Well some of the big news this week is
that I am now the proud temporary owner of a motorbike! A pink one at that! Everyone gets Honda
Dreams which are black and seem to have a bigger seat that fits more people on
them. Mine is a Honda Scoopy and is definitely not as cool in the eyes of the
locals, but I’ve always disliked blending in
with everyone else. I didn’t actually pick the colour but when the hire
company turned up at the hotel with it I couldn’t say no.
Feels great to be
keeping up with all the other bikes on the roads and knowing I don’t have to
take it back to the shop every few days to swap over the battery. I’m led to
believe that as long as I wear a helmet
I should be within the law, (you would be surprised at the percentage of people
who don’t). Also, the ‘no hiring bikes to foreigners’ rule seems to have been
left behind more recently and as you don’t actually need a licence to ride the
size bike I’m on, (125cc), I’m comfortable that I’m ok as far as the police and
my travel insurance are concerned. It’s all still completely crazy on those
roads and each day I find myself laughing and doing a number of deep intakes of
breath, as well as mumbling under my breath about the silly antics of the young,
helmetless blokes who do some very risky behaviour on their bikes hoping that
the mature adults won’t hit them and will let them pass. I find more and more
that I have to leave behind my understanding of Australian road rules, they
just don’t work here. It’s not unusual to have a bike or two coming
towards you on the outside edge of your
lane! They do this because its easier to cross over and ride up the wrong side
when you get a break in traffic rather than have to stop in the middle of the
road and wait for a break in traffic at the actual road you want to turn into.
So you have to keep an eye on both sides
of your lane. And cars and bikes continually turn out of a side road directly
into your path, so I might be cruising along the main road at 40km per hour
which feels pretty fast here with all the craziness, then all of a sudden a
vehicle will just pull out and swing into the lane in front of you and if you
don’t jam on the brakes you would run up the back of them. It’s a completely
normal practice and they don’t seem to understand what give way means at all. What
most bikes do is swing out and around the car, either side, whether there is
traffic travelling towards them or not and don’t even slow down. So you can’t
just assume that people will give way to you, they kind of sometimes do, but
you can never guarantee it so you have to always ride presuming they won’t. It’s
completely nuts. And still seeing hilarious things on bikes. On Saturday I was
riding through a different part of town, kind of on the outskirts and a few
motorbikes came past each one carrying two huge pink pigs strapped lying across
the back of the bike with their little legs flopping about as the bikes bumped
over the bumps. I presume they were no longer alive, they didn’t appear so, and
I guess they have to get the pork delivered to markets or restaurants somehow,
it just looks so funny when they go past as at first glance it looks like a
couple of really fat ten year old western kids bouncing around….
I am feeling very much a local these
days, having breakfast in my little unit, jumping on the bike and travelling the few
kilometres to work with many other bikes and cars doing the same thing. I say a
cheery hello to my good mate the security guard at the main entrance to our
work compound and say hi to other people who work in the building. I know the names and family
background of the others in my own office, we chat about what we did on our
holidays, what we plan on doing on the weekend, what food we have eaten lately,
in fact pretty much all the same kinds of conversations I have with my
workmates in Brisbane. I’m planning a trip to the huge freshwater lake Tonle
Sap next weekend three or four other staff here. The lake is the largest in
South East Asia and is normally 2800sqkm and 1m deep but by the late wet
season, (right about now), has swelled to 15,000sqm and 8m deep, which is an
amazing transformation. Apparently the Mekong, which the lake drains into at
the southern end down at Phnom Penh becomes
so powerful with all the rain that it reverses direction and pushes water back
up into the lake. Hard to imagine. The interesting thing is that whole villages
live by and on the lake, rising and falling with the water, living on the land
during dry season and living as floating villages during the wet season,
130,000 people. With shops, pagodas, schools etc that float as well. And the
seafood that comes out of the lake contributes to feeding 50% of the population
of the whole country. Looking forward to checking it out.
One of those staff members that will
be going with us is 22 years old and works here part time as a sponsorship
interpreter. That means she spends all her time reading letters from western child sponsors
from Australia, Japan, Sweden, UK, US and many other countries and re-writing
them in Khmer so the kids who are the recipients can understand it. I hadn’t
every really thought about how that works, but its still done manually. So with
8,000 children being sponsored out of the Plan Siem Reap office and a promise
to the sponsors that they will receive an update and letter from the child at
least once a year it requires local Khmer staff to do their best to interpret
the English letter and pass it on to the child and then get the letter back
from the child in Khmer and interpret it back to English to send back to the
sponsor. Seems like a very labour intensive practice and I’m not sure that its
helping the child at the receiving end much. Tend to think its about making the
westerner feel like their money is going towards something positive and then
need that reassurance back from the sponsored family. I think a lot of people feel like they need to see some direct impact
of their money and from Plan’s point of view encouraging that feeling of family
connectedness encourages ongoing donations so they are not going to change the
structure. The Sponsorship team in head office is made up of around 10 people
who spend their whole time interpreting and re-writing, collating the stacks of
forms that come through the post from overseas, collating the stacks of
interpreted letters into piles ready to be taken out to the local villages and
handed to the particular child, delivering said letters and also collecting
updates from the child and their family to bring back to head office to turn
back to English to send onto the donor. I had a quick look through some of the
piles and piles of letters waiting to be done, (they were stacked up about 2ft
high on someone’s desk), and people draw pictures, stick on little things,
include photos etc. So Plan have to include the original English letter along
with the Khmer interpretation to ensure the kid gets to see what the sponsor
has included. And it’s a full time job for those field staff to get the letters out to the
various villages, take down information to provide an update to the sponsor,
and get a letter back from the child. As you can imagine it’s a complex, time
consuming thing to be doing. And the reason they do it is that it provides a
huge amount of money each year that goes directly to running many localised
projects targeting children’s health, wellbeing and education and maternal
health and early childhood nutrition. Plan work with local non-government
organisations to help them implement the projects at a local, village level. It
definitely makes a difference for those sceptical whether the money makes it to
those who need it most.
 | |
| Plan sponsored health clinic. Note the ramp to the left. |
Starting with pregnant women, they are given assistance
both from an education point of view and practical point of view with access to
Plan managed maternal health clinics where they can have their baby with a doctor or mid-wife present ensuring
the best chance for a healthy birth. Then the mother is given information on
breast-feeding and encouraged to come back for regular check-ups and
vaccinations for the baby. Then the young child is given opportunities to
attend free Plan constructed and managed pre-schools that encourage basic play,
learning numbers and letters etc, albeit at a very informal and basic level.
Parents are encouraged to send their young children to these pre-schools as a
way of giving them a good start ready for school, same as western countries.
Problem is that pre-school is not really respected yet and so teachers are
either local Khmer women who volunteer or are paid absolute pittance, (primary
teachers are also paid very poorly but at least they are paid). Plan try to
encourage the local commune council to put aside a small amount of their
government issued funding each year to pay the pre-school teacher but its
proving to be a constant battle as the Commune Council in each village only get
a very small contribution from government each year. Its like our local council
but without funding generated by collection of rates and masses of federal and
state grant funding, ie, nothing like our local council. They get maybe $20k
per year and that is to service local roads, power, water supply and maintain
buildings such as schools and community halls as well as pay local school and
pre-school staff. In other words its woefully inadequate and without NGO’s
tipping in extra funds, providing buildings and supporting pre-school staff
many of the poorest villages would only be marginally better off than they were
20 years ago. Many of them are in that exact situation. The difference between
the cities and villages is becoming greater, the wealth gap bigger.
Plan have built 80 pre-schools in the
Siem Reap local provinces over the past few years. There are government run pre-schools as
well but they only build one per commune whether there are 20 children under
five living there or 200. Plan’s aim is to have one pre-school per 30 children.
I believe UNICEF are also working hard to building and support additional
community preschools as well.
So back to the young person who works
here in the sponsorship team. She is only employed part time so the rest of her
time she is available as a tour guide for westerners, who book her services
through a few hotels she has links with. Another of the young women who works
in the sponsorship team and also has very good English works part time as well.
The rest of her time she works as a flight attendant with a newish airline in
Cambodia that does flights to Korea and China. She was telling me some absolute
horror stories about the Chinese tourists on the flights, how they have no idea
about basic expected behaviour on flights, constantly calling the flight attendants
over throughout the flight, getting up and down all the time and creating
massive lines waiting for toilets, standing up as the plane is coming in to
land, large tour groups arriving really late for the flights and holding up the
flight from leaving, being really rude to the flight attendants including
physically abusive and generally being pretty obnoxious. She said the best
flights are when half the plane is filled with Europeans as they were quiet,
polite and understood flying protocol. There is a general dislike and distrust
of Chinese tourists and investors here in Cambodia, likely well founded. They
may spend money to get here but once they do not a huge amount of it ends up in
the hands of the locals. They are rude to local staff in restaurants and
hotels, treating them extremely poorly, and they are transported around the
city in buses to Chinese owned restaurants and they stay in large hotels on the
outskirts of town, probably Chinese owned as well.
I imagine the Bacons and
Bron are nodding their heads about this as well seeing it occurring in Vietnam and
to a lesser extent East Timor. At the moment the Cambodian government is hungry
for their money, but I have a feeling there will be a point in time in future
where Cambodia realises they are not actually seeing the full benefit of
Chinese tourism and may start to push back, but that won’t be for a while.
There are a lot of very wealthy people in China and they are looking to spend
and invest their money. But the local Khmer people are not very happy about it,
they don’t believe it is going to be for the full benefit of their future
generations. Time will tell I guess.I would say probably 50% or more of
the tourists I see around town are either Chinese or Korean, when I was here in
2014 I think it was probably 80% European/western. So a very sudden and major
shift. Lots of local Khmer young people are learning Mandarin instead of
English so they can be Chinese tour guides. There is a brutal frankness about
Chinese tourists that shocks and surprises those cultures not used to it.
Cambodian’s are certainly not used to it.
Its school holidays here, they have
all of September and October off, probably because those are traditionally the
wettest months of the year I guess. The poorer countryside based children stay
home and play, work around the house or farm and generally get into mischief
where they can, the middle class and wealthier kids, (mostly based in the
larger cities of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap), go to summer schools where they
spend the morning learning in Khmer and the afternoon English, preferably from
native English speakers at a cost of around $100 per month (very expensive). A
couple of the project officers sitting here with me have kids going to school
over the holidays. I’m not sure if the kids ever get any proper holidays or
extended time off? Everything is about education here and improving their
chances of going to university and therefore improving their choices in life
and likelihood of earning a reasonable income in the future. Doesn’t sound like
fun for a typical western kid! No holidays!
Yesterday I was picked up by one of the staff
here and two others in her little car and we went for an adventure. Out of town
about 15 minutes, turning onto a very muddy dirt road and slowly bumping our
way along amongst the flooded fields with people sitting by the roadside
selling lotus in various forms for eating. The raw seeds pods still within the
plant itself, or
cooked and sold in a little bag (tasted like chickpeas).
Then we arrived at a
place in the middle of nowhere that had a series of little huts built out over
a large lake, Each hut, (more than 30 all up) had its own little bridge to gain
access and each group gets their own hut to use as a family or friends
gathering for lunch.
Waitresses and waiters zoom around on motorbikes taking orders, bringing
baskets of various drinks and a tub of ice cubes, cutlery baskets and then the
food all set out in baskets lined with palm or banana leaf. We ordered a whole
bbq chicken, which at $15 I thought was extremely expensive considering this
was a Khmer place and not a tourist or western place. It was also only about
our version of a scrawny size 10, tasty but tough, along with various salad
foods, rice, a seafood and salad dish.
The total bill including drinks was $25 which
was cheap considering all the food and drinks we had. Interesting that chicken
is such an expensive dish, I guess its not as plentiful around there as
seafood. It was all very relaxing and coolish, my friends son convinced them to
hire a fishing rod and a little bag of fish food pellets and he spent lots of
time standing there dangling the bamboo stick over the side watching tiny fish
come along and nibble the fish pellet down to nothing. 
The place was full when we arrived, I think
there were probably 3 or 4 empty huts out of more than 30, so its obviously a
popular place for local family groups.
Then we went for a cruise back through
town, out the other side and into the Angkor temple complex which is a series
of roads that criss cross the whole area (25sq km) with amazing temple
complexes all the way throughout. It was around 4pm when we arrived there and
the whole area was teeming with locals on bikes, on the grass on the side of
the road, sitting and lying in hammocks and generally relaxing again with
family and friends. There were also loads
of tourists still getting around from one temple to the other either by bike,
tuk tuk or small bus. We went to a couple of temples but it started raining so
we didn’t stick around.
Its free for Khmer to
visit this large, significant, UNESCO heritage listed complex of many temples, which
is great and its extremely popular but not free for Barang’s (foreigners).
$37USD for a one day pass, $62 for 3 days and $72 for 7 days. I got a 3 day
pass and will use up the other two days this weekend.
It absolutely pelted down last night for a few hours, like a really heavy tropical downpour, similar to what Brisbane and central Qld look like they are gettting today! I heard from a couple of different staff members this morning that a lot of low lying poorer houses and businesses around Siem Reap flooded or had water flooding their roads out the front of their houses. Everything seems to magically disappear though as there wasn't significant water across roads or anything by this morning.
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