Hi,
I am into the home stretch of my contract here, with only 6 weeks to go, and ironically am starting to get really busy as time runs out. I have been doing much of the work of the Technical Advisor while they seek a replacement for the job, and now for a month I am acting Programme Manager in Ratanakiri. This was meant to be a bit of a formality as most of the work that needs doing is what I am already coordinating, but it has quickly become apparent that there are plenty of urgent queries from London and the like, as well as routine staff and finance paperwork.
As a trainer I have not been much involved in operational matters, so its a challenge to open a spreadsheet and give sensible explanations for all the variances in spending and budget lines, or to draft revised targets in a project plan. I have one advantage - I am now the longest serving expat in HU Cambodia!
Cool season has set in properly, with nights cool enough for the duvet, dust starting to fill the house, and a massive increase in the number of tourists around town. It is a very good time to visit this part of the world. The dust is much less than last year with the new bitumen road laid right through the town.
I've never really got over the dengue, with an endless run of infections .. the last was a flu which quickly turned my lungs to soup so that I’d wake at 3am every night unable to breathe, and cough for an hour. One night I was nearly over it, but hadn’t felt up to going to the market, so I went out to a restaurant for a feed of fresh vegetables. The landlady hadn’t put the outside lights on and as I walked back in the front gate .. BANG – a snake latched onto my foot. I never saw what sort but as its fangs were 2cm apart it must have been a decent size.
That night was agony but by morning it was all settled. A week later though, it swelled up and got all hot and red, probably an infection rather than venom, although its interesting to see that such tiny holes haven’t healed after a month. I saw on tv that even highly venomous snakes don’t always inject, they prefer to save it for something edible.
Most of the staff have a bit of time-in-lieu or leave and they chose to take this week off, coincidentally its Christmas week, so while last year it was an ordinary working day this year I have no great need to be at work. I am still getting over doing the 2 way trip to Phnom Penh in 3 days last week, and not keen to get back in a bus, but if a looming sore throat doesn’t sap me too much I’ll go off in search of beaches and good food for a few days.
A couple of ‘scenes’ from the past week or so:
- Sitting on a mat in a thinly forested spot, to the right the roar of a waterfall, to the left two elephants trumpeting, in front a bunch of colleagues acting out in mime their project’s work, behind a semicircle of local indigenous people gazing on in baffled wonder. Staff development Cambodia style.
- Last night, leading a bunch of adults and children in a sort of crazy line dancing to blasting Khmer pop under a stilt house. This was a follow on from drinks at work as a holiday farewell, great fun but can’t do it too often as it comes out of my pocket! (Later I realised the dance one was teaching the others was the Madison, so I went and put on “Nutbush City Limits” – they were unimpressed and put the Khmer dance music back on.)
I won’t put any photos in the post .. you can see some new ones in my gallery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/30375182@N05/
Well, have a good Christmas and all that, catch you next year,
December 19, 2009
October 18, 2009
Notes From A Small Kingdom 9 - Typhoon Season
Hi All,
After 2 dull months its been a busy 2 weeks. Ratanakiri is the biggest office of HU in the world and generally there three foreigners based here, the manager, a technical advisor and myself. The advisor works with the health rights advocacy project, and in 2 1/2 years they have had three, and are now looking for the fourth; while the position's vacant I'm doing some of the work, jobs like redrafting the statutes for a local organisation they're forming, and teaching them to write press releases and articles.
2 weeks back someone found a funding opportunity with AusAID, but with only a week until it closed. Writing a proposal usually takes 3-10 weeks and involves a lot of drafting and circulating, but we had 5 days and I was leading with almost no knowledge of the details of the existing projects, so I had my work cut out. It was a joint effort with our team in Mondulkiri province, so a couple of us jumped in a 4WD and headed off there. In the dry with local knowledge you can go straight there on a motorbike in 6-7 hours - its something of a legendary trip. But in the monsoon it’s the 11 hour long way round.
Our road is not too bad and there is now 250km of bitumen across the lowlands, but the climb up to Sen Monorom includes an 80km construction site with plenty of mudbaths and a couple of landslides. I was amazed at how the Ford pickup managed to plug through mud inches deeper than its floor, and we would have got through in daylight but for the best part of an hour spent pulling a minivan past a landslide. People often spend a night on these roads not 'cause they're stuck but someone else is bogged and blocking the road.
It had already rained solidly for a week but the next day the remnants of Typhoon Ketsana came through, wet and windy but nothing very unusual where I was. After a few 12 hour days we knocked out a passable application - having been training our guys in "the logical framework approach" it would have been nice to work through it in an orderly fashion, but shortcuts and fudging were the order of the week, we were still redrafting 30 mins before the deadline! On the last day the sun broke through, fog cleared and I had a brief look at the mountains around town before dark.
Next morning we set off down a much drier road and were soon buzzing along the highway. On a few corners there was a faint sqeal from a front tyre, and when we stopped to eat I looked to see if it was a bit flat or hard, but it looked OK. We made good time despite some of 'our' road being flooded (picture above - never seen that before) and 15km from home were on track to knock 4 hours off our outward time when the front suspension collapsed and we careened into the weeds. A bolt holding the upper control arm fell out .. hence the squeally tyre .. and the remaining one eventually broke. Now that would have been really interesting at 100km/h, but at 40 no one died. An hour had it patched up and limping home.
Next day was the sabbath and a rest was in order, but the NGOs had been gearing up a flood relief effort and I ended up driving a load of rice and other bits to one of the northern districts along the Sesan River. Parts of Cambodia saw a lot of wind and rain from the remnants of Typhoon Ketsana (the same storm that drowned Manila). The Vietnamese have been building hydro dams in the upper reaches of the Sesan and they like to amuse themselves by saving up water and then dumping it at times of flooding to see how much higher thay can get the water to rise in Cambodia. This time they managed to get the river to break its banks before the typhoon hit; two days later people went to bed as normal in their tall stilt houses and woke in the middle of the night swimming. We heard of one old man who remained with his house when the family evacuated, when it went under he climbed a tree, when that went under he swam to another, and stayed in it for 3 days. Another family climbed a mobile phone tower.
Many families are camped on 'islands' with little more than their clothes and maybe a sheet of plastic, and we are using longboats to take food to them. I dropped a load at Veun Sai schoolhouse (pictured) which is usually 800 metres from the river; now the boats can pull up to the verandah and load direct. In Ta Veng we visited the health centre which like the rest of the village had had 2 1/2 metres of water through it.
I got involved in a quick needs assessment and more high speed proposal writing, doing a draft for flood relief in a few hours, but it came to nothing. As expected, my house had let rain in during the typhoon, but it kept happening in normal weather so finally I said I'd have to move elsewhere; suddenly the staff were on the roof replacing rotted shingles.
The staff have all been doing training leading to this week doing field surveys, so I hopped on a moto and buzzed off to a couple of villages to watch the action. it is interesting to see but I don't follow the conversation so well, as much of it is in Kreung or Tampuon language, translated into Khmae for our records and then into English for us barang. It’s a nice change for me to get out into the community rather than stuck in the office with the hungry mosquitos.
Someone called me a "longnose" the other day - must be a decade since that happened!
Tony
After 2 dull months its been a busy 2 weeks. Ratanakiri is the biggest office of HU in the world and generally there three foreigners based here, the manager, a technical advisor and myself. The advisor works with the health rights advocacy project, and in 2 1/2 years they have had three, and are now looking for the fourth; while the position's vacant I'm doing some of the work, jobs like redrafting the statutes for a local organisation they're forming, and teaching them to write press releases and articles.
2 weeks back someone found a funding opportunity with AusAID, but with only a week until it closed. Writing a proposal usually takes 3-10 weeks and involves a lot of drafting and circulating, but we had 5 days and I was leading with almost no knowledge of the details of the existing projects, so I had my work cut out. It was a joint effort with our team in Mondulkiri province, so a couple of us jumped in a 4WD and headed off there. In the dry with local knowledge you can go straight there on a motorbike in 6-7 hours - its something of a legendary trip. But in the monsoon it’s the 11 hour long way round.
Our road is not too bad and there is now 250km of bitumen across the lowlands, but the climb up to Sen Monorom includes an 80km construction site with plenty of mudbaths and a couple of landslides. I was amazed at how the Ford pickup managed to plug through mud inches deeper than its floor, and we would have got through in daylight but for the best part of an hour spent pulling a minivan past a landslide. People often spend a night on these roads not 'cause they're stuck but someone else is bogged and blocking the road.It had already rained solidly for a week but the next day the remnants of Typhoon Ketsana came through, wet and windy but nothing very unusual where I was. After a few 12 hour days we knocked out a passable application - having been training our guys in "the logical framework approach" it would have been nice to work through it in an orderly fashion, but shortcuts and fudging were the order of the week, we were still redrafting 30 mins before the deadline! On the last day the sun broke through, fog cleared and I had a brief look at the mountains around town before dark.
Next morning we set off down a much drier road and were soon buzzing along the highway. On a few corners there was a faint sqeal from a front tyre, and when we stopped to eat I looked to see if it was a bit flat or hard, but it looked OK. We made good time despite some of 'our' road being flooded (picture above - never seen that before) and 15km from home were on track to knock 4 hours off our outward time when the front suspension collapsed and we careened into the weeds. A bolt holding the upper control arm fell out .. hence the squeally tyre .. and the remaining one eventually broke. Now that would have been really interesting at 100km/h, but at 40 no one died. An hour had it patched up and limping home.
Next day was the sabbath and a rest was in order, but the NGOs had been gearing up a flood relief effort and I ended up driving a load of rice and other bits to one of the northern districts along the Sesan River. Parts of Cambodia saw a lot of wind and rain from the remnants of Typhoon Ketsana (the same storm that drowned Manila). The Vietnamese have been building hydro dams in the upper reaches of the Sesan and they like to amuse themselves by saving up water and then dumping it at times of flooding to see how much higher thay can get the water to rise in Cambodia. This time they managed to get the river to break its banks before the typhoon hit; two days later people went to bed as normal in their tall stilt houses and woke in the middle of the night swimming. We heard of one old man who remained with his house when the family evacuated, when it went under he climbed a tree, when that went under he swam to another, and stayed in it for 3 days. Another family climbed a mobile phone tower. 
Many families are camped on 'islands' with little more than their clothes and maybe a sheet of plastic, and we are using longboats to take food to them. I dropped a load at Veun Sai schoolhouse (pictured) which is usually 800 metres from the river; now the boats can pull up to the verandah and load direct. In Ta Veng we visited the health centre which like the rest of the village had had 2 1/2 metres of water through it.I got involved in a quick needs assessment and more high speed proposal writing, doing a draft for flood relief in a few hours, but it came to nothing. As expected, my house had let rain in during the typhoon, but it kept happening in normal weather so finally I said I'd have to move elsewhere; suddenly the staff were on the roof replacing rotted shingles.
The staff have all been doing training leading to this week doing field surveys, so I hopped on a moto and buzzed off to a couple of villages to watch the action. it is interesting to see but I don't follow the conversation so well, as much of it is in Kreung or Tampuon language, translated into Khmae for our records and then into English for us barang. It’s a nice change for me to get out into the community rather than stuck in the office with the hungry mosquitos.Someone called me a "longnose" the other day - must be a decade since that happened!
Tony
September 27, 2009
Notes from a Small Kingdom .. and a larger one
Hi Folks,
Its been another long gap between missives .. after I was weakened by Dengue and by the drug that finally killed my pet tapeworm, a couple of other infections moved in and I ended up getting shipped off to Bangkok where the hospitals are shiny and the service 5 star. After antibiotics most of what I needed was rest, and I got plenty of that. A happy side effect is that I lost 14kg, most of which came from Darwin's pubs and clubs; its great to be without it but can anyone tell me why I still have a gut? Now I need to keep it off, more difficult as the weather gets cooler.
It would be hard for me to see two more varied years of weather; last year the monsoon started (very late) in September, while this year it kicked off in May, and has been fairly constant since - the annual rainfall is about 2.2 metres and most of it falls July - Oct. My house was wanted for family so I have moved to a small apartment-like place in the grounds of a hotel near the middle of town. The small dwelling is exactly right, a bed-sit plus kitchen, bath and utility, but unfortunately its not very well built, a bit dingy and tends to get water inside.
I bought myself a nice new fridge in Phnom Penh and sent it up on a pickup, once again the envy of the neighbourhood .. will these ridiculous luxuries never cease? My new landlady is trying to extract a promise to sell it to no-one but her when I leave. I'm not too sure about the quality of these Thai built fridges, but they seem to work well in the tropical conditions (and a frost free upside-down Panasonic 155 litre for $300 seems good value when you've spent $400 repairing an old fridge in Australia). Both my places have had one of the common 26" 'Sony' tvs, sold here for $50; they come from China and the buttons tend to change function over time, but with a remote they mostly work OK.
A couple of nights back I was ready for bed when a decent storm front hit. This stage of the monsoon there are less thunderstorms and more broad wet cloud systems, so the storm didn't seem that dramatic until the water began splashing off the bed and my luggage. I dashed about rescuing stuff and putting it up high in dry spots, dragged the new fridge out from under a cascade, then spent the night in one of the hotel rooms.
This week I am off to to the neighbouring mountain province of Mondulkiri, to write a funding proposal for the Indigenous Peoples' Health Rights projects in both places. The tropical storm which drowned the Philippines yesterday is threatening to become a typhoon and is heading this way, so I may come back to another deluge. Initially I planned to drive but the boss decided to send a driver to share the wheel, not a bad thing as it is 10 - 12 hours of mostly hard slog down to the lowlands, south a couple of hundred clicks then back into the mountains.
Tony
July 4, 2009
Notes from a Small Kingdom 7
Hi,
Its been a long time between letters, either I've been too sick to think them up, my computer has been too sick to type on, my email has been inaccessible, or the 'net has been too sick to carry messages. My Australian isp shut down my account, killing off my website and my decade old email address. Soon after, my hard drive failed, leaving me lots of messing around to get repairs in Phnom Penh, rebuild and retrieve data.
Back in April we had Khmer (Chinese) New Year and a week of holidays. Visitors dropped in from France and I took a break, ducking back into Phnom Penh office to interview job applicants in the middle. We spent the first 5 days at a 'pool resort hotel' just out of the semi deserted capital. There are a few of these places catering to day-trippers from town as well as guests. This one is nicely laid out with bungalows scattered in tropical gardens around 2 pools and - being French run - the food is good and the value excellent.
On the last morning we all woke early and with nothing pressing but breakfast were all still lazing in bed pretending to sleep at 7am. I heard a few loud cracks and my first thought was fireworks (at this time? idiots) but it developed into a very loud cracking which I thought was a very close thunderclap. However it seemed to be getting closer, lightning doesn't do that so I started to look up, but my rising head was met by the falling ceiling as the roof came down. After a short blank and settling of debris I looked through some gaps in the wreckage and worked out that a huge tree had demolished the bungalow. Having calmed the screaming and checked that there were no serious injuries, I dug myself out and then lifted the wreckage off the others. By the time stunned bystanders arrived we were standing in the garden forlornly pondering the state of our room and baggage.
We picked up a few scratches and bruises, a small discount on our bill, and a lingering suspicion of tall trees. It proved to be the tree itself that caused it all, but I find now that thunderstorms make me edgy, where previously I enjoyed them. We have had a lot of storms up here since April so that's a lot of edgy. In fact, with last year's monsoon so late and this year's very early, in 10 months I've had two 'wets'.
After a shower and feed, and a few hours cleaning luggage, we took a bus to Sihanoukville and the beach. When we arrived it was buzzing, people on NY holidays filled the place, but by Monday the town had emptied; we sat in a great restaurant on the beach overlooking the bay with fresh barbecue and live music .. and only three of us in the place. Its how rich people must feel when they live in castles I guess, only warmer.
My visitors went home and so did I, back to an office in flux as the manager had resigned and a new British-Kenyan-Indian technical advisor joined us. We found a new Program Manager in Alex, a Filipino with long experience in Cambodia. I was on the selection panel and had worried that there may be no suitable applicants, but it turned out that we had a choice of possibles. This hasn't been the case with some of the other jobs we've tried to fill.
An old pal from Melbourne (and the Oxfam India trip) passed through Ratanakiri and stayed for a couple of days .. my first house guest! He was on a birding trip for 4 months in half a dozen countries, and managed his target of spotting his 1000th species somewhere in China. I have been suffering from the isolation as the email and Skype get worse, and it is great to be able to sit and chat for hours on end. The worst thing about this lifestyle is the inability to have a gab with a mate regularly. In my Red Cross training I saw how valuable 'debriefing' is after incidents, but its also a normal part of daily life, getting stuff off your chest .. another thing you don't notice happens until its not there.
My landlord decided to do some home improvements, not during any of the seven weeks I've spent away but late into the evenings on a normal working week when I came home desperate for rest and got a building site instead. The house is made mainly of unlined timber frame clad in planks, and for some reason he decided to plank the inside of the main bedroom. In addition to having my house full of people without warning, the obvious disruption and the massive damage the builders did to everything that got in their way, I was also appalled at the poor work they were doing. In this part of the world, any small cavity is an obvious home for all kinds of squatters (my last boss had endless dead-rat-rotting-in-the-wall fun while another Aussie is currently looking for a new home as she can no longer stand sharing with the 300 bats in the walls and ceilings) and here they were creating a multi story apartment complex for vermin, full of big inviting gaps and holes. Their two favourite tricks were cutting the planks 3-5cm too short and splitting them in two while hammering in nails, while the second grade wood was full of holes to begin with.
In Cambodia there are many large spotted geckos, (with the interesting latin name Gekko gecko, and in khmer named tokay to differentiate from the smaller tokung) which often live in the upper parts of buildings. Asians are terrified of them, mainly I think due to a fearsome reputation for biting and never letting go (the only way to get one off in one piece is to immerse it in water).
They are really very timid but have a disconcerting habit of falling near people, especially when disputes over territory arise between geckos. I was having a peaceful 'cook at the table' hotpot dinner in a Ban Lung restaurant when one dropped into the vegies; the local with me screamed the place down. I had been living fairly peacefully with three in the house, but with the onset of the monsoon and their breeding season I was surrounded by a nightly chorus of their very strident series of calls. With the walls lined, they were no longer constrained to the small gaps behind pillars and tended to camp inside the wall two feet from my head, where the all night calling and scratching about gave me no hope of sleep. After weeks of this I managed to trap them outside and plug all the larger gaps with cardboard. Being territorial they are not amused, and there has been the odd scuffle in the lounge and toilet.
The water tank poised atop my bathroom has filled a couple of times (either because it rained a heck of a lot or because someone put the pump in the well on and forgot it) and as they've made no provision for an overflow, it floods into my kitchen and what are aptly described 'wet areas'. It gets exciting when you later absently turn a light on, as you get nice cascades of sparks and lots of noise. Usually a guest does this. I've showered and … whatever in the dark for weeks now. I think one flood happened while I was away and the water sat for a time; when I got back the food cupboard wouldn't open and a lot of food was mouldy or stale. Each trip I lug a large sports bag full of supermarket treasures back from Phnom Penh an eke it over the months, I don't like having to throw it out! A stick of French sausage with a camembert-like coating of mould was stored in my fridge, and the mould infested everything, I had to grit my teeth and dump a lot of ham and cheese.
I had another surprise visit from my French connection, and was persuaded to join her on the trip to Phnom Penh by promising myself a visit to the doctor to try and sort the stomach out. I had been feeling off colour and over a couple of days noticed bunches of "bites" around my wrists and ankles, but during the journey down my whole body turned a blotchy red, a sign of bleeding capillaries and a classical symptom of Dengue Fever (and HIV incidentally). Oh well, I was going to the doc anyway. I stayed in Phnom Penh for 12 days, when the blood tests finally yielded a positive result for Dengue, then got a minibus back home, there to collapse for another couple of weeks. Now I am gradually building strength for full days at work but a 'sick headache' lingers and my concentration is still pretty dodgy.
An Australian Youth Ambassador volunteer in town got malaria that week, took the tablets OK but after five days had a soaring fever; turns out she had dengue as well, and she ended up evac'd to a hospital in Bangkok.
Last month I was reading Lincoln Hall's account of being left for dead on Everest, and in the middle of the book I found myself watching a new National Geographic series about Everest .. and here were a bunch of the people I was reading about, there in technicolour. This week I started reading Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan which includes in its narrative a pretty good potted history of the war on terror into which his characters are woven. Twice I have found myself reading an account of a particular raid in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone, and within 24 hours turning on the TV and seeing actual footage of the incident (along with another view of the event), in a program called Situation Critical. I don't know if this is a comment on the wonders of technology and a shrinking world, or on the weirdness of life.
On the subject of TV - since getting beaten up I've got a bit post-traumatic, and so try and avoid some sights, and its amazing how many TV programs have torture scenes in them - you really notice once you start changing channels to avoid them. The Thais (who provide much of our cable) have an interesting take on this: if there is any cigarette being smoked, bare 'part' on display or any weapon pointed at anyone (even a cocked finger!) it is pixelated out … but their nightly news is peppered with lingering shots of blood draining from limp corpses at accident and murder scenes. I guess the libel defence works - if its true its OK.
As I write they are spraying tar to underseal the road in front of the office, yes, you read right .. the first 100 metres of legendary Highway 78 is in the first stage of getting a black top! They are into year 3 of the project though, the town is still a mess and there is an open culvert blocking our front gate. They first dug this one Sunday, with all our vehicles parked inside; it took some messing about with planks to get them out and three weeks to get any back in (via a half block of footpath).
I'll go and rest my headache .. keep well,
Tony
Its been a long time between letters, either I've been too sick to think them up, my computer has been too sick to type on, my email has been inaccessible, or the 'net has been too sick to carry messages. My Australian isp shut down my account, killing off my website and my decade old email address. Soon after, my hard drive failed, leaving me lots of messing around to get repairs in Phnom Penh, rebuild and retrieve data.
Back in April we had Khmer (Chinese) New Year and a week of holidays. Visitors dropped in from France and I took a break, ducking back into Phnom Penh office to interview job applicants in the middle. We spent the first 5 days at a 'pool resort hotel' just out of the semi deserted capital. There are a few of these places catering to day-trippers from town as well as guests. This one is nicely laid out with bungalows scattered in tropical gardens around 2 pools and - being French run - the food is good and the value excellent.
On the last morning we all woke early and with nothing pressing but breakfast were all still lazing in bed pretending to sleep at 7am. I heard a few loud cracks and my first thought was fireworks (at this time? idiots) but it developed into a very loud cracking which I thought was a very close thunderclap. However it seemed to be getting closer, lightning doesn't do that so I started to look up, but my rising head was met by the falling ceiling as the roof came down. After a short blank and settling of debris I looked through some gaps in the wreckage and worked out that a huge tree had demolished the bungalow. Having calmed the screaming and checked that there were no serious injuries, I dug myself out and then lifted the wreckage off the others. By the time stunned bystanders arrived we were standing in the garden forlornly pondering the state of our room and baggage.
We picked up a few scratches and bruises, a small discount on our bill, and a lingering suspicion of tall trees. It proved to be the tree itself that caused it all, but I find now that thunderstorms make me edgy, where previously I enjoyed them. We have had a lot of storms up here since April so that's a lot of edgy. In fact, with last year's monsoon so late and this year's very early, in 10 months I've had two 'wets'.
After a shower and feed, and a few hours cleaning luggage, we took a bus to Sihanoukville and the beach. When we arrived it was buzzing, people on NY holidays filled the place, but by Monday the town had emptied; we sat in a great restaurant on the beach overlooking the bay with fresh barbecue and live music .. and only three of us in the place. Its how rich people must feel when they live in castles I guess, only warmer.
My visitors went home and so did I, back to an office in flux as the manager had resigned and a new British-Kenyan-Indian technical advisor joined us. We found a new Program Manager in Alex, a Filipino with long experience in Cambodia. I was on the selection panel and had worried that there may be no suitable applicants, but it turned out that we had a choice of possibles. This hasn't been the case with some of the other jobs we've tried to fill.
An old pal from Melbourne (and the Oxfam India trip) passed through Ratanakiri and stayed for a couple of days .. my first house guest! He was on a birding trip for 4 months in half a dozen countries, and managed his target of spotting his 1000th species somewhere in China. I have been suffering from the isolation as the email and Skype get worse, and it is great to be able to sit and chat for hours on end. The worst thing about this lifestyle is the inability to have a gab with a mate regularly. In my Red Cross training I saw how valuable 'debriefing' is after incidents, but its also a normal part of daily life, getting stuff off your chest .. another thing you don't notice happens until its not there.
My landlord decided to do some home improvements, not during any of the seven weeks I've spent away but late into the evenings on a normal working week when I came home desperate for rest and got a building site instead. The house is made mainly of unlined timber frame clad in planks, and for some reason he decided to plank the inside of the main bedroom. In addition to having my house full of people without warning, the obvious disruption and the massive damage the builders did to everything that got in their way, I was also appalled at the poor work they were doing. In this part of the world, any small cavity is an obvious home for all kinds of squatters (my last boss had endless dead-rat-rotting-in-the-wall fun while another Aussie is currently looking for a new home as she can no longer stand sharing with the 300 bats in the walls and ceilings) and here they were creating a multi story apartment complex for vermin, full of big inviting gaps and holes. Their two favourite tricks were cutting the planks 3-5cm too short and splitting them in two while hammering in nails, while the second grade wood was full of holes to begin with.
In Cambodia there are many large spotted geckos, (with the interesting latin name Gekko gecko, and in khmer named tokay to differentiate from the smaller tokung) which often live in the upper parts of buildings. Asians are terrified of them, mainly I think due to a fearsome reputation for biting and never letting go (the only way to get one off in one piece is to immerse it in water).
They are really very timid but have a disconcerting habit of falling near people, especially when disputes over territory arise between geckos. I was having a peaceful 'cook at the table' hotpot dinner in a Ban Lung restaurant when one dropped into the vegies; the local with me screamed the place down. I had been living fairly peacefully with three in the house, but with the onset of the monsoon and their breeding season I was surrounded by a nightly chorus of their very strident series of calls. With the walls lined, they were no longer constrained to the small gaps behind pillars and tended to camp inside the wall two feet from my head, where the all night calling and scratching about gave me no hope of sleep. After weeks of this I managed to trap them outside and plug all the larger gaps with cardboard. Being territorial they are not amused, and there has been the odd scuffle in the lounge and toilet.
The water tank poised atop my bathroom has filled a couple of times (either because it rained a heck of a lot or because someone put the pump in the well on and forgot it) and as they've made no provision for an overflow, it floods into my kitchen and what are aptly described 'wet areas'. It gets exciting when you later absently turn a light on, as you get nice cascades of sparks and lots of noise. Usually a guest does this. I've showered and … whatever in the dark for weeks now. I think one flood happened while I was away and the water sat for a time; when I got back the food cupboard wouldn't open and a lot of food was mouldy or stale. Each trip I lug a large sports bag full of supermarket treasures back from Phnom Penh an eke it over the months, I don't like having to throw it out! A stick of French sausage with a camembert-like coating of mould was stored in my fridge, and the mould infested everything, I had to grit my teeth and dump a lot of ham and cheese.
I had another surprise visit from my French connection, and was persuaded to join her on the trip to Phnom Penh by promising myself a visit to the doctor to try and sort the stomach out. I had been feeling off colour and over a couple of days noticed bunches of "bites" around my wrists and ankles, but during the journey down my whole body turned a blotchy red, a sign of bleeding capillaries and a classical symptom of Dengue Fever (and HIV incidentally). Oh well, I was going to the doc anyway. I stayed in Phnom Penh for 12 days, when the blood tests finally yielded a positive result for Dengue, then got a minibus back home, there to collapse for another couple of weeks. Now I am gradually building strength for full days at work but a 'sick headache' lingers and my concentration is still pretty dodgy.
An Australian Youth Ambassador volunteer in town got malaria that week, took the tablets OK but after five days had a soaring fever; turns out she had dengue as well, and she ended up evac'd to a hospital in Bangkok.
Last month I was reading Lincoln Hall's account of being left for dead on Everest, and in the middle of the book I found myself watching a new National Geographic series about Everest .. and here were a bunch of the people I was reading about, there in technicolour. This week I started reading Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan which includes in its narrative a pretty good potted history of the war on terror into which his characters are woven. Twice I have found myself reading an account of a particular raid in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone, and within 24 hours turning on the TV and seeing actual footage of the incident (along with another view of the event), in a program called Situation Critical. I don't know if this is a comment on the wonders of technology and a shrinking world, or on the weirdness of life.
On the subject of TV - since getting beaten up I've got a bit post-traumatic, and so try and avoid some sights, and its amazing how many TV programs have torture scenes in them - you really notice once you start changing channels to avoid them. The Thais (who provide much of our cable) have an interesting take on this: if there is any cigarette being smoked, bare 'part' on display or any weapon pointed at anyone (even a cocked finger!) it is pixelated out … but their nightly news is peppered with lingering shots of blood draining from limp corpses at accident and murder scenes. I guess the libel defence works - if its true its OK.
As I write they are spraying tar to underseal the road in front of the office, yes, you read right .. the first 100 metres of legendary Highway 78 is in the first stage of getting a black top! They are into year 3 of the project though, the town is still a mess and there is an open culvert blocking our front gate. They first dug this one Sunday, with all our vehicles parked inside; it took some messing about with planks to get them out and three weeks to get any back in (via a half block of footpath).
I'll go and rest my headache .. keep well,
Tony
About Geckos: http://www.rikitikitavi-kampot.com/TokayGecko.html
March 8, 2009
Part 6 - Dust dust dust
I’ve not been much of a correspondent, what with health and internet problems. My service provider here is so unreliable that many email servers refuse to accept mail from it. And in a spam laden world, no server will send this to you all at once, so I need to send a few copies.
Stomach problems are pretty routine, but some very strange sensations turned out to be a parasite problem. Without easy diagnostic facilities to hand, I used the ‘catch - all’ treatment, which catches all but the type I had, so a second round was needed. Fortunately, the usual case with these wee critters is that they live mostly harmlessly in humans, and do all there tissue burrowing, cyst forming and other nasty stuff to the other hosts in their life cycle, like pigs, cows and fish. I’ve also had a long running respiratory thing which seems to have migrated to my ears, swelling them internally and messing with my hearing and more recently balance. Of course, when I got to see the Australian Embassy doctor in Phnom Penh all was quiet.
My landlords bought a new mattress when I moved in .. after 4 nights there was a clear deep indentation from my body - giving a fair indication of quality! I an pretty tolerant of dodgy beds, but the sagging combines with a poor range of available pillows to put pressure on my ears, so I tend to wake up numb and deaf on one side.
I’ve begun presenting a regular series of small group lectures on management topics to the Team Leaders; I’ve had to dust off some old skills but since everything here has to be dusted off before use noone seems to notice. The nicest bit of feedback I’ve had was from one who said he studied all this at university, but never understood it ‘til now.
Getting them to turn up can be a challenge, and I can get tetchy after waiting a week for two hours of their time and five of six don’t bother showing up .. last week I corralled them in time to start 23 minutes late, and felt the need to run over the ‘ground rules’. Those of you who attend workshops will be aware of this sort of participatory methods gone mad, where you sit as a group and decide what the rules are for your meeting, whether phones must be off or on silent, how many toilet breaks you are allowed, blah blah. Usually this and ‘getting to know you’ takes up the first 20% of any course. I told the guys “you’ve done enough of these to know what to do, turn up on time, kill your phone, don’t chat amongst yourselves, we are 23 minutes late for a 2 hour session, let’s get on”. One of them wanted to debate the rules for phones, can it be on, but on silent, or must… I replied that he could interpret the rules how he liked, just don’t disturb me and everyone else. Well, you could have heard a 10 tonne steamroller drop a kilometre away. Actually, I did. Happens all the time. Not content with looking shocked, he complained to the boss later about my methods. This week all those available turned up 20 minutes early! I’ve warned them if they don’t use my services other provinces will.
Inflation had been rising here, around 25% in the first half of 2008; not quite the 40,000,000% of Zim, but enough to bite. With the drop in oil prices it has stabilised I think. Worse though is last year’s freefall in the Aussie dollar, which cut any money I withdraw by a third, and in 4 months cost me an amount I could have used to fully furnish a house. Timber has been rising severely in price, it used to be really cheap, and I’ve been looking around for something I can afford .. as I write I am wedged against a small coffee table perched atop two wooden stool as a makeshift desk, and I’m tired of it.
There’s a small industry here making mostly very heavy chunky timber tables and chairs, much of it from illegally logged timber. There was a crackdown a while back and a lot of backyard carpenters were shut down and fined, which puts a bunch of locals out of work but does nothing to stem the forest destruction, it just ensures it is all exported and enriches the elite rather than a bit staying in the country providing heirlooms and livelihoods. It has contributed to a quintupling of the price of pieces once very affordable; cost and taste encourage me to forage in Phnom Penh for light wooden or cane gear instead. Transporting it up in good condition is a problem. I’ve finally got onto a bloke who knows a bloke who seems to know what I want (I gave photos) and has given a reasonable quote. Though .. I requested a table 180 x 100 cm, and my go-between casually mentioned that the carpenter would make it 80 wide as it would look better. ‘80 is very narrow for a dining table’ quoth I. ‘Oh, you want a dining table!’ Well, yes, and desk, guest bed for drunks, whatever, just make what I drew… That’s the point of drawings and measurements and photos isn’t it? Fingers crossed.
A while back I threw a house warming party. I was fairly low key in inviting people and on the night I managed a good racial mix and barely had to toss out a single drunk. I got Sal to cook up some curry and spring rolls but my landlady passed on that it is quite unnecessary - in future if I need a heap of food just tell her and she’ll do it. Her husband said he wanted to give me food but wasn’t sure if I could eat it, I said khmer food is fine. A couple of days later the wife brought up some sweet potato type vegetable, the sort of thing you may well miss out on if you don’t have local people to guide you. Since then someone bobs up occasionally with a plate, especially if I have just come in from Phnom Penh. If I haven’t bolted the door they will just walk in which can be disconcerting (one needn’t wear much in the warmer months, which is most of them) - they do sort of announce themselves, but this is not easily distinguishable from the background racket that is usual around meal times.
Getting ready, I began to practice the ‘Heath Robinson’ art of moto transport, buzzing about town with coolers, mats and bags of ice strapped and balanced about the ‘bike. These little motos are very practical, and tootling along with 4 cartons of beer between your legs is pretty effortless, it’s the loading and unloading that’s tricky. As soon as you need to put your legs down you lose control of the forward cargo, and when its heavy it can get away from you. You lose a bit of turning circle too and need to plan ahead to avoid the necessity of sudden sharp turns. I have a couple of webbing straps (thanks Onsy) which are absolutely great for rear loading; otherwise you need a passenger to hold it on.
The only guest that caused a bit of carnage was a new British volunteer that I didn’t really know who took up the implied invitation ( - if you’re white and there’s a party feel free). That was fine, I didn’t even mind the broken glass, but 2 weeks later she had her own housewarming with lots of little written invitations, and didn’t invite me. Kind of symbolic of my relations with the bulk of the expats in town.
At another party I managed to kick something in the dark - it was right in the middle of the driveway - and pretty much cut my big toe in half, so I had a few weeks of not being very mobile, and feeling queasy for a day every time I dressed the gruesome wound. For a while the end looked like it belonged in the Egypt Room at the British Museum, but now the dead black mummy bit has dropped off and its pretty much ‘good as old’.
I have one of the ‘Rabbit’ ceramic water filters that are commonly given to villagers in Cambodia with the help of Red Cross and groups like HU. We have been working on a water and sanitation proposal with a consultant and we were chatting about how a big well-sinking project in Bangladesh gave many people access to clean water, but altered the soil chemistry leading to arsenic dissolving and contaminating the water, with a few cases of poisoning the result. (Some people just can’t win.) He pointed out that the Rabbit filters leach arsenic too, something the manufacturers admit. Comforting. Still, it was the first permanent cure for malaria, and may attack tumours, so its not all bad.
I have had a couple more trips to Phnom Penh to conduct interviews - recruitment is a major and difficult task, and we have a stack of vacancies. There is a great tendency for people to fail to turn up, both at interviews and, once appointed, at work. Cambodians are the main culprits but an Australian jerked us around pretty badly recently too, really annoying as we missed our other top choice due to the wasted time. One of the interviews we attempted was in Nepal; put their phone system in contact with ours and you are not going to get a conversation worth a dime! We ended up on Yahoo chat!
One trip was hard on our Nissan - going down we hit a bus (not very hard) and coming back a cow hit us. For the return I was given the wheel; having not driven for half a year and not driven a left hand drive for 20 years, I found PP’s traffic and the narrow clogged highway out a fair challenge. After a few hours we turned onto a nice clear road, and just got settled when a cow bolted onto the road - pretty unusual behaviour in these parts where man and beast take a measured approach to most things. I could avoid it OK, but my options were limited when a second one appeared, I didn’t hit it but it hit us, putting a couple of minor dents in the back door. After 9 hours of concentration I was pretty knackered.
As I write the house is back to vibrating in gut churning fashion, another chapter in the epic saga of the new road. They seem to do most of the work on weekends for some reason. If possible, it is making the dust even worse; it is like living 20 yards from the old Stuart Highway. Last night we had an unseasonal thunderstorm which has settled the dust nicely for a while, but my house is already grotty underfoot, having not been mopped throughout in the last 48 hours.
Hope this finds you well,
Tony
Stomach problems are pretty routine, but some very strange sensations turned out to be a parasite problem. Without easy diagnostic facilities to hand, I used the ‘catch - all’ treatment, which catches all but the type I had, so a second round was needed. Fortunately, the usual case with these wee critters is that they live mostly harmlessly in humans, and do all there tissue burrowing, cyst forming and other nasty stuff to the other hosts in their life cycle, like pigs, cows and fish. I’ve also had a long running respiratory thing which seems to have migrated to my ears, swelling them internally and messing with my hearing and more recently balance. Of course, when I got to see the Australian Embassy doctor in Phnom Penh all was quiet.
My landlords bought a new mattress when I moved in .. after 4 nights there was a clear deep indentation from my body - giving a fair indication of quality! I an pretty tolerant of dodgy beds, but the sagging combines with a poor range of available pillows to put pressure on my ears, so I tend to wake up numb and deaf on one side.
I’ve begun presenting a regular series of small group lectures on management topics to the Team Leaders; I’ve had to dust off some old skills but since everything here has to be dusted off before use noone seems to notice. The nicest bit of feedback I’ve had was from one who said he studied all this at university, but never understood it ‘til now.
Getting them to turn up can be a challenge, and I can get tetchy after waiting a week for two hours of their time and five of six don’t bother showing up .. last week I corralled them in time to start 23 minutes late, and felt the need to run over the ‘ground rules’. Those of you who attend workshops will be aware of this sort of participatory methods gone mad, where you sit as a group and decide what the rules are for your meeting, whether phones must be off or on silent, how many toilet breaks you are allowed, blah blah. Usually this and ‘getting to know you’ takes up the first 20% of any course. I told the guys “you’ve done enough of these to know what to do, turn up on time, kill your phone, don’t chat amongst yourselves, we are 23 minutes late for a 2 hour session, let’s get on”. One of them wanted to debate the rules for phones, can it be on, but on silent, or must… I replied that he could interpret the rules how he liked, just don’t disturb me and everyone else. Well, you could have heard a 10 tonne steamroller drop a kilometre away. Actually, I did. Happens all the time. Not content with looking shocked, he complained to the boss later about my methods. This week all those available turned up 20 minutes early! I’ve warned them if they don’t use my services other provinces will.
Inflation had been rising here, around 25% in the first half of 2008; not quite the 40,000,000% of Zim, but enough to bite. With the drop in oil prices it has stabilised I think. Worse though is last year’s freefall in the Aussie dollar, which cut any money I withdraw by a third, and in 4 months cost me an amount I could have used to fully furnish a house. Timber has been rising severely in price, it used to be really cheap, and I’ve been looking around for something I can afford .. as I write I am wedged against a small coffee table perched atop two wooden stool as a makeshift desk, and I’m tired of it.
There’s a small industry here making mostly very heavy chunky timber tables and chairs, much of it from illegally logged timber. There was a crackdown a while back and a lot of backyard carpenters were shut down and fined, which puts a bunch of locals out of work but does nothing to stem the forest destruction, it just ensures it is all exported and enriches the elite rather than a bit staying in the country providing heirlooms and livelihoods. It has contributed to a quintupling of the price of pieces once very affordable; cost and taste encourage me to forage in Phnom Penh for light wooden or cane gear instead. Transporting it up in good condition is a problem. I’ve finally got onto a bloke who knows a bloke who seems to know what I want (I gave photos) and has given a reasonable quote. Though .. I requested a table 180 x 100 cm, and my go-between casually mentioned that the carpenter would make it 80 wide as it would look better. ‘80 is very narrow for a dining table’ quoth I. ‘Oh, you want a dining table!’ Well, yes, and desk, guest bed for drunks, whatever, just make what I drew… That’s the point of drawings and measurements and photos isn’t it? Fingers crossed.
A while back I threw a house warming party. I was fairly low key in inviting people and on the night I managed a good racial mix and barely had to toss out a single drunk. I got Sal to cook up some curry and spring rolls but my landlady passed on that it is quite unnecessary - in future if I need a heap of food just tell her and she’ll do it. Her husband said he wanted to give me food but wasn’t sure if I could eat it, I said khmer food is fine. A couple of days later the wife brought up some sweet potato type vegetable, the sort of thing you may well miss out on if you don’t have local people to guide you. Since then someone bobs up occasionally with a plate, especially if I have just come in from Phnom Penh. If I haven’t bolted the door they will just walk in which can be disconcerting (one needn’t wear much in the warmer months, which is most of them) - they do sort of announce themselves, but this is not easily distinguishable from the background racket that is usual around meal times.
Getting ready, I began to practice the ‘Heath Robinson’ art of moto transport, buzzing about town with coolers, mats and bags of ice strapped and balanced about the ‘bike. These little motos are very practical, and tootling along with 4 cartons of beer between your legs is pretty effortless, it’s the loading and unloading that’s tricky. As soon as you need to put your legs down you lose control of the forward cargo, and when its heavy it can get away from you. You lose a bit of turning circle too and need to plan ahead to avoid the necessity of sudden sharp turns. I have a couple of webbing straps (thanks Onsy) which are absolutely great for rear loading; otherwise you need a passenger to hold it on.
The only guest that caused a bit of carnage was a new British volunteer that I didn’t really know who took up the implied invitation ( - if you’re white and there’s a party feel free). That was fine, I didn’t even mind the broken glass, but 2 weeks later she had her own housewarming with lots of little written invitations, and didn’t invite me. Kind of symbolic of my relations with the bulk of the expats in town.
At another party I managed to kick something in the dark - it was right in the middle of the driveway - and pretty much cut my big toe in half, so I had a few weeks of not being very mobile, and feeling queasy for a day every time I dressed the gruesome wound. For a while the end looked like it belonged in the Egypt Room at the British Museum, but now the dead black mummy bit has dropped off and its pretty much ‘good as old’.
I have one of the ‘Rabbit’ ceramic water filters that are commonly given to villagers in Cambodia with the help of Red Cross and groups like HU. We have been working on a water and sanitation proposal with a consultant and we were chatting about how a big well-sinking project in Bangladesh gave many people access to clean water, but altered the soil chemistry leading to arsenic dissolving and contaminating the water, with a few cases of poisoning the result. (Some people just can’t win.) He pointed out that the Rabbit filters leach arsenic too, something the manufacturers admit. Comforting. Still, it was the first permanent cure for malaria, and may attack tumours, so its not all bad.
I have had a couple more trips to Phnom Penh to conduct interviews - recruitment is a major and difficult task, and we have a stack of vacancies. There is a great tendency for people to fail to turn up, both at interviews and, once appointed, at work. Cambodians are the main culprits but an Australian jerked us around pretty badly recently too, really annoying as we missed our other top choice due to the wasted time. One of the interviews we attempted was in Nepal; put their phone system in contact with ours and you are not going to get a conversation worth a dime! We ended up on Yahoo chat!
One trip was hard on our Nissan - going down we hit a bus (not very hard) and coming back a cow hit us. For the return I was given the wheel; having not driven for half a year and not driven a left hand drive for 20 years, I found PP’s traffic and the narrow clogged highway out a fair challenge. After a few hours we turned onto a nice clear road, and just got settled when a cow bolted onto the road - pretty unusual behaviour in these parts where man and beast take a measured approach to most things. I could avoid it OK, but my options were limited when a second one appeared, I didn’t hit it but it hit us, putting a couple of minor dents in the back door. After 9 hours of concentration I was pretty knackered.
As I write the house is back to vibrating in gut churning fashion, another chapter in the epic saga of the new road. They seem to do most of the work on weekends for some reason. If possible, it is making the dust even worse; it is like living 20 yards from the old Stuart Highway. Last night we had an unseasonal thunderstorm which has settled the dust nicely for a while, but my house is already grotty underfoot, having not been mopped throughout in the last 48 hours.
Hope this finds you well,
Tony
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