Coming off the back of a very busy couple of years running a large, complex project i have found it interesting and refreshing how laid back everyone is here, in spite of the apparent chaos on the roads...Lets star with professional
working hours in Cambodian offices. I was advised that working hours are from
7.30am to 12 midday and then 1.30pm to 5.30pm. I duly attended and left at
these times during the first week. What quickly became apparent is that the
working hours here are more likely 8am ish through till about 11.30am and then
around 2pm ish through till about 4.30-5pm. I’m thinking that it’s no wonder we
get a lot done at home, I’m generally working at least 15 hours more a week in
Brisbane than staff here. And I’m busy that whole time, the ‘never get to the
end of the list’ feeling. They are not really busy by our standards. Maybe busy
is a western construct, why do we think we need to be busy at work and often
feel guilty if we’re not? What purpose does it achieve? How does it make our
workplace and our own lives better if we are constantly busy? There is probably
a PHD in that but another time, have to finish my Masters first.
I am
sitting in a room with six other workmates and our desks make me feel like
1950’s Russia. They are all metal with a glass top and
all a very WWII camouflage green colour. Every time you bump your chair against them they rattle and bang away in a very metallic way.
I am sitting with the various program
managers, the leaders of each of the key programs Plan International runs in this part of
the country. They include: childrens and womens health and nutrition program; childhood
education from pre-school to high school; child protection and safety; school feeding program; and water, sanitation and
health programs. They constantly have to go and visit staff and volunteers
working in the field running these programs so they spend a lot of time riding
their bikes from one part of town to the other or riding out of Siem Reap to
nearby villages which might be 10km or 20km away. Sometimes they have to go to more remote places
and they will take their laptop and ride 80km on the Plan scooters and stay
overnight in the village. No work cars here!
Last
Thursday I got picked up at 7am by a Plan vehicle with 3 staff and we drove
90km north west of Siem Reap on reasonably good roads apart from the last 5km
which was bumpy dirt to a small village that is about to get a new school
funded by Plan via a Japanese food company donor. The construction bids or
tenders closed last Wednesday and Plan staff didn’t open the five envelopes
that were submitted. Instead we took them with us to the village community
council building
and ran a two hour workshop with representatives from the government regional
education team, village representatives, two senior school children, and the
village commune chief.
All up there were 12 of them and 6 Plan staff. They ran
a powerpoint presentation showing the community group and the rest of the the process of
tendering and how they worked out which builders to send the documentation to
and ask for pricing. They one by one they opened each envelope, someone read
out the total quote and they wrote it on the board. There were two prices that fitted within
the previously set budget so they chose the lower offer.
By
doing it this way it shows a very transparent and fair bidding process, showing
the village leaders that projects can be undertaken without corruption and
nepotism which are still both rampant in Cambodia. The commune chief and local
education minister were very happy with the process and thanked Plan for
showing them how it all works and including them in the process. Plan hand over
the building when complete to this same community council so they want them to
take ownership of the process early on. It was really great to see and was
fascinating to see a very similar procurement process to Qld Government but
undertaken on a much different scale with stakeholders who are very new to
ideas of fairness and compassion when it comes to spending large sums of money.
The new school building which will be four simple concrete spaces with windows
and a long verandah along one side will cost USD60,000. Something funny, I
asked my boss where the detail was on the drawings were for the lighting and
power. He looked at me strangely and said, ‘we don’t need power or lights in
schools, they use chalkboards and school finishes before dark’. Makes sense I guess! Something else Plan
always ensure is constructed as part of the school building is a ramp up to the
verandah. Buildings are always built about 300-500mm plus above ground level to
prevent localised flooding during wet season, usually about 4 steps above the
ground. This prevent disabled kids from easily getting into the building so
Plan ensure all their buildings, whether health clinics or school buildings
always have ramps built into them. I expect it to look very similar to this
image I found online.
My
next biggest cultural challenge is traffic and tackling it on my electric
scooter, which by the way was a great idea, freedom, independence and makes me
feel like a true expat! I make sure I wave the key around as I leave shops or
cafés so the hoard of guys hanging around don’t all yell out asking if I need
transport!
Traffic Rules
First rule – avoid everything.
Second rule – the smaller the object on the road
the greater the responsibility to avoid bigger objects. Except for dogs who
have their own rule and that is to nonchalantly wander around along the edges
of the roads or lay down close to the edge and assume that all traffic will go
around them, which it does.
Third rule – it seems very important to never
actually stop your vehicle, particularly if you are riding a motorbike but all
vehicles try hard with this rule. Stopping appears to throw a bit of a spanner
in the works of the generally free flowing chaos that is peak hour and shows
weakness of spirit. It’s like a dance, you all come slowly up to the bigger
intersections and roundabouts and all lanes of traffic gracefully slide around
and past each other without anyone having to come to a complete stop. When I
say gracefully I mean with lots of noise, very near misses, breaking hard,
talking on phones whilst riding one handed, parents riding bikes with two or
three little kids in school uniforms and no helmets crammed behind them and
kids slowly riding bicycles through said intersection without looking once at
where the traffic is going and just assuming that everyone will go around them,
which they do. All pretty mundane really…..
Fourth rule – its best to have at least three
people on each bike, one to drive, one to carry whatever it is you are
carrying, from speakers, to mirrors, to boxes, to timber, to long metal poles
etc and the last person is the one who sticks their arm out signifying which
way they are turning and if they need to cross over to turn into a street the guy squeezed on the back
waves his arm wildly up and down to let cars and other bikes know they intend to cut across a lane.
Not sure why they don’t use their blinkers, but I guess if you have a third
person you may as well make use of them.
Observations
at 23km per hour – In the afternoon on the way home from work every dog is out
and about, wandering up and down along the front of its territory in the dusty
road verge, trucks, bikes and cars roaring past a few metres from their noses.
They are all watching what’s happening, checking out the scene and the other
dogs nearby. I kid you not, every 20m the whole way home, (1.8km) there is a
dog or two to be seen on both sides of the road. Once it hits about 4.30pm and
the air is cooling down and the sun has dropped behind the horizon its social
time! But when I ride home for lunch at 12pm its really, really hot and humid
and the traffic is less and no animals to be seen. They are off sleeping in the
coolest spot they can find. I’ve watched a few dogs crossing the busy roads,
they walk right up to the edge and wait for a bit of a break and then put their
head down and start to trot across, assuming that traffic coming in either
direction will be kind and go around, which is what they do. Not many dogs
cross the road mind you, I think they grow up knowing their little piece of
territory and only the very big and bravest dogs take on the traffic.
Other
random observations: 15 bicycles stacked up in the back of the ute, more stacked on the
tailgate, couldn’t count those but suspect another 8-10. Guy at work told me
that he has seen quite a few more than that stacked up as well. I also saw a
ute yesterday carrying 8 double mattresses piled on top of one another. 
On our
field trip I also saw a fishing trap on the ground near the community council
building
Apparently many village kids are taught how to make and repair them and its
their job to drop them into a local river, creek or irrigation channel at night
and then go and pick them up before school and bring whatever is found inside
to parents for cooking up for lunch or dinner. Sometimes small fish, sometimes
little crabs I was told.
Just
to finish on a foodie note, last Friday afternoon I got called downstairs into
the chatty womens office, (I talk to them every day and they are the ones that
took me out to dinner the first week) and they showed me bags of goodies they
had just bought from a nearby food stall to share amongst themselves as an
afternoon snack. Now I would usually expect that to involve chocolate or cake
but no, this was a bag of snails, a bag of small soft shelled crabs and shrimp
that were eaten whole, and a bag of fried roosters legs and feet….They were all
standing around and eating and chatting and telling me you try, you try! I had
a go of the snails, you were given a tooth pick and skewered the flesh inside
the snail and then slowly dragged it out, dipped it into the accompaniment that
goes with everything (ground up garlic, chilli and fish sauce) and ate a couple.
Got to say, they weren’t great, slightly gritty and very chewy, not sure why
they are so famous in France! Couldn’t bring myself to try the chickens foot,
but they were all tucking in and chewing and gnawing at the legs and bones and
skin until all that was left were a few little picked clean pieces of leg and
claw bones…it was so gross, but they treated it the same way we would treat
chocolate cake, any excuse for tasty food and a chat and a gossip before finishing
a week of work. I’m thinking now that I probably should have had those Hep A
and Typhoid shots afterall…oh well.
To
counter balance the above I had amazing Italian gelato yesterday, salted
caramel butter flavour and caramelised coffee flavour, was so good! The ice cream parlour is about 2.5m wide with 3 tiny tables out the front, run by an
Italian so it was the real deal! And I sat in a laneway with
this view….
I feel
like I’m living two very separate lives here, one as a semi-local and one as a
very rich tourist, it’s both intriguing and morbidly fascinating. Many of the places i eat at are local NGO's, started by foreigners but run and managed by locals now, training young people from outlying villages in hospitality, giving them opportunities to break away from their parents and grandparents extreme poverty. I often chat to them, they are always keen to improve their english conversational skills as well as their hospitality training. As with most Asian developing countries speaking and understanding English well can be a ticket out of poverty. So many more opportunities open up for them, particularly in a city like this where there are 200,000 locals and 2,000,000 tourists each year.
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