Well this week seems to have involved a lot of water! Flooding rain, constant dark clouds and thunder, showers and heavy rain most days, but don't worry its still 32 degrees and feels like 100% humidity..
Before
I talk about things I that happened this past week I wanted to
briefly back track and talk about a day I spent a few weeks ago listening to
the Plan program officers meeting with their local non-government partners for the
quarterly reporting and planning workshop, along with talking about any new
policy that Plan have introduced etc. Each representative presented a series of
slides showing what they have been doing in the previous quarter, what funding
they accessed from Plan, how it was spent and what they are planning to do in
the next quarter. Whilst a lot of the discussion went over my head as it as in
Khmer the slides tended to be in English so that helped a lot. Made for some
interesting statistics and learnings. Because Plan International is English
based all the names of their programs are English and have English acronyms of
course. So someone would be talking in Khmer and then all of a sudden they
would say ‘Child Friendly Community’, or ‘WaSH’ (water, sanitation and hygiene) and I would kind of
get the gist of what they are talking about. I found myself getting quite
emotional at one stage, when one of the local partner NGO representatives was
providing some statistics on something or rather, my eyes tearing up all of a
sudden whilst sitting at a table with 15 people! Had to try and be very
discreet and tell myself to ‘harden up’.
By
far the greatest expense for Plan International Cambodia Siem Reap office is
the school feeding program which supports meals at 800 schools for over 200,000
students. Plan work directly with the WFP (UN World Food Program), providing a
cooked hot meal to students in the morning before school. The students arrive
at school from 6.30am to have their meal as school starts early, 7.30am and
finishes around lunch time for the morning school. Then another lot of students
comes in after lunch for afternoon school. I learnt today that the afternoon
session don’t get a free hot meal so the timetable changes every second month
at school so that the afternoon children attend in the mornings just to get the
free meal!! The reason behind that thinking is that the meal provided by
Plan/WFP is often the largest and most nutritional meal of the day for many of
the very poor children.
One
of the more interesting things Plan have been working on with local NGO
partners is village mapping. It requires staff to meet with the commune chief and local village leaders and
explain the process and then they encourage every resident in that village to
come to the local equivalent of the town hall and mark on a big sheet of
plastic where their house is and note whether it has a well or latrine or both.
Considering there is no such thing as council rates or requirements to advise a
council or local government of any changes you might be making to your land and
there are no lot numbers or addresses etc, it makes it really hard to know
exactly what is going on in a particular village, who lives where and what
infrastructure they have access to. The local commune council will generally
know the population of the village but that’s about it. So this mapping that
Plan and their partners are doing helps them understand some of the village
statistics so they can work out where the greatest needs are etc. Pretty clever
I thought.
Back
to the happenings over the last week. So apparently it rains a lot here in
October! It has rained consistently and steadily over
the past two nights and this morning on my way to work I could see front yards
and side roads completely inundated with muddy water. When I pulled off the
main road into our work driveway I was confronted with a flood!
There is certainly no stormwater system infrastructure
here and the area is incredibly flat so when it rains a lot there is nowhere
for it to go. The
worst thing about it for Plan is that they have a large storage shed out the
back and it was flooded as well. Lots of cardboard boxes were damaged and they
had inside of them hundreds of packs ready to go for sponsorship kids. So some
of the staff will spend time today moving them from wet cardboard boxes to
dryer heights. I reckon there was probably a foot of water in the shed at its
deepest. I asked the staff who were all hanging around trying to decide what to
do if this happened every year and they said no, last year and this year are particularly
bad.
Many workmates had flooding in the lower storey or underside of their
houses as well, wading through knee deep water in their work clothes to get to
their motorbikes and cars. I imagine the water is not particularly clean
either, perfect breeding ground for disease I would have thought. The whole
area around Siem Reap is sodden and flooded still, tiny little shallow creeks
have turned into large, fast flowing rivers and many houses outside the town on
the main road are almost completely surrounded with water, just a little narrow
strip of land (and when I say narrow I mean maybe a metre), running from the
road to their front steps.
Every
day around the time I am riding to and from work there are consistently major
traffic jams around the international/private schools and this appears mostly
due to wealthier parents having cars. The roads are well paved and wide and
there is not a huge amount of traffic, but due to the hilarious lack of road rules
and basic understanding about how cars need extra space a crazy gridlock starts
to happen. It’s often caused by a car just stopping, yes that’s right, just
stopping in the middle of the road to wait for their kid to come out of school.
This is because there is no space off
the road to pull over as such, so people just pull up and wait, either not
realising or not caring that cars and bikes can’t get around you because there
is so much traffic headed the other way.
So slowly the traffic all grinds to a halt,
even the motorbikes who have been zipping in and around all the small cracks of
space can’t get through and build up behind cars, mini buses, little trucks
with people sitting up on top of the cab, bicycles and tuk tuks. It all gets
pretty comical as people start to look around confused as they realise that there
is nowhere for traffic to go, remembering that traffic never really properly
stops on the roads usually, it slows down yes, but come to a complete stop? rarely.. It
usually takes someone getting out of their car, or someone coming from inside
the school grounds and ordering the owners of the cars causing the blockage to
reverse or move forward and free up enough space for cars to just squeeze past
them and bikes to get around them. No one really honks or yells or gets too angry, people just
sit and wait for something magical to happen and seem surprised when it takes
as long as it does for the traffic to disperse. Sometimes peaceful and loving
doesn’t work! Angry horns and yelling at people to move their cars is probably
the more practical option here. I tried glaring at a ridiculous driver the
other day who just stopped her big car in the middle of the road waiting for a
child to come out of school. She created a massive traffic jam and no one went
and told her to move her car as far over to the curb as she could to let cars
get around. It’s pretty funny actually, you would think that those same people
would figure out the problem and not stop in their lane right outside the
school the next day and cause yet another traffic jam, but it doesn’t work that
way, short term memory. Or more likely, they think, ‘oh well there is no way to
avoid it so I will just stop to pick my children up and somehow it will all
work out’. And of course it does. Although when its pouring rain and my trouser
legs are getting soaked like they were yesterday afternoon a traffic jam is not
so much fun. We have busy traffic around our schools in Australia as well but
it’s kind of ordered chaos, this is just chaos. And it will only get worse as
people get rid of the bikes and buy more cars.
I
have also realised why families seem to be maxing out their number of children
at 2-3, it’s because you can only fit three primary aged kids on a bike with
you and let me tell you it was pretty squeezy the one I passed this morning.
One in front of the mother and the other two behind her, crammed onto the seat
in their neat school uniforms with backpacks and sensible school shoes on,
hiding under a cheap plastic raincoat because it was drizzling and they didn’t
want to get wet. No more large families for Cambodia I don’t imagine, most people I talk to are having 1 or 2 children. Too
expensive to send them all to school and university. The public school system,
whilst supposedly free, is not as good as the private schools in Siem Reap, so
everyone is trying to earn enough to send their kids to the private schools.
Universities have scholarships but the student has to achieve a very high mark
in an entrance exam to get the opportunity, which pushes out most of the poorer
kids as they don’t get good schooling in the villages. Lots of the younger staff
here at Plan seem to be studying at university, bachelor degrees, masters. They
either have to go straight from work to classes a few times a week or else have
an intensive session over each weekend, one has a Saturday class every week
from 2pm to 9pm and then Sunday morning from 8am-12pm, which doesn’t leave much
time for socialising!
On
Thursday I travelled by bus down to Phnom Penh with my boss, a 6 hour trip
during which I heard some amazing stories about his upbringing and early life
during the Khmer Rouge time, (he was 5-9 years old during their rule). The
impacts affected his whole family for the rest of their lives. I can see that
for most of the population over 40 years
old they were forced to leave everything they owned and had to start again with their families or what
remained of their families after the country became peaceful and safe again
more than a decade later. Even though Pol Pot’s dictatorship regime only lasted
for four years the next decade after that there was still mass fighting going on between
the different groups and this put a stop to any kind of growth or repair of
buildings and lives during that time as well. So basically a generation were
completely disrupted and destroyed and then their children had nothing at the
end. Heavy stuff. I will talk more about some of his stories in next weeks
blog.
On
Friday I presented my proposed new documents and check lists to some of the
senior management of Plan Cambodia in Phnom Penh and we discussed my review of
their procurement documents and contracts. The room had eight people in it and
I had my little powerpoint presentation ready to go, plus copies of all the
different documents I wanted to show them. For the first hour the Country
Deputy Director was in the room and as he is a fellow Aussie we tended to speak
to each other a lot about some of the issues. After he left the rest of the
room were Cambodian people but to their credit the expectation was that the
whole day and all discussion was in English. Some of us had lunch together in a
very small, family run restaurant, with the cooking done on the footpath and
little tables and chairs spilling out there as well. They brought us plates to
share of rice, vegetables, small whole grilled fish and other fish based curry
dish I think plus a soup of some kind. All up it cost the princely sum of .75
cents per person…..We finished up around 4pm, I think my presentation went ok, they seemed very interested in what I
had done and wanted to pick my brains about a number of issues to see what I
thought, what I would do if the issue occurred in my projects at home etc. It
also showed me that I have learnt a whole lot about how they go about doing
construction projects here, I know all the acronyms they use to describe
people, places and activities, how the commune councils work, who is involved
and who attends all the construction meetings, the names of all the different
groups in the various villages and communes, the social structures about who
manages/controls groups of people, how procurement works here, what peoples
expectations are, how things work basically.
Yesterday
I spent a full day with some of the girls from work. There were six adults and
two small boys and we all crammed into a very small car, like a little Daihatsu
charade, four adults and a kid in the back, me in the front nursing the other
five year old boy and the driver! We drove out of town and then turned down a very bumpy road
and ended up at a place where people, both locals and tourists but mostly
tourists can hire local boats with a driver to take them on a trip across part
of the heavily flooded Ton Le Sap Lake to visit a town that is built high up on
stilts and completely floods for three to six months of the year, depending on
how long the wet season lasts.
During the wet season everyone is much more isolated and has to
use boats to get everywhere. This is people needing to get to the pagoda, to
the village commune council hall, to the school, health clinics, to shops, to
the market etc. All those buildings are up on stilts as well which is very
unusual in Cambodia as the community based buildings tend to be ground level or
close to it.
 |
| Commune Council Building (town hall) |
 |
| High School |
We
were taken to a floating restaurant where we got off and clambered onto a much
flatter, small boat that a lady with a large oar was in charge off. This was a much more relaxed and
quieter experience than the original very noisy boat and she floated us through
and beneath flooded trees, under a long timber pedestrian bridge that led to a
local market and pass loads of water hyacinth, singing as she paddled which was
lovely!
Then it
was time to get back on the larger boat and travel out and into the actual lake
itself, the area we had been in originally was the temporary flooded areas around the
edges of the lake that are dry some of the year. I have included
a map to give an idea.
The lake is so
huge you can’t see the edges of it, it looks like an ocean and provides a
number of large and small fresh water fish, prawns, shellfish, frogs and other
water based animals for a few million Cambodian people living in the central
and north western parts of the country. The houses vary in their materials
based on how rich the family is, some of them were in a very bad way, others
made of steel and metal and concrete seemed like they might be happily standing
and getting flooded every year for many more to come. A fascinating experience.
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