After being away from my district for about a month in total I had mixed feelings about heading back there. I experienced that old Sunday afternoon feeling after a really good weekend or holiday where the thought of setting your alarm clock for 6 o’clock in the morning and actually having to get up and work for your living fills you with dread and creates a rather bad mood which repels people on sight. Well, that was somewhere close to how I was feeling although at the same time, kind of looking forward to being back ‘home’!
When I arrived in Phnom Srok, there was good and bad...
The good included being back in my own bed. Over the past month I had managed to sleep in 7 different beds with 5 different room mates so being back in my own bed, despite the heat and uncomfortable Anna-shaped dent in the sponge mattress, I had the best night’s sleep I’d had for a while. It was also good to be back as Phnom Srok was full of smiles for me. People seemed to have missed me and it was great to walk down the road and have familiar faces smiling back at me! Also, there have been some home-improvements made in my absence which are very welcome. The kitchen sink has a new tap attached so that the water comes out in a stream rather than a trickle, my bedroom ceiling fan has been fixed and the dead bat corpse, which had been trapped between the window panes and starting to rot and subsequently smell, has been removed! Oh joy!
The bad included having to set my alarm for some earlier-than-natural time in the morning and having to go buy ice so that I could create one small cold space to keep water chilled. It is so hot! The baby downstairs, now about 6 months old, doesn’t recognise me after my long absence from his short life and one of the dogs was run over and killed. I half expected the dog to have died of starvation as it was literally skin and bones and just didn’t get fed despite my many comments to point this out to the family. It’s clearly survival of the fittest, a dog-eat-dog world! The poor thing was probably too weak to move out of the way of the traffic or had decided to put itself out of its own misery and commit suicide. The photo of said dog was taken months ago and does not show she at her worst... RIP!
My week back at work was full on to say the least. It was a highly productive week but not without its frustrations. I took a small group of my colleagues to visit some Child-Friendly schools in another district in the province so that they can plan their own Study-Tour there with teacher and school directors at the end of the month.
We also had numerous meetings and some school visits in order to follow up the ETL training given at the beginning of April. All good stuff and it is my Khmer colleagues who are leading me rather than the other way round which is great (but quite tiring!). Despite Soroth being an excellent and very hard-working translator, there can still be difficulties in communication and this week I have found it particularly hard. Perhaps because I’ve been out of practice for a while, or perhaps because it has been an unusually busy week packed with one thing after another, I don’t know. I have been very gently reminded by Soroth that it is not appropriate or polite for me to show my frustration at all, not even one little bit! which is a lot easer said than done. Hmmm, many lessons learnt this week!
Next week is the King’s Birthday here in Cambodia and being a very generous King, he has given the whole country 3 days off work. So yet again, I find myself being forced to go on holiday! This time Corine and I are travelling by bus to Bangkok for a long weekend city-break. We’ve heard that it takes the same amount of time to get to from Sisaphon as it does to get to Phnom Penh so we’re going to check it out and pretend to be hippy travellers for a while.
When I arrived in Phnom Srok, there was good and bad...
The good included being back in my own bed. Over the past month I had managed to sleep in 7 different beds with 5 different room mates so being back in my own bed, despite the heat and uncomfortable Anna-shaped dent in the sponge mattress, I had the best night’s sleep I’d had for a while. It was also good to be back as Phnom Srok was full of smiles for me. People seemed to have missed me and it was great to walk down the road and have familiar faces smiling back at me! Also, there have been some home-improvements made in my absence which are very welcome. The kitchen sink has a new tap attached so that the water comes out in a stream rather than a trickle, my bedroom ceiling fan has been fixed and the dead bat corpse, which had been trapped between the window panes and starting to rot and subsequently smell, has been removed! Oh joy!
The bad included having to set my alarm for some earlier-than-natural time in the morning and having to go buy ice so that I could create one small cold space to keep water chilled. It is so hot! The baby downstairs, now about 6 months old, doesn’t recognise me after my long absence from his short life and one of the dogs was run over and killed. I half expected the dog to have died of starvation as it was literally skin and bones and just didn’t get fed despite my many comments to point this out to the family. It’s clearly survival of the fittest, a dog-eat-dog world! The poor thing was probably too weak to move out of the way of the traffic or had decided to put itself out of its own misery and commit suicide. The photo of said dog was taken months ago and does not show she at her worst... RIP!
My week back at work was full on to say the least. It was a highly productive week but not without its frustrations. I took a small group of my colleagues to visit some Child-Friendly schools in another district in the province so that they can plan their own Study-Tour there with teacher and school directors at the end of the month.
We also had numerous meetings and some school visits in order to follow up the ETL training given at the beginning of April. All good stuff and it is my Khmer colleagues who are leading me rather than the other way round which is great (but quite tiring!). Despite Soroth being an excellent and very hard-working translator, there can still be difficulties in communication and this week I have found it particularly hard. Perhaps because I’ve been out of practice for a while, or perhaps because it has been an unusually busy week packed with one thing after another, I don’t know. I have been very gently reminded by Soroth that it is not appropriate or polite for me to show my frustration at all, not even one little bit! which is a lot easer said than done. Hmmm, many lessons learnt this week!Next week is the King’s Birthday here in Cambodia and being a very generous King, he has given the whole country 3 days off work. So yet again, I find myself being forced to go on holiday! This time Corine and I are travelling by bus to Bangkok for a long weekend city-break. We’ve heard that it takes the same amount of time to get to from Sisaphon as it does to get to Phnom Penh so we’re going to check it out and pretend to be hippy travellers for a while.
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