Traffic in Phnom Penh

January 17th

I thought I was going to faint and that there was going to be nobody to pick me up… I went to Takmao to visit another family house with Corinne and Julie. I hadn’t eaten much today and then on the way back we got stuck into some terrible traffic (see picture). I got home and I was shaking and there was no-one home (they’d just dropped me home cos they had stuff to do). I went to the supermarket and bought $5 worth of biscuits. Don’t worry, I also bought bread and Vache Qui Rit. It’s the only stuff you can find in that supermarket.

The visit was as always amazing. The kids were very cute and very attaching. The mom chatted to us for hours, explaining what she’s been up too lately. She and her husband do loads of things to get money. Hey repair furniture, make table sets, buy pigs and chicken make them fatter and sells them back.. Julie says they’d the family which costs less to Krousar Thmey. We now understood why! The kids looked very happy. And the end the mom asked us to come visit often cos the kids love it. She gave us loads of fruit from her garden, this really delicious jam she made and a wooden toy she had made for Corinne’s kid Raphael.

Today Kosal, KT’s director general, is back from her holidays. I was worried about her arrival a bit as everybody had told me to be careful about this, and she likes things like that, and when she says this do it right away. She’s seems very nice. But I was also told not to be fooled by the friendly appearances, she remains our boss. I hope she’ll like me. Apparently it’s good to have her on our side.

So tomorrow is the day we will drop the bomb to her: the fact that I can’t drive. This has been a matter of intense debate since I arrived. There is no way in the world I will be able to drive here without a driving licence. The license in itself is not an issue, you can buy them without passing a test. It’s the fact that even an experienced driver feels like someone who has never driven before in the streets of Phnom Penh. Traffic is the biggest source of deaths and accidents in the city. It’s a nightmare. Even wore than when we’d been last time. Apparently it gets exponentially worse every year. There is just no sense of direction, motorbikes, and cars, drive extremely fast and without care of their surroundings. When I cross the road to go to the internet café, I’m so tense. It’ds not like you first look left then right. You’re constantly going left right left right until you hit the other side. The KT car gets scratch every week and accidents happen at least every month. And then there’s driving outside Phnom Penh, with the potholes and the ravines. Julie had to drive on a road today which was only half of the car’s width wide, and then on one side there was a bump of dirt of about 40 cm high and on the other a small ravine. And this is driving a pick up truck… No way in the world am I ever driving here. No one contests that I should not drive here. But this is not cool for the others. Like today, when we came back from Takmao. Julie had to visit an apartment at 5.30 and Corinne had to get medicine f her son before the pharmacy closed. The traffic was horrible. So they automatically thought they’ll go to these places and I’ll drive the car back to casa… oh wait, no, we can’t do that, Anaïs does not drive. So they had to do a complicated detour so that the car would be returned to the casa and do everything in time. Or like for the tours. Every month we do a tour of the country on car to visit the different centers. In febuary Guillaume’s parents are coming during the week of the tour and he too holidays. So Julie is all worried that she’s gonna have to drive 10 hours a day on dirt roads all by herself. Well she won’t, it’s not feasible. Driving on these roads requires far to much concentration as people live on the edges on the roads and you have to be constantly aware that a kid or a cow might jump under your wheel. You also have to know how to avoid holes and get out of them if you’re stuck. So anyway, we’re gonna have to tell Kosal the great news tomorrow, and I’m not looking forward to it.

Yesterday was ok. Dana was very nice. She’s about my age and very pretty. We went to “comme a la maison” a French café where you can have viennoiseries and stuff. It’s oin that area of Phnom Pemh where all the expats are and the International organizations and the NGOs. It’s a different country altogether. It was weird for me to see white people. Like we met in front of the FCC. There were loads of tourists and tuk tuk drivers were harassing me with their “lady, you want tuk tuk”. In the part where I live there’s not even any tuk tusk. So I start by saying Até akun, and then they ask again and again. At one point I started getting angry at this group of tuk tuk drivers in Khmer. They looked at me with big round eyes. They’d probably never seen a white person getting angry in Khmer before. So anyway, it was weird being with a girl who was “that kind of expats”. All expats except for the KT ones really live like kings here. Their houses are palaces, they go to place like comme a la maison for Sunday brunch (5$ for a coffee and chausson au pomme, that was way over my budget…) and they basically live a western life, western style hang out with whites all the time, go to western restaurants and bars. She kept bumping into white people she knew. She introduce them to me. Oh and this is Tom from Oxfam America, and Dave from World Vision Germany. And I’d go hi, I’m Anaïs from Krousar Thmey. They would cringe with an interrogative look. I was so surprised because not once have I said to a Khmer person that I work for KT without them going Ah! Krousar Thmey, yes the street children and the blind children!! And believe me I have told many many Cambodians (people always ask me what the hell I’m doing here) People always feel sorry for me when I tell them where I live. And a part of me envies them for all this luxury. But I can’t help but feel proud that I’m living a real Cambodian experience, on a Cambodian salary, suffering the Cambodian dusty home without air con and noisy neighborhood. It would be too easy otherwise. And I feel very close to people. I speak Khmer all the time and it’s quickly improving. Expats here can only say akun chran and even that they don’t say right. I also am lucky to have contact with the kids, the actual beneficiaries of our project. I would have been so frustrated to work in an office writing about human rights, going to meetings about capacity building without actually seeing and feeling what we were talking about. Each time I go to a center I feel overwhelmed. Its just too great for words. The expats are missing out on much more than I am.

I’ve also made myself a budget plan for putting aside a part of my KT salary too. It should be feasible. The guys say they never come out at the end of the month with money left over but they also go out a lot in the evenings for dinner and drinks. I’m also gonna try to cut out on the 2.5$ rip off lunch. Around the corner you can have pork and rice for 2000 riel… At least once or twice a week.

Anyway, I’m off to the internet café and then shower (at last!! You could scoop out the dust mixed to sweat on my face with a spoon!) and to bed, as I am developing a serious headache thanks to that lovely traffic jam experience in the hot and loud street of Phnom Penh.