Grand Prix

Being a volunteer and earning not much more than £150 per month does occasionally carry the odd perk. For example, some people with money and advantage sometimes take pity on the likes of me and this is exactly what happened this month.

Pam and her husband Tim are both Volunteer Professionals and Tim is lucky enough to have been born into the same family as his incredibly generous big brother John. For some reason Corine and I found ourselves invited to join almost the whole family at John’s apartment in Kuala Lumpur and accompany them with complimentary tickets to watch the Malaysian Grand Prix! Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth (although sometimes poor Corine struggles!) and even though we could barely name more than one current Formula 1 driver, we leapt at the chance of this once in a lifetime trip.

Honestly, this is the most flattering photo I have of Uncle Pam and Auntie Tim...

I found myself dredging up all sorts of racing car information that I didn’t know I possessed (well, I impressed Corine once or twice anyway!) and wasn’t sure if my small but surprising amount of knowledge was due to watching Days of Thunder umpteen times, being taken to watch banger cars with Dad when I was younger (its practically a poor man’s F1 you know!) or from being forced to watch hours of Formula 1 on a Sunday afternoon with Daniel during his F1 obsession years in the early 90s, despite my pleads to turn over the channel to the Eastenders omnibus of even the Little House on the Prarie. I learnt more too and surprised myself at how interesting I found it all.

Kuala Lumpur is fantastic. It is a small but perfectly formed city, so very clean and smart compared to anywhere in Cambodia and with all the delights of any developed country’s capital city: air-conditioned shopping malls, restaurants, bars and Marks and Spencers. There were down pours of rain on Saturday during our well-planned ‘walking round the city’ day and glorious sunshine on Race day. It might sound a bit weird, but I really enjoyed having a break from the poverty of Cambodia. KL is a hugely multi-cultural city with renowned food choices which we sampled as much as we could although I ate a lot of Western food I’d been missing as well! Mmmmmm - a sausage sandwich...Swamping the occasional historical colonial house here are many tall buildings in the city (something I’m not so used to now) so I ooh-ed and aah-ed at the Petronas Towers, climbed the Menara Tower and took lots of photos!!

The Menara Tower...

And the view from the top...Nightview of the Petronas Towers from our comfortable seats at Sky Bar...

Karaoke is quite huge in South-East Asia. Cambodians will never miss the opportunity of singing tunelessly down a passing microphone and much crooning can be heard from Karaoke bars which pop up all over the place. Malaysia seems no different in its love of singing lyrics over slightly dodgy if not nausea inducing music videos. John took the lot of us to a Karaoke rabbit warren below a multi-storey car park on Saturday night. I think it was Corine’s vision of hell. I though it was a perfect idea and I’m thinking of bringing the idea back to London, if it’s not there already. We were shown into our own sound-proofed room with a computerised song selection screen, our own en-suite toilet and a waiter! We proceeded to thoroughly enjoy desecrating numerous all-time favourite tunes at extremely loud volumes although Tim’s high pitched Bee Gees style of singing Michael Jackson’s Beat It was the last straw!

Apart from thoroughly enjoying constantly ribbing Tim throughout the whole weekend (well, don’t dish up what you can’t take!) this was my favourite joke of the weekend... Ferrari took a decision for the British GP to hire a couple of Scousers as pit crew members when they found out they could remove all 4 wheels in under 0.8 seconds. But to Jean Todt’s dismay, after 1.5 seconds, the car was resprayed and sold to McLaren... I think part of the reason I liked this joke so much could’ve been because I understood it! I learnt all the gossip and back-stabbing of last season’s F1, got sunburnt, discovered the wonder of earplugs (the noise was terrific!), and even sneaked onto the track and made it to the pits to see all the F1 cars after the race – did you know there are 150 diagnostic checks carried out after each race?! After dodging the Malaysian guard and getting onto the track, no-one else seemed to mind (we were practically invited into the pits!) so we made the most of snapping photographs of the cars, teams and of course ourselves!!

Oh yeah, and I think the red car won!

She barangs, She barangs!

With a small pang of quilt at my upcoming holiday to Malaysia, I decided to spend a weekend in Phnom Srok instead of making my usual trip to town. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, spent next to no money, learnt lots more about my work colleagues and the complexities of relationships, positions of power and politics. I also spent time with my landlady’s family in an attempt to get them to stop treating me like The Queen and a bit more like one of the family (not that that will ever be 100% successful).

On Saturday I got a shopping list from Ree in Khmer and trotted off to the market. After successfully recognising most of the things on the list and purchasing them I carried it all back to cook with Ree. Surprisingly no stall in the market had any limes (limes are used in loads of dishes and are always readily available, hence the surprise) but after wandering around for a bit saying ‘Where are all the limes? Don’t have limes!‘ in my best Khmer, someone took pity on me and found a yellowish old looking lime for me to take home! Sometimes it really helps to be a barang! Well, I couldn’t go back without one!

My search for a lime also helped distract me from the fact that I was carrying a live fish home in a small plastic bag. I’m not sure exactly at what point the fish lost consciousness but it may’ve been while it was being descaled. Or perhaps pain finally overwhelmed the fish’s small brain when a huge cleaver was used to slice open its stomach and force out its guts and egg sacks! Tasted good though!

The rest of Saturday afternoon was spent sat outside the shop front at the base of the guesthouse where I live. I caught up with world news reading my Guardian Weekly, solved the Sudoku and crosswords while watching my small world go by. It was bliss! As soon as my colleagues discovered I was in Phnom Srok for the weekend I got invited to the village ‘pub’ to drink beer. These opportunities are simply not to be missed. No, I’m not an alcoholic (yet), I mean that it is at these times I get to practise my Khmer, as I am without a translator at weekends, and I actually find out heaps more interesting things than during a normal day’s work. My deputy director is very good (and very patient) at talking to me in Khmer at a snail’s pace so I can understand him and there are always a high school teacher or two around wanting to practise their English. We ended up having a very bilingual conversation with me acting as a translator between teachers talking English and my Khmer-speaking colleagues. I have also prepared them all for the upcoming visit from my bong-srei (big sister!) although they are having difficulty pronouncing ‘Ruth’....

I learnt that there are changes on the horizon which may affect me and my work at the DOE. I discovered interesting political stuff which made me incredibly thankful that I was from England. Imagine having to buy your job? Or having to pay in order to get a promotion? Imagine being in fear of losing your job if your employers ever found out your political stance? Imagine being bought off because of your position and support for the opposition party or having bogus charges brought against you? Imagine how frustrating it must be to really want to help see your own country develop but at every turn you are faced by obstacles put there by your own government! Unbelievable!! And there’s a load more where that came from.

On Sunday I found Phnom Srok’s one and only Christian Church. I was late to the service (nothing new there!) and hoping to slip in the back of the 20-something congregation but no such luck. It is pretty impossible to do anything surreptitiously, much to my disappointment at times like these! So, seated at the front, I listened to the remainder of the service and afterwards was asked to stay and talk with the minister. Happy to oblige, I pulled up a chair and in a mixture of Khmer and English he asked me questions about my friends and family in the UK. After about three sentences it became starkly obvious that far from being interested in my spiritual welfare, he was much more interested in the fact that I had white skin and that by default probably had loads of money, or at least friends and family with loads of money! To cut a long, disappointing story short, he wanted to buy land for the church and a church building. Sometimes it sucks being a barang! I let him down as gently as I could and then headed to the lake for Sunday morning bacon ‘n’ eggs...

The following week finished very positively with an official visit from VSO staff from the Programme Office in Phnom Penh trekking up to Phnom Srok to see little old me!. The visit is supposed to take place 3 months into placement in order to review how things are going and check that I’m still sane. (I managed to hide the nervous twitch I’ve developed and I don’t think they noticed the cardboard cut-out characters that have moved into my spare room - sometimes I just need someone to talk to!). Prior to the visit, I reviewed my placement objectives with the DOE staff (after we found out what they were!) which turned out to be a really useful activity. The PO staff seemed quite impressed with how things were going in Phnom Srok, how relationships have developed, how I’m coping in a relatively rural and remote district and what has happened so far. It was quite a relief to hear I was on the right tracks as sometimes it’s hard to see what I’m doing here! I still don’t think I could clearly explain it to anyone!

I also recently met some of my blog readers! I bumped into Perry and Sarah from the UK at the Programme Office in Phnom Penh and after they found out I was Anna, I was quizzed about how I was feeling now, what happened to the dogs and whether I had found a new translator or not! It was so weird to be known so well by complete strangers! Lovely to know that they cared and were reading with such interest (thanks guys!) and I hope that meeting me hasn’t shattered your expectations! Anyway, for anyone else who is interested... yes, I am feeling fabulous again. I have accepted this is life for the next little while and as well as making some kind of difference for the better in this country, I’m going to try and enjoy every opportunity that comes my way!... The 5 puppies have become 3 much bigger puppies (2 were given away to families in Sisaphon) and are well on their way to becoming the same as the rest of the neighbourhood canines – sleepy or playful during the day and aggressive, hungry rulers of the streets at night. The mother dog is a very sorry looking bag of bones though... and yes, I have a new translator, Soroth, who started work this month. He has plenty of experience of working with NGOs in his home province of Oddor Meanchey and his English is very very good!

Pied de terre

Not quite satisfied with my humble rural residence in Phnom Srok, I have recently received the keys to a Pied de Terre in Sisaphon. I probably spend half my time there both for work purposes and as a weekend retreat. As much as I am loving Phnom Srok more and more as it feels increasingly like home, I do need to escape every so often in order to maintain my mental health! I enjoy catching up with using the internet, occasionally watch BBC World News and more occasionally watch a dodgy film from the 80s on HBO. Sisaphon doesn’t have much besides lots of dust but it does allow me to visit more restaurants than would be possible in Phnom Srok, drink gin and tonic and conduct conversations in English at a relatively normal speed. Corine’s placement in Malai didn’t work out as expected so she has moved into a huge house in town and very generously given me a set of keys to come and go as I like – well, until she discovers all my bad habits!

Security
It takes about half an hour to get into the house as there are a multitude of locks and keys to negotiate due to the slightly unusual layout of the abode. This makes one feel super safe although it’s a real pain in the neck if you need the toilet as soon as you get home (which I’ve noticed with annoying frequency!) or if you have locked up to go out only to realise you’ve left something on the kitchen table!

Wildlife
We have discovered that Corine is not the only full time resident at this address. Along with the expected geckos, Corine shares her house with some utterly huge spiders, a rather large and noisy lizard, some cockroaches and a bat! But they’re all very friendly when they’re disturbed by the odd human night wanderer on the way to the loo (I try my hardest to hold it till morning...!)

Neighbours
Corine’s neighbours are really friendly. There are some children who live opposite who always wave and say ‘hello’ over and over again as soon as you’re leaving or arriving at the gate. And next door there is an abattoir. Every evening at around 4 or 5 pm motos turn up with pigs strapped upside down to the back. Sometimes they have leafy branches covering their bare bellies to prevent sunburn! They usually give the odd squeal on arrival. We think they then have their last meal and get penned in for the night... until about 4 in the morning. Then, both Corine and I are awoken by the almighty death squeals of the pigs as they are killed, murdered, slaughtered! I’ve heard the saying ‘squealing like a stuck pig’ and now know exactly what that squeal sounds like. It’s horrible! Some pigs go more quietly than others, some sound like they are gurgling and drowning in their own blood, others sound like they need a few thuds on the head to finish them off, and others really don’t want to go at all. It is enough to turn a healthy meat lover into a strict vegetarian! And do you think there could be some psychological effect of waking up to the distressed squeal of a pig being murdered every morning?

Photos will make it here as soon as I can be bothered!