Welcome to Phnom Srok

Monday 1st October

First 2 photos show the current DOE office where I will start working on 1st November and the NEW DOE office which should be ready for use in December. Spot the difference! The main similarity is the cow outside the front entrance in each picture!

After a 6 hour taxi drive from Phnom Penh to Sisaphon, a night at a guest house and then another 2 ½ bumpy hours in a truck, I finally arrived at Phnom Srok for my placement visit. I officially start living and working here on 1st November so the purpose of this visit was to find a house and meet my future colleagues. I was chaperoned by Carly (current VSO volunteer) and Sokwin (soon to become my translator/assistant).

We dumped our bags at a friendly guesthouse in the village and were taken to the District Education Office round the corner (my future work place! - see pic above) where we met the Director and Deputy Director of Education, Mr. Sophan and Mr Saey (my future employers!). They gave us a quick tour of the office and the NEW office! and then we went out to lunch – a short motorbike journey and a table by the lake – beautiful!! Apparently the lake was one of many dug by forced labour camps during the Khmer Rouge regime and one of the few which was successful. It was weird taking in its beauty while thinking of how it came to be but the locals certainly enjoy it. It is a tourist attraction in the area and has become a bird sanctuary too – home to the almost extinct Sarus Crane. As we ate lunch (fresh fish and rice), some children played near by with a rubber ring and the water did look inviting!

The village is centred around a main crossroads, and by road, I mean dirt road. It has a market (cleaner than some!), a few restaurants serving breakfast and lunch but not an evening meal as we found out, an ice seller (no electricity means no fridges so most people have an icebox and use ice to store or cool things!) a pagoda or two, a few mobile phone shops (and by shop, I mean shack) and a petrol station (and by petrol station, I mean guy selling old Coke bottles of petrol at the side of the road. The guesthouse (which was suggested as the only place suitable for me to rent) is a few buildings down from the crossroads so really feels in the hub of the village. It’s ground floor is a shop run by the landlord, selling canned and packet food (I’ll never run out of instant noodles), toiletries (I’ll also never run out of toilet paper or toothpaste – phew!) and beer (thank goodness that’ll always be close at hand!).

The first and second floor of the guesthouse look exactly the same and comprise of a big open landing space, 4 bedrooms and a bathroom (and by bathroom, I mean tiled room with a squat toilet and a huge rain water tank from which you scoop water in order to wash with – did I mention there was no running water in this village?!