My
eight weeks living and working in the city of Siem Reap are now finished and my
internship is officially over, well the practical part anyway, now just need to
come up with 6,000 words over the next month or so to finalise the subject and
my Masters will be finished!
I
feel like an honorary citizen of the place and a Plan staff member. It’s been
really hard saying goodbye to work friends that have become close over that
time, they have befriended me, looked after me, taken me out to amazing local
food places, shared their thoughts, feelings, dreams and heartache with me and I
feel privileged to have been part of their lives for a brief period of time. We
have shared many discussions about life in Cambodia and life in Australia, what
is different, what is the same, and what I have learnt are that there are many more
similarities than differences.
I
spent some time visiting a couple of my favourite temples during my last week
and Panha and Amara, two of my closest buddies, one of whom is a qualified
Angkor Archaeological Park guide, accompanied me. It was really good to walk through
the amazingly intact Angkor Wat buildings and have someone talk me through all
the carvings, hundreds of metres of them, with all different people and animals
depicting stories of war, mediation, kings, gods, hindu and buddhist
influences, heaven and hell and hearing about it and what it means now to
Cambodians. Such rich history staring back at you from beautiful, detailed
carving, it’s pretty amazing to see and I really recommend you visit this part
of the world sooner rather than later. We wandered and chatted and tried to
stay out of the very hot sun. The place was swarming with tourists, mostly
Korean, Chinese and Japanese with a smattering of Aussies, Americans, Brits, Germans
and French.
The
second temple we visited was the infamous Ta Prohm, which is being left to
slowly become taken over by the large, insidiously beautiful tree roots. Its
spectacularly beautiful, approached from a long walk between rows of large
overhanging trees Your first view is of carved blocks of stone broken and strewn
about the place, and as you enter the accessible areas, dark and damp sections
of temple where the roof has fallen in
and stone now fills up the walkway, then through to open courtyards where sunlight streams into the compound. Built
by the king for his mother, there are 37 little towers scattered throughout the
grounds of the temple, 37 being a special number, can’t recall why now though? Most
are in good condition, a couple are completed destroyed with the blocks
scattered, some have tree roots pushing sections of walls over, and others the
tree roots seem to be holding the tower together. It’s a magical place, it
really is. 
By
1pm we were hot and bothered and ready to sit under some shade and eat lunch.
Luckily for me my ‘guide’ knew a place that was frequented by Cambodians rather
than tourists so off we went down a little dirt road and came across a row of
open huts with a view out to a large lake through the trees. We ate roast
chicken, morning glory (green leafy plant similar to spinach or Chinese greens)
with chicken livers, (I declined), rice and salad along with the staple
accompaniment sauces of choice, chilli, garlic and fish sauce all ground up and
mixed together and the second one is salt and pepper ground up together with
lime juice squeezed into it. They are great, tasty, easy sauces to make and go
particularly well with fish, chicken and rice. We had a few friends, (dogs),
sitting on the grass nearby watching us very closely and longingly. The dogs in
this poorer part of Siem Reap province are definitely not as well fed and it
was a bit hard chewing on roast chicken with two or three very scrawny dogs
politely sitting and waiting. Lucky for them we don’t eat chicken feet, chicken
necks or chicken heads, (all of which were on the plate as part of the dish),
so we threw them to the dogs and they crunched up every last possible bit of
bone, meat and sinew.
And
then it was my last couple of days. First, the Plan Siem Reap team threw me a farewell
party which was really fun. There was a huge spread of food laid on across a
couple of tables outside the office, along with local beer. The food included
prawns, little meatballs and beef strips grilled on skewers, rice paper rolls
and green papaya salad with spicy sauce. There were speeches and present giving and lots
of “chol muoys” shouted which means cheers in Khmer and is yelled out every few
minutes and everyone calls back and takes a slug of their drinks. Leads to much
merriment over the course of an hour….
It was actually really sad to be leaving all my
new found friends who had taken me under their wing, treated me as part of the
Plan Siem Reap family and been so kind and helpful. Caring, respectful, honest,
trustworthy, loyal, joyful, funny. All words to describe my new found friends
and workmates. Confident that their children and their children’s children will
be better off financially leading to
healthier longer lives, have better access to education, maternal and
general health facilities, travel more, have new experiences, undertake higher
learning and generally live a life with more choices available to them. But as
I have discovered over the past 8 weeks choices and wealth don’t necessarily
make for a happier person. It’s all in the heart and mind.
After
the work party on the Wednesday night my closest group of friends took me out
to a local bar where we had cocktails, party food and listened to local live
music played on guitars. I thought the venue had just been picked randomly but
no, it was all heavily pre-planned as it turned out. By 9pm the drinks were two
for one, including ridiculous party sized cocktail towers, of which two were
brought out for us…and we had already finished one earlier in the night, and no
we didn’t finish the third one although we all put in a good effort. And then at some point
I heard the staff singing happy birthday for someone and saw them carry a cake
upstairs to a table and present it to the birthday girl. Then five minutes
later I heard them sing happy birthday again and the staff brought a cake over
to our table and sang happy birthday to me! Except my birthday is in January,
but it was a beautiful farewell cake organised by my friends! A great surprise.
And at the end of a long night when it was most
definitely time to be going home they wouldn’t let me contribute one dollar to
the very expensive cost of the night. I felt so bad, but they wouldn’t hear of
it. They said it was a special party for me and they all loved me and wanted to
pay for me. I felt my privilege so strongly at that and part of me continued to feel terribly
guilty as I was in a much better financial position than them but if I had
overridden and insisted on paying they
would have been disappointed and probably a bit hurt that I wasn’t accepting of
their generosity. I have never felt so humbled.
And
so on the last Friday afternoon I went around to the staff and handed out
cupcakes and presents and took selfies with the staff I spent the most time
with and talked to the most and packed up my desk and rode my bike out for the last time. Feeling like I was leaving my new family behind. What a great
experience, so many new things to see, do and learn, understanding how a large
international non-government aid and development organisation works at the
local level, what they do, how they do it, what impacts they are having
directly and indirectly on those around them. Understanding how they work to change the future of the children's lives they are working with
to help them become the healthy, educated leaders and teachers and parents of the future generations
in a country that is still so poor and lacking in so much basic infrastructure.
But boy is it fighting to change that.
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