Settling in to Samrong

So after two months of moving around I have finally moved in to my house with Emma in Samrong, what a relief. On Sunday we had the most horrendous journey and it took us over 12 hours from PNH. The guy tried to rip us off and we had to go a long way because the quick road from Sisophon wasn’t accessible but we got there – albeit over 12 hours later.

Anyway – it was great to get here and despite a few problems they appear to have done a really good job on the house and the Kitchen they built us on the back is very nice. It feels nice to have a space to call your own. So after a few hours kip I got up at 6 for work at 7.30 (had to sort out keys and a few things).

After a brief stop off at the office to say hello to everyone and generally show my face I actually went to observe some training which has been conducted by ZOA. Although I have covered the content before and was not in need of the training, it was interesting to observe how the training was delivered and the type and level of the questions being answered.

There was a session on participatory tools (which is my kind of thing) so it was interesting to me to talk to the NGO’s taking part and working in the area to see their reaction. Interestingly there had been a few organisations who had been on training but had not used this in the field. My extra discussions seemed to point to a lack of understanding at how adaptable “PRA” or participatory techniques can be in general. It seemed to be difficult to highlight the fact that there is not a simple equation to find which tool that you should use. Time seems to also be a massive issue here as NGO’s chase more funding and fulfil their commitments – establishing M and E from the beginning is therefore very important as a lot of work has been done but I only have a vague idea of how successful it’s been.

Anyway, since then I have been spending a bit of time in the office and I had a really positive meeting with our director and although it will no doubt take me a long time to establish myself I hope that it can be done. Reading documents (particularly anything technical) is a good way to go but it is so important to talk to people. The level of English is better than I thought and between that and my Kamai I think that we can muddle through! And although I tried to read everything thety gave me more and more documents seem to appear that would be useful for me! I am planning to spend a lot of time in the field over the next month or two to observe the work of CDA on “the ground” – but due to the fieldwork being the other side of the province this week and some of the staff I will be working with being in training I don’t think that I‘ll get in to the villages till after the water festival.

Samrong is so remote and identifying markets and opportunities here is severely limited by transport – it is bad enough from here to either Sisophon or Siem Reap but if you factor in how remote some of our areas are it is going to be a massive challenge – but more on that to come!