Every month, the communication team and the finance team go on tour for a week. This means we take the land rover, pack it with stuff like milk, books, but most importantly money (that doesn’t take to much space though…) find a space to sit on and set off for the different Krousar Thmey centers in Cambodia. The idea is mainly for the financial controller to check each programs’ accounts, for the communication team (Guillaume, me and Chetra, except Chetra didn’t come this time) to undertake interviews, take pictures etc of the centers/schools/houses etc for our upcoming activity reports, and to deliver things such as the above mentioned powdered milk, books, computers or other things which were donated.
First stop: Battambang
We set off Tuesday at 2 and arrived at about 6 in this quiet provincial town which is Battambang. Many foreigners who have lived in Cambodia for a long time say that Battambang is the best place in Cambodia because it IS Cambodia, whereas other cities like Phnom Penh aren’t really Cambodia. I’m not quite sure I agree with this vision of things, as even if Phnom Penh has really modernized in the last 15 years, I would still maintain that it is Cambodia, but then again I’m new here and I haven’t been in Battambang long enough to understand what they mean.
We arrived at the school for deaf and blind kids, but the kids had already gone home. We went up to the building where guests stay. It had a beautiful spacious room on the first floor where deaf kids learn to dance, with an airy terrace overlooking the river. It felt so nice to arrive there after the trip in the hot car (I thought at that time that the trip was a bit tough but I didn’t know then what was about to come…). As you can see on the picture, the view from the terrace was very nice. But now would you like to bathe in it to wash yourself?
Well I didn’t have a choice, because the bathroom on the ground floor had no running water. Instead a tub was filled up with this very brown river water which had probably stagnated in there for weeks. It stank and even when I ran it on me with the pot for this effect, it wasn’t clear. But it was that or no shower at all. Apparently the Khmer guys who had come last tour had chosen the latter option. I can’t believe I went through with something even the Khmers wouldn’t do.
We went for dinner in a Cambodian restaurant in town and then I joined Clayre and her workmates for a drink who were also in Battambang that day. We were gonna have dinner all together, but they were planning to go to a restaurant were you can have a dish for 3-4$, but Krousar Thmey only gives us 2$ allowance for food, which means we could only eat in a Khmer restaurant. At these times I wish Krousar Thmey could be just a little bit less stingy with its money. I also feel like this when I’m in front of my computer which dates back from the mid-nineties and which freezes each time I insert a picture in my reports and which is just unbearably slooooow. But until it is completely dead, which means it will not even turn on at all, then I will perhaps be allowed a new computer. And I was used to stealing office supplies from where i worked before – of course, everybody does that. Well here I had to buy my own pen and notebooks from my salary. There is only one computer with internet access, and we have to reuse every sheet of paper on both sides, and then even when it is used on both sides, we put it aside for the blind schools, as they will use it for punching Braille on it. Krousar Thmey is extremely proud of the fact that we only spend 3% of our budget in running costs, all the rest goes to our beneficiaries. It is something to be proud of. Other NGOs can have more than 20%. But sometimes it drives me crazy…
Anyway, back to Battambang. So the next day I spent the whole morning doing interviews and taking pictures, as I have to write a report on the school in February. Unfortunately I was only told at the last moment that I would be doing this report and I hadn’t prepared it at all. It is also my first report on a school. All the other ones I have written so far have been on street children centers or family houses. So it was really difficult because I didn’t know what questions to ask the director and didn’t always understand what he was talking about when he answered me. Then I asked if I could pick one blind and one deaf kid to ask a few questions but they gave me this really shy blind kid, who was new in the school and who wasn’t talkative at all. The deaf kid was really cute. He was signing away his whole life. I love looking at deaf kids sign. Their faces are just so expressive. You can almost understand what they are talking about. But the guy translating the sign language for me didn’t speak English well and could obviously not be bothered, so he would translate 1 sentence when the kid had been signing for like 10 minutes. So I’m quite worried about this report. I don’t know what the heck I’m gonna write about. And there’s a lot of pressure as the donor this report is intended for is really picky and there has been some problems with them before, so we have to "grovel at their feet".
Stop 2: Sisophon
We left in the afternoon for Sisophon, a small town in the northwest of Cambodia. We first went to the school for Khmer arts and culture. Promotion of Khmer art and culture is Krousar Thmey’s 3rd main domain of intervention (the other two being child protection and education (blind and deaf)). The school is intended for any kid in the area. It is free of charge, so they can just go and learn traditional dancing, painting, sculpture, shadow puppeteering or music after school. It’s a really nice atmosphere there. I really loved watching the kids dancing and painting.
Then we moved to the protection center. We were put up in little wooden hut on stilts. The confort was very basic but it was luxurious for the area. Plus we could see the effort that was put in to welcoming us there. I spent the whole afternoon playing with a gang of young kids – they were just adorable. And my level of Khmer is just enough for 3-4 year olds, so we get along perfectly.
After dinner we were invited to Jean-Pierre’s. He's an old French guy who once helped Krousar Thmey in logistics and who retired in the Sisophon center. He now lives with his Khmer wife and two adopted kids in a small house just off the center. They made us crepes, which were absolutely delicious. It made me wonder how it could be possible for westerners to adopt a Khmer life completely. I mean, most people who come here know they will return at some point. But he lives here permanently. And it’s not like he’s in Phnom Penh, where there’s a bit of modernity. Sisophon is very small and rural. They don’t have a fridge, as electricity only comes on after 6pm, if at all, and live in a very decent but extremely simple house. But I guess he traveled a lot before he came to Cambodia (he was in the military) but it just made me wonder. I don’t think I could be up to that.
We went to bed, shattered. Felt like it was 12. It was 8.30 (normal bedtime in cambodia, especially outside main cities)
Stop 3: Poipet and Siem Reap
We got up quite early to go to Poipet, the most unglamorous place in Cambodia, if not the world. It’s a border town between Cambodia and Thailand and it has nothing to offer but casinos, human trafficking, poverty and misery. You drive in and everything is gloomy, falling apart, the kids never smile. Krousar Thmey has a school, a protection center and a women’s village there. The village was created to alleviate conditions of single women in Poipet. Little houses with a bit of land were given to these women. They are now single grandmothers rather than single moms. But life continues quietly for them in this small haven away from the ghetto. I was invited into one of the houses. The lady was so happy to have me over. It made me smile because the house was just a wooden cube with a surface of about 6 square meters. There was no furniture at all, but this huge sound system for their tv. Obviously the top priority for this family was quality sound for their favorite karaoke tunes..
What shocked me in this town was that you could sense misery and see it on people’s faces. For a start, an unbelievable amount of kids had light hair because of malnourishment. In the protection center, one the kids must have been so badly beaten when he was younger that his faced was completely deformed. He had no nose, a huge bump on the back of this neck, scars all over his face and was mute. Another 4-year-old kid could not walk or even stand up because he was blind and he was left without care all this time.
It felt that Poipet was in a too desperate state to be worthy of attention from other organizations. It’s quite demoralizing.
After lunch at the centre we went back to Sisophon to take our stuff and then set off to Siem Reap. The road from Sisophon to Poipet was bad enough. It was full of potholes so that the car had to stop and start again every metre, or if the driver hadn’t seen the big hole and was going fast, we would now and again get a good back slamming. But the road to Siem Reap… Dust road (dark red dust) all the way with a surface similar to the moon’s. We bounced for 4 hours and every once in a while we would wipe off the dust off our glasses and give our kramas, which were protecting our heads, a good shake...
We passed a demining crew on the way.
We have loads of projects in Siem Reap. First of all, Siem Reap, being the tourist hub of the country (it is the base town for the temples of the Angkor period, millions of tourists come here every year) there is consequently a lot of beggars and street children. Anyone who visited Siem Reap will have noticed that the street children are a nuisance. They are very numerous, everywhere and very persistent. And it is very hard to keep them in our centers, as begging in the town or near the temples is very lucrative. So we have a street children center (center for temporary reception of street children), a protection center (permanent reception for orphans or street children who cannot be reintegrated into their families because of problems of alcohol or violence) and 2 family houses (big houses where parents host 10-12 Krousar Thmey children, usually children who are too badly traumatized to be integrated into a permanent reception center and need the closeness and comfort of a real home - see post January 12). There is also a school for blind and a school for deaf children, a massage place with blind masseurs, an exposition on Cambodia and the Tonle Sap (Cambodia’s main lake/river) and a dance troupe which performs every week in a posh hotel. So there was a lot of things to visit, a lot of children to see and play with and a lot to discover. Veronique invited me to take part in a speech therapist class for deaf children. She has been training the KT teachers in speech therapy and she was supervising one of the classes. It was really interesting to see how they were trying to make these children understand sounds. I was amazed by the patience it required. I was there for 1 hour and the teacher went over just 4 sounds which he kept repeating to the three kids, using different methods for them to understand the difference between the sounds.
Siem Reap was not all work, and in the evening we managed to go to Benito’s (the founder of the KT) hotel which has a nice pool. It was also the occasion to take a shower from a real shower and not a big jar of stale water. That was sweet. Especially after the never-ending trip on the red dust roads between Sisophon and Siem Reap.
Day 5: Back to Phnom Penh
We left Siem Reap on Saturday morning and arrived early afternoon in Phnom Penh. I was kinda glad to arrive, even though I really enjoyed the tour. But I was happy to see my friends who weren’t with us. Corinne had left me a piece of chocolate cake in my mailbox for when I returned (she never comes on tour because of her kid) that was much appreciated. In the evening, there was a big do at Amory’s and then we all went out dancing. I like this about my life here is that I experience two different worlds at the same time. I’m not completely cut off from the world and we still go out for drinks in nice bars, go clubbing, and recover by the pool on Sundays. It makes being so far from home easier. Of course this is not at all what Cambodia is about, and if I was based outside a main town, I wouldn’t be experiencing these two worlds. But I think it’s good to have a balance. I also try as much as possible to cultivate friendships with Cambodians. I get along very well with my Khmer colleagues from work and with my Khmer teacher Kesor who is my age. She invited me to go to this huge Valentines Day concert this evening. I have traditional Khmer dance class tonight, but I’m really tempted to go anyway. I’d love to meet her friends and that way mix more with the locals. You can’t blame the expats here for hanging out too much together because it’s true that it’s hard to make close friendships when you have such language and cultural barriers. But I want to try anyway. It won’t be the same type of friendship as my "western" ones but it doesn’t mean it can’t be a true friendship either.
We walked around a bit, looked for the waterfalls, couldn’t find them or even hear them, so went back in the bus thinking that we would go look for them later, after we had dropped our stuff in the hostel. Except the bus driver had no idea where the hostel was, so we went up and down the mountain 3 times, finally arriving there after 6, by which time it was dark and too late to walk around anymore. I was quite disappointed cos I would have really liked to see nice landscapes and take pictures. But anway, the party was really good. The people who were there were nice and we had a good time. Dancing outside is so much more fun than in clubs.
You wear an absolutely gorgeous princess dress. At first the western eye would say that these dresses aren’t gorgeous at all but very tacky, and that they look like fancy costumes. I agree the dress I ended up wearing (Kesor my Khmer teacher lent it to me!) was quite similar to a dress I once wore for Halloween when I was dressed as a fairy. Except it was much more sophisticated. And it was Barbie pink. So I had to find Barbie pink shoes. Check out the pictures and tell me if you don’t agree that I look like a real life Barbie, in which case I will assume that you are just dead jealous. 
So anyway, the wedding on Sunday afternoon was awesome I really loved it. I wasn’t the prettiest girl, as Amory kept reminding me (these stupid Belgians are so untactful), because all the Cambodian girls looked like princesses or Barbies too. The hosts were so honored to have Baraings at their party and we were treated as kings. They wanted us to be present for when the bride meets the groom which is usually only for parents and siblings. The parents wanted to take pictures of us with the bride and groom and everything. And after the meal (which consisted of 6-7 different courses) they kept inviting us to dance. The guys come up to the girls and bow and you have to bow back to accept the dance. But I was so tired by the end (and the Barbie shoes weren’t that comfortable for dancing on dust floors) that I’d sometimes pretend I hadn’t seen the guy bowing in front of me and walk off the dance floor. No but it was really fun. 
The girls were really eager to show me the different dances, and I was probably making a fool of myself by attempting to do it right but they were so glad for us to be there that it didn’t matter. The bride changed dresses 5 times in the evening and each dress looked more gorgeous than the other. Amory and Corinne kept explaining to me all the different rituals that they were performing. It was really interesting. Then we had to give our money. You take the envelope that you’d received with the invitation and you put in money (you are expected to give quite a bit if you are Baraing) and you hand it over to the two guys sitting near the entrance. One opens the envelopes and tells the other what your name is and how much you gave and then the other writes it down. At first I thought that wasn’t really on, but then I realized that wedding lists in our weddings are not that different.
Anyway, after hours of dancing around the center table, we decided to call it a day, and I set of in the princess-worthy coach otherwise known as the back of Amory’s motorbike. I had to hold up the different layers of dress and veils, so it wouldn’t get stuck in the wheels. That’s Cambodian top class, I’m telling you…
