Back in Kampong Cham

So we have managed to find a house and it is beautiful – it is too good for a volunteer to live in but it is cheap as chips. I am sharing with Emma which is great and will mean that I shouldn’t get as lonely as I thought I might do. We have an amazing view of Samrong ‘lake’ from our really massive balcony and it’s going to be great for having parties on – I guess we’ll have to make some friends!! It feels great to have it sorted anyway and I’m excited about the prospect of getting up there.

As well as the two VSO’s and Tito (ZOA) there are also quite a few NGO’s in the area with the international ones including International Child Support, Malteser and Les Enfants Mekong so there are a few people to meet and get to know and hopefully we can begin to co-ordinate some of the projects to avoid any overlap and learn from each others successes and failures.

So after a week I returned to PNH with a lot of reading and preparation to do alongside ICT. After a few days training on first aid kits, establishing yourself in the work place etc. We have returned to Kampong Cham to get on with the Language. In PNH I also had the opportunity to meet with Community Forestry International who were very nice and are currently funding some work with CDA. They have there own Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP) Team and I think that we could well organise some training with them as they seem to have materials etc in place.

It’s nice to be back in Kampong Cham and I was quite surprised that I actually quite enjoyed language class yesterday. However I am still a long way off being able to communicate properly as they find my accent very hard to understand despite my best efforts. However some of it ios beginning to make a bit more sense and hopefully it will all click in to place at some point. To be honest I really just want to get up there and get cracking as although I have agreed to do a couple of things for them and have a massive amount of reading to do it’s frustrating not actually being in the house yet etc. However I know when I get there I will miss all the VSO crew etc so I will just have to enjoy it and make the most of this time as possible.

Today has been a good day off - cups of tea and pool by the Mekong River - good stuff. Going to ride out to an éco village' when the sun dies down too - then back to the Khymer tom!!

Finally In Samraong

It has taken me a while to get to post anything but I'll briefly explain what I have been up to over the past few weeks.

After arriving in Cambodia after our night flight we spent 6 days in Phnom Penh orientating ourselves with the city and VSO Cambodia as an organisation. Whilst this was not always rivetting it was important so that we could function within VSO as an organisation. Phnom Penh is also relatively well developed and is a nice intermediatary stage at which to adapt to life in a new developing country. It allowed us time to take a cyclo tour around the city as well as visit the markets, the royal palace and the genocide museum. The Khymer Rouge was so recent and I am only begining to see the effects that this period in recent history still has on the Cambodian people.

We then moved on to Kampong Cham which is a small little town on the Mekong where we quickly started our Khymer lessons with the wonderful Dara. Languages have never been my strongpoint but English is still not widely spoken here, particularly in the older generation and if I am to be effective I will need a reasonable level of Khymer. The lessons are going OK and the Grammar is not as complex as Spannsh, however I have never found languages to be particularly logical as they always have exceptions to the rule etc etc. However with Dara's help I am making some progress. However all the sentance constructions seem to be based around drinking Whisky with Dara or visiting my "sweetheart!!". Not sure I will need either of those but I am sure I'm getting somewhere anyway.

After two and a half weeks in Kampong Cham my little brain couldn't take anymore language and we set off excitedly to reach Samraong where I will be working. A few of us got the bus up to Siem Reap (The Bantear Meanchey lot stayed a night there) then Emma and I managed to negotiate transport up to Samraong. There is no bus up to Samraong and it involves negotiating a space in a shared taxi - unfortunately we couldn't find a taxi so we ended up getting a lift in a pick up (though we had seats we weren't in the back!!). It took us about four hours (on top of the 5 and a half to Siem Reap). The further we got the more and more remote everything seemed and it was a relief when we finally arrived.

Samraong is very small, although because space isn't as big an issue as some areas everything is really spaced out and so it is quite hard to establish exactly how big it is. We met with two of the volunteers currently here (as well as Tito who works for ZOA). Manny who is currently working for CDA and will be leaving soon after I start work, he has had a slightly different role but has been working hard with CDA. The other VSO volunteer Rosheed (sorry for the spelling!!) is working for a health NGO.

Yesterday I went to the office and finally saw where i will be working for a year, I will try and post pictures soon! It is a small area and resources are tight and I wont even have a desk but there is a communal work area. We had a welcome meeting and it was nice to be introduced to everyone and to talk about the exciting prospects of the year ahead, which I will go in to in greater depth later.

Today we went out to meet one of the community forestry groups. I wasn't expecting to play such a large part in the meeting but through an interpretter and my pigeon Khymer we managed to communicate enough. I was just trying to be polite and make some initial forrays in to discussing non-timber forest products and income generation. It appears that there is a great potential and I look forward to findng out more and meeting more communities. On a side note the Cambodians I have met have by and large been kind, smiley and happy people with a genuine warmth. I am still seen as a novelty as you dont get many Barangs up here! Choruses of Hello! follow you everywhere. Anyway this is quite a hefty post so I will try and follow this up with a post soon discussing how the house hunting (so far proving very difficult ) and the rest of the week in Samraong goes before returning to Phnom Penh.