girl' a-la-samba-batucada was just the greatest, most fitting, fun outro to living in the UK that I could have wished for. Put a grin on my face and kept the tears from my eyes!

The scene after getting home that night was pretty hectic, still lots of stuff to sort, throw out, box, and store. We were already over our baggage allowance, and we kept finding things and going "Oh lord how come I haven't already packed this!". Got it done with a little help from my sis. Finally hit the sack at 4... ready for 6am rise... (this after nearly six weeks of night-after-night of getting 3-6hours every night - good lord I was tired, but having something of the enormity of this VSO adventure thing to look forward to just kept me going and going).

After a nervous are-we-going-to-be-there-in-time drive to Heathrow Airport; Aunt, Uncle, Sister and a friend of Mel's saw us off. (Paula: thanks again for the lift.) Shed a few tears as we set off, not out of sadness, more out of fondness and the momentousness-of-the-moment. Despite the grinding fatigue and my head bidding me to 'keep it together - stay focussed' my emotions were soaring: a heady mix of nerves, and excitement.

I mean, this is something I've wanted to do since I can remember. I kept thinking to myself: "This is it!" And I gripped Mel's hand as I watched our takeoff of the window. "This is IT!"

OUR FIRST CAMBODIAN
Some 12-14 hours later (I lose count) and we were touching down in Pnomh Penh. The language tapes I'd promised myself I'd learn on the plane still ringing in my ears, though scant words seemed to have stuck.

There was a Cambodian guy from the VSO office there to meet us, was great to see him, his English was pretty passable - a little mixup with the visas - it turned out there was another VSO on the plane but they'd brought someone-else's visa for her... and a stern-looking border officials told us we were supposed to have passport photos, and I wondered if we were going to have to bribe him (though it seemed unlikely) - we'd been told they could take a photocopy from our passports, and when we explained this he seemed quite satisfied and hurried off to fill out what seemed like a hundred different forms and stamp 20 different stamps on each. He even cracked a sheepish childlike grin when he realised he got one of his stamps wrong - as if he expected we would scold him for his inattention. 'Welcome to Cambodia', I thought to myself.

IN AT THE DEEP END
We all climbed into a VSO pick-up to go to the VSO office. It turns out Cambodia really does look and feel like a slightly poorer version of Vietnam - was wonderfully reassuring to hear the familiar buzz of motorbikes swarming around us.

Our arrival at the office was not quite as smoothe as we'd hoped - in fact a bit calamtous (and slightly embarrassing!). We were exhausted, having barely slept on the plane, and having been told we would have the first afternoon off, were looking forward eagerly to a siesta. But in under an hour we were fetched for our first briefing on admin and orientation, and then told that an hour after that we started our first afternoon of training! We were not best pleased! Even worse there'd been a communication breakdown and we kept being told how we were 'late'! During our first briefing we were even told how they'd gone with all our papers to collect us from the airport several days earlier, how everyone had had to wait around for ages while they tried to work out where we were...

Well after a that I couldn't help but introduce us to everyone with as evocative an explanation as I could muster about how WE were there on the day THEY had requested at the time THEY had requested and that there had NEVER been any other day for our arrival. In fact I was feeling a bit hot-headed about it all and went to make sure my programme director knew the full story and to see if we couldn't get the afternoon off after all.

After airing my grievance in the plainest possible terms, and making sure he was in absolutely no doubt about our innocence in the matter, he nodded sagely, and explained in fairly good English that there was nothing to be done, that since they hadn't known about this no arrangements had been made, and that although some of the briefings we had missed were quite vital, there was no time to catch up on these so we would have to muddle through, and I could choose to miss the afternoon's briefings also if I wished but these were very important and there would be no opportunity to catch up. Fuming though I was, I could see there was no way forward, so I had to concede.

ONLY LATER did I discover that the guy I'd been talking to was in fact called Pisit.... wheras my programme director is called 'PisET' and I'd been ranting on to a completely un-connected member of the office admin staff.... who had obviously listened to me going on and on out of nothing but the sheer politeness for which Cambodians are famed... and not wishing to seem unhelpful thought up the best information he could muster!

Moreover it turned out that catch-up sessions had been arranged, just no-one had actually told us about them, so all was not nearly so bleak as it had at first seemed!

UP-TO-DATE
So that was the first day. A few briefing sessions, and a day or two on we were all piled into a large coach that looked like it had just driven out of the 70s (though thankfully the air-con did still seem to be working just about) ... complete with some really awful cambodian karaoke. The destination was Kampong Cham, which is where we'll be spending the next six or so weeks for language training. On the way we stopped off at a large concrete watering hole ... where we got to see our first fried spiders and cockroaches... our language teacher explained: in the khmer rouge days people got pretty desparate, I couldn't imagine ever making it back to a normal existance, we were so hungry we would eat anything, even leaves off the trees just to having the feeling of having something in your mouth to chew. Thank god those days are gone. And there is real feeling of industriousness that makes me feel hopeful for the future of Cambodia. And I hope will mean my time here won't end up being in vein.