Welcome back to Cambodia!

We have had a population explosion in Nida Villa. Turkeys increased by six! We didn’t even know anybody was pregnant around here until we saw the big Tom Turkey passing out cigars. If we had, the Capacity Building and Health Education Program would have strongly advised pre-natal care and birth in the local Health Center with attendance by a midwife. Now that this has already happened, we will concentrate on post-natal care, vaccinations, and advice to the mom about birth spacing. Fortunately everything went well. Mom and the little chicks are fine. Our happy villa is suffused by the warm glow of new arrivals.

We have been traveling again, although only for two days, this time to Battambang, which is a provincial city at the upper end of the Tonle Sap and capital of the biggest rice-producing province in Cambodia. Please consult the pocket map of Cambodia that I mailed to each of you, although admittedly only one per household.. We don’t have an unlimited budget, after all.

Why did we go to Battambang? No, not to see rice. The rice is all harvested. We went at the invitation of a friend who wanted to know the most auspicious date to start construction on her new house. She knows somebody in Battambang who can tell her this. Well, I wanted to see a person who would know when to start construction on a new house. I might want to start construction on a new house myself some day.

We traveled west from Siem Reap on a bus about 120 kilometers to a town named Sisophon (see map referenced above, section 6D). The road from Siem Reap to Sisophon is part of National Highway 6, a kind of Cambodian interstate. It is, alas, unpaved for most of the way between these two cities. Its design is based on the washboard model, so that you feel fortunate that you are in a bus that gives you padded seats and plenty of head room. From Sisophon, National Highway 6 continues west to the Thai border, but we turned south on the road to Battambang. That road was paved.

Our friend, who lives in Siem Reap, was coming from Phnom Penh, and we met her in Battambang. It turns out that we weren’t going to see the man about the construction date until the next morning, so we settled into our hotel and I turned on the TV and discovered that it had ESPN and–are you ready for this?–the AFC championship game between New England and Indianapolis was on live! How great is that? I saw the Colts come from behind to beat the Patriots to go to the Super Bowl. In Battambang I saw this! Then I watched the Super Bowl, which started at 6:00 a.m. Monday morning, here in the comfort of our little villa.

You may be wondering if I have forgotten that this is a blog about Cambodia. OK, you’re picture starved. Be patient.

The next morning we had to be ready at 5:00 a.m. We (nine of us) piled into our friend’s 4WD Land Cruiser and set out well before daybreak along another unpaved road deep into the countryside, passing large trucks carrying bags of rice coming the other way. I mention that not because you might be wondering what those trucks are doing so early in the morning but because we are well into the dry season now and all the mud on these dirt roads that I described in an earlier posting is now dust. Do you know how much dust a large truck on these roads leaves floating in the air to be caught in your headlights? Yes, you’re right: Lots. So much that you simply can’t see ahead. You know that even at this hour there are other vehicles going your way (not to mention more trucks coming toward you). Many are slower vehicles. Vehicles without lights. There are even pedestrians. And you can’t see more than five feet ahead. But we’ve all got our time, right? If it’s now, well, what can you do about it? So we rush on into the darkness, oblivious to what awaits us.

It turns out we came safely to a market just as light was breaking, and you will be relieved to know I got a picture or two, so this dreadful narrative will be interrupted by an illustration in just a second. This was a crowded country market that straddled the road, with vehicles of every description chugging up and down slowly to avoid all the foot traffic in the narrow passage between the market on one side of the road and the same market on the other. Eggs piled high here, tangerines there. Here is a picture of the road with vehicles and pedestrians between the market on either side.



You’ll see more of that strange looking vehicle in another photo, but note that it moves slowly and has no lights. Something to think about if you are roaring through an impenetrable cloud of dust in your Land Cruiser without regard for what might be ahead.

Another picture shows one of the large trucks that run up and down the road carrying rice and other things. It’s going to take a little while for this truck to squeeze through the market. The driver’s got lots of people and things in front of him that need to get out of the way. At least he’s going slow, so there’s no cloud of dust, and it’s daylight, so he can see.


Directly on the other side of the road, this woman prepares for a big day at the store. I wonder if she’s got anything on sale?



This gentleman is waiting for the return of his riders, whom he has brought to market. Notice the self-confidence, the swagger even? The cane is a very nice touch. He owns this country bus. It can hold at least 25 people, all pulled by one motorcycle. He will drive up and down country roads like this all day, taking on and dropping off passengers wherever they want. With volume, he can offer ridiculously low prices, which is the only way these people can afford to ride.


Speaking of low prices, you may remember that the Angkor Hospital for Children, in accordance with Ministry of Health policy, charges each patient 1,000 Riel. That includes, if necessary, seeing a doctor, getting a prescription, having surgery, spending a few nights as an inpatient. No matter how extensive the patient’s needs, the charge is 1,000 Riel, or 25 cents US, and even that is waived for patients who can’t afford it. The hospital is not a for-profit institution. It recoups next to nothing from the patients it treats. That’s why it needs your donations. There. I didn’t even show you a picture of a child, much less a weeping child, and you are reaching for your checkbook already. Thank you. I guess I owe you a picture of a child:


Whoops. That’s a tree. A strangler fig, I believe. Those are the trees with big roots that grab and tear apart the stones of the monuments at Angkor. Big tree, big roots.

Here’s a little Cambodian child. See that red spot on his chin? This kid needs to go to Angkor Hospital for Children! In those ragged clothes, he looks like his mom must be quite poor, but that doesn’t matter at this hospital. Did you know that most kids who go to Angkor Hospital for Children suffer from more than one thing? They may go in for a red spot on their chin, but the doctors find malnutrition and TB too, so they treat it all.


Speaking of cents, as we were a minute ago, you may remember that I told you that the US dollar is accepted everywhere in Cambodia as a medium of exchange. I have heard from a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer who recently visited and from reading an article in the Cambodia Daily newspaper of a scam that is taking place at the border where people make a land crossing from Thailand to Cambodia. According to the newspaper, the guides on the tour buses tell tourists that King Sihamoni is advising Cambodians that they should not accept US dollars but should favor their own currency. The guide also tells the tourists that there are no ATM machines in Siem Reap, which is where all the tourists are going, so the tourists better change their dollars to Riel at the border.

It shouldn’t be hard to put yourselves in the tourists’ shoes: first trip to Cambodia, excited about seeing Angkor Wat, the guide has been informative and helpful, the story sounds plausible (imagine, the king says this!). So you rush to the first money changer you see as soon as you walk across the border (the bus doesn’t cross the border). You don’t know what you will have to spend, so you exchange, say, three hundred dollars. You learn later, when it’s too late, that despite the staggering amount of 800,000 or so riel you put in your pocket, you should have gotten well over a million. I don’t expect that my affluent readers will make the crossing on land (unless, as a former Peace Corps Volunteer, your reputation rests on doing it the way the locals do it), but, sad to say, these things happen sometimes in Cambodia. I’m glad there are no scam artists in America!

Back to our trip to Battambang. Remember that odd-looking vehicle in the first picture above? Well, here it is with a better view. You see them all over in rural areas. They are mainly used to transport things–bags of rice, stacks of rice straw–although some also transport people, with or without the things.


Remember those Mad Max movies of post-apocalyptic Australia from twenty or twenty-five years ago? Here is another vehicle that seems to have been purchased from that film company:

And another. You wonder how they can keep these trucks working. Not with original manufacturer’s parts, that’s for sure.

This posting is supposed to be about getting a date to begin construction on a house, however, so let’s return to that subject. After the market we went in search of the man who could tell our friend when to begin. We found him in a rather nice house: Cement, two stories, some odd touches that you see here and there, for example a low ceiling in a stairway that makes you bend over lest you bump your head. We entered an upstairs bedroom used both for sleeping and for divining. While two children of the household played on the bed, our friend and several of her family members were instructed to prepare for the ceremony, which was to take place in front of a Chinese altar with candles, incense, vases, figurines, banners, fruit, and plastic plants.

Here is another view. This is in a bedroom upstairs, mind you. Though I don’t have a picture of it, the ceiling over the altar was darkened by smoke from the constant use of candles and incense.

This is the man who will divine the future for us. He was very specific in giving instructions, even going so far as to demonstrate where people should stand and how they should move. It reminds me of Cambodian wedding ceremonies, where nobody knows what to do. Do I put my hands here? Do I face this way? Do I bow to the senior monk first or just go down the line? Fortunately, Cambodian weddings are always directed by someone who has all the answers, and he sits next to the bride and groom to tell them exactly what to do. This man looks more like an aggrieved fruit vendor than a seer, don’t you think?

Here he is again lighting giant incense sticks. You can see where incense sticks are placed, in the little vase on the same table as the candles in front of the altar. Nobody ever seems to clean out the used incense sticks, which makes it hard to push the new ones down into the sand in that vase without breaking the sticks you are trying to push in. I do that all the time in pagodas, and there is never anyone around to tell me what to do with my lighted, broken incense sticks that I can’t push into the vase any more.

And here are the participants lined up with incense in hand, all stepping forward and backward in unison several times, just like he had shown them.

Finally, the last exercise involved three people in turn holding and then dropping on the floor two oddly shaped wooden pieces which you see the man in the middle here holding. From the way they fall, the seer divines an appropriate date for our friend to begin construction. That date, it turns out, is any time after Chinese New Year! And I slap my forehead and think: Well, of course! It’s obvious!

So we set off for home, all nine of us in the Land Cruiser, taking the paved road to Sisophon and then the washboard road, National Highway 6, to Siem Reap. Those of you who are thinking about coming to visit us overland from Bangkok will do well to remember that you have to come along this road.

That wraps it up, folks. Oh wait. I’m getting a message. About the little turkeys. Oh no! Are you sure? They’re not wandering around somewhere? Could they have slipped out through the gate? You saw one of the dogs.... Oh, my god. Picking his teeth with a little turkey feather? And there’s only four left? Folks, I don’t know if you understand what has happened here. I am deeply sorry to report that two of the turkey chicks have gone missing and are presumed to have been devoured. By one of our fluffy little dogs. We never would have thought this of the little fella. He’s quiet. Seems nice. Wags his tail a lot. Doesn’t bark much, and never threatened anybody. Seemed close to the other little critters. His name? Rupert. Rupert Wayne Roberts. Why do you ask?

January 8, 2007

[Editor's note: Today’s blog posting is a verbatim transcript of a lecture Mr. Richardson delivered to Tonle Sap University students and their parents on the special occasion of the third anniversary of the formation of Mekong Blogmeisters Associated. Unfortunately, a rather impertinent heckler, whom you have seen sparingly in earlier blogs, makes a more extended appearance here. Mr. Richardson has kindly asked us to present the transcript unedited on the grounds that all voices, even objectionable ones, deserve to be heard.]

Happy new year to everyone! We have been occupied for three weeks with our children and grandchildren, and I would like to report to you where we have been all that time. I know how often you wait beside the mailbox, pining for more news from your favorite blogmeister, so wait no longer. Here is the first posting in what promises to be an exciting and productive 2007.

So where did we go with our children? Well, after three and a half months in Siem Reap we finally went to the Angkor monuments to have a look. I know how visual you all are, so I will of course project pictures on the screen as proof positive that I actually arose from my hammock to lead the young members of the family on this expedition. Therefore I proudly present this first picture of the Angkor Monuments:

That’s not a monument.

What do you mean that’s not a monument? It is indeed a monument: to the creativity of man, to the hope that springs eternal, and to the power of commerce to drive human progress. Yes, it is dresses for sale. Beautiful, bright, colorful dresses. Dresses to perk up the doleful. To brighten the lives of women who simply can’t understand why their husbands will spend $10 a day to sit in a tuk-tuk, breathing foul polluted air and subjecting their sweaty bodies to a thick covering of red laterite dust, when they could easily have afforded an extra ten bucks to enjoy air-conditioned comfort in an enclosed car with a professional, smartly dressed, English-speaking driver who would have told them something intelligent about the history of Angkorian kings and the monuments they built.

Well, sorry. I don’t mean any disrespect to tuk-tuk drivers, many of whom speak fairly good English and know something about the monuments and–let us not forget this–work very hard to provide a little money for their families to eke out a hard-scrabble existence in a cruel world. They too can be acceptable guides.
So what do these dresses have to do with the monuments? The next picture should make this perfectly clear:

You see the dresses there, in what looks like a market, or more accurately a row of shops, with coconuts and cold drinks in ice boxes out front for sale to thirsty tourists? Well, for those of you who still don’t get the picture, such little shops sit across the road from or adjacent to all the major monuments at Angkor. The really minor monuments, ones that attract only a few isolated tourists simply because the monument was on some obscure list and the tourist has lots of time, will have, not shops, but children clutching trinkets (beaded bracelets, bamboo flutes) that some tourist might buy for his bratty little nephew back home. Commerce! You go to a monument, you buy a souvenir, or a dress, or a coconut (which they will quickly trim for you with a full-size machete–watch your fingers!--and neatly insert a straw for your personal use). You’ll buy something, because you came unprepared and weak and susceptible to their persuasiveness. You don’t stand a chance against these charming people.

You have to assume that people buy the things that are offered for sale here, otherwise the shops would sell something else, or would disappear. So somebody must be wearing one of these dresses somewhere, and somebody must be drinking a coconut, and somebody must be buying, for six or eight dollars, a guide book that has a high price marked on it I paid $8 out there for a book that I had already purchased in the states but forgot to bring with me. The price marked on both copies–the one in the States and the one for sale at the monuments–was $27.95. They look identical–same quality of paper, same sharpness and color in the photos, same stiff folded cover, same binding–but one was original and the other was a knockoff. I was later told I should have paid $5 for it. It is just remarkable what they can do by way of reproducing these things. Maybe what is remarkable is how much they charge for them at home.

In any event, I go into these shops and see junk I would never want, but I did buy a book, and others buy other stuff. The Cambodians who run these stalls are happy to oblige us. Despite my rant about the tacky shops on the way to Mt. Rushmore (you all remember that rant, don’t you?), I don’t begrudge these people the opportunity to make a few bucks off all the tourists who come to these magnificent monuments.

So now here’s a picture of a real monument:

This is taken from inside the outer wall of Angkor Wat looking west past the gopura, with the moon hanging low in the near distance. You may not have known that the moon comes closer to Angkor than any other place on earth. Genuine "double-blind"scientific tests have determined that the combined weight of all the stones that make up all the monuments in the concentrated area of greater Angkor exert a gravitational pull of their own, distinct from that of the earth, such that the moon, when passing directly over Angkor, dips noticeably out of its orbit in what is often considered by the non-scientific mind to be an acknowledgment of the genius of Angkor’s builders.

Did you say "dips out of its orbit"?

Moving right along, the next picture is of the grounds around the Baphuon, a temple within Angkor Thom which has largely fallen apart over the centuries. I am trying to show you some non-traditional views of the monuments, as you can plainly see.

All of those thousands of stones lying on all sides of the temple (which by their mere presence, even if not in the form of a standing temple, contribute to the scientifically verified gravitational pull of greater Angkor) were studied and tagged and numbered to identify their place in the fallen structure preparatory to rebuilding, but, alas, the records were lost or destroyed during the Pol Pot years and the tags and numbers are now all meaningless.

Excuse me, I’ve got a question.

Yes, by now you may be asking that important question, why do we call it "the" Baphuon? You may also be asking how, if the Baphuon is a temple and Angkor Thom is a temple, the Baphuon can be located inside Angkor Thom? Perchance you are also asking what is the difference between Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and Angkor Beer? Well, the answers are as follows: 1) probably for the same reason that we call that other temple within a (small) stone’s throw of the Baphuon "the" Bayon, 2) Angkor Thom is bigger, and 3) Angkor Beer tastes better. Let me explain.

No! Please don’t! Forget my question. Let’s just move on, for heaven’s sake.

Don’t be hysterical. I’ll move on soon enough. First, I don’t know why they call it "the" Baphuon or, for that matter, why they call the other one "the" Bayon, except that it doesn’t sound as silly as "the" Angkor Wat. Who would travel thousands of miles to see "the" Angkor Wat? Even the Angkorians knew there are no tourist dollars in that. Second, Angkor Thom means "big city." It is a huge piece of land enclosed within four walls about three kilometers long, making 900 hectares or...let me convert here for you–let’s see, 7 plus 3 equals 10, carry the 10, add that number over there–about 78,000 square furlongs. Today it is mostly field and forest, but when it was built it enclosed a city made of perishable materials, of which there are no traces today. Both the Baphuon and the Bayon and a number of other monuments are enclosed within the walls of Angkor Thom.

Angkor Wat means "city temple", or, if you like, "city monument." The walls of Angkor Wat also enclosed a city, although a smaller one.

I might mention also that Angkor Wat and the other temples here are not pagodas. They are monuments. Most monuments at Angkor were built in accordance with Hindu mythology to honor Shiva or Vishnu, and by extension the king or his parents, for most kings of Angkor held Hindu beliefs and had Bramin advisors. The Buddha figures found today throughout the monuments, along with the candles and incense that are used to pay respects to Buddha, are later additions. I would guess that Angkor Wat is a name given to this monument after the Angkorian civilization collapsed and Cambodia became largely Buddhist. A few of the monuments were built by Buddhist kings, but they are still not pagodas.

There is, by the way, and has been for a long time, a Buddhist pagoda within the walls of Angkor Wat. The monks in that pagoda historically have maintained Angkor Wat and kept it from succumbing to the jungle.
Now we can move on.

The next picture, taken in early morning before the sun broke the horizon, shows a great big date palm tree partially blocking the view of Angkor Wat.

You haven’t shown us a single decent picture of a monument. Just date palms and dresses and that ridiculous dipping moon.

Don’t be petulant. You want good pictures of the monuments, go buy a coffee table book. Here’s the best I can do: a picture of Angkor Wat in early morning without the date palm tree:

Speaking of trees, this next is a picture showing trees slowly destroying the wall around Ta Prohm monument.

You watch trees grow? How can this possibly be interesting?

Ta Prohm has been cleaned up a little, but it is the one monument that has purposely been kept largely in its deteriorated state so that the typical benighted American tourist, after getting off his air conditioned bus and spraying mosquito repellant on his bare legs, can see just what the jungle does to these monuments. Of course, if you go to this monument any time after 7:00 a.m. you will see nothing but Japanese tourists lining up endlessly to take pictures of each other right in front of the one thing that would make your own coffee table book a best seller if they would just get out of the way.

Ta Prohm is my favorite monument. It pays to get here early so that you can reasonably imagine that you are its discoverer stumbling across this strange and enchanting monument. Combined with the semi-darkness of the pre-dawn morning, the ubiquitous chirping of cicadas in the dark forest all around, and the absence of human voices (at this point, all you hear is the rumble of the first 50 buses bringing Japanese tourists to those little shops out at the entrance), you can imagine yourself in a different time, a different world. For about three more minutes.

Okay, I’ll slip in one more tree picture, showing a close-up of just how those tree roots dig in and grab and tear apart those heavy stone walls (please don’t show this graphic photo to the children):

You probably thought you’d never see that in your life. Well, I bring to you nature unadorned, nature demythologized, nature in all it’s heartless cruelty. You can see here, because of my careful selection of non-traditional photos, the forces of nature at work dismantling the proud monuments of man, crumbling them to dust, leaving no trace of this once-great civilization or the people who built it.

And now what you have all been waiting for: my grandchildren:


Why do they look like they’re afraid of you?

Well, Ha Ha, they haven’t seen me for months, you know, and I guess I’ve changed a bit.

They actually look terrified.

They’re not terrified. They’re just a little surprised. They thought they were going to Disney World after they got off the plane and they got me instead.

That would make them bitterly disappointed, not terrified. These aren’t your grandchildren, are they. They look like Cambodian kids.

I’ll have you know that my grandchildren are, technically speaking, Cambodian kids.

Not these Cambodian kids. Man, you’re a total fraud. Why did I pay 25 bucks for this lecture?

This next picture is of these same grandchildren of mine at play. They are sitting inside a commune office. Outside is the road going through the village and all the dust churned up by large dump trucks going back and forth.

Here’s a closeup of one of these kids, er, grandchildren. This picture is included for the sole purpose of importuning you to write a big check to FWAB.


We also went to Phnom Penh and saw the king’s palace, which I show you right here:

Next you’re gonna tell us you’ve been inside there.

We’ve been inside there, though, for the sake of full disclosure, we weren’t invited this time. He was out of town or something. The king, that is.

There’s a little park on a small hill within the compound of the Silver Pagoda next to the palace where I found this forlorn little Cambodian boy searching for something (truth? enlightenment?) under the watchful and protective gaze of several Buddha figures:

There’s something fishy here.

We drove one day to Prey Veng, a province to the east of Phnom Penh. Prey Veng turned out to have nothing of interest, so we ate lunch at what was probably the only restaurant in town and turned around and came back. On the way to and fro, however, we crossed the Mekong River at the Neak Luong Ferry. A bridge is under construction, but the ferry is much more interesting. One, it is incredibly crowded:

They pack cars and motos and pedestrians so thick I thought we would all sink and die before we got started.

A cause for celebration, surely.

Two, you have to sit and wait a while for the ferry to come before getting on, so you encounter the hoards of vendors and, unfortunately, child beggars, taking advantage of your forced wait. It is an opportune time for the intrepid photographer to get pictures such as this:

And this:

All that covering is meant to protect them against dust and auto exhaust and sunlight.

And photographers.

We also took a day trip to Oudong, a small mountain some 40 kilometers north of Phnom Penh which was an earlier capital of the Cambodian kingdom. Its long association with religious undertakings made it a suitable place for establishment of the king’s residence, for royalty and religion are linked in Cambodian thought. A number of wats and chedei (burial mounds) are found on top of the hill. The ashes of two or three kings are enclosed there. Here is a view from the top of the hill looking south across other wats below and the Tonle Sap in the distance.

And here, below, is a girl who didn’t flinch at the sight of my camera. She sat there for picture after picture, never changing her insouciant expression.

(Must...write...check.)

She doesn’t live in Siem Reap, but she would be admitted to the Angkor Hospital for Children if she could get there. No restrictions. My grandchildren would be admitted. After all–you probably don’t know this–the AHC functions as the pediatric department of the Siem Reap Hospital, so kids don’t go there, they go to AHC. See, you are learning so much, despite that crank in the second row over there.

We also visited Kep, on the coast. Kep was the playground of the rich and famous in the 1960s–fabulous villas, boat trips to the islands, parties with the cream of the diplomatic corps. It was destroyed during the civil war and the Pol Pot years. It is slowly making a comeback, but may not be able to compete with Sihanoukville, not far down the coast, which has bigger beaches and much more money being poured into it. At any rate, this is a picture of the resort as it stands now. Note the hammocks. Hammocks and a sea breeze: what more could you want?

Here are a mother and her child playing in the water of he Gulf of Siam at the beach in Kep.

Why all these pictures in silhouette? What are you up to now?

And here are two Cambodian children running out to the family boat in the evening in Sihanoukville. They may want to accompany the men on their nightly fishing trip. The girl is hobbling for some reason on bandy legs and, if you look closely, appears to need a cane just to walk. She’d probably love to run as free as the wind just once in her life.

There’s something wrong here too. What is all this artifice?

And finally, we walked way down the beach at Sihanoukville to see the fish market where the boats come in after the nightly catch. We came upon this house on the water’s edge.

Next to the house are dozens of fish and crab traps. On the other side, they sell snacks to the fishermen.

The fishing boats gather here in a small cove to unload their catch:

And here is an actual fish, to show you that they are not just wasting their time out there.

And finally, a traditional picture: a couple of boats sitting quietly in the water.

All the best to you until next time.

Forget it. I’m not coming again.

December 6, 2006

Hello Everybody,

First, some scheduling news. I know you are all lining up to come visit us, so here is when NOT to come. We will be home (California) from mid-February to mid-March, so don’t come then. We are also likely to be in the States from June 1 through August 30, so don’t come then. I know: that's the whole summer. But we will probably not be here. Our next trip home after that will be around Christmas of 2007. Other than that, we will be glad to welcome you to Siem Reap.

I thought I would show you some pictures from the last drama performance to be presented to villagers a couple of weeks ago. This time, we put on the show in the evening, the idea being, of course, to attract the adult members of the community. They will have finished work for the day, bathed and possibly eaten dinner, and would be ready to go out to a show, just like you and I might do. Except villagers don’t have the options we have. There are no restaurants out there. No McDonald’s. No take-out Chinese food. No movie theaters at the mall. Aside from a few roadside vendors who manage to appear at events like this, there are simply no options other than to do what they always do, and they wouldn’t have the money if there were.

Here’s the stage, built during the day. Next to it is a truck loaded with speakers. As you can tell, there was no lack of volume when the performance began. You can see that the truck is leaning toward the stage. The stage was built on the side of the road in front of an open field that sloped up to the road, giving people along the side of he road the opportunity to see over the heads of anyone in front. At least that’s what it accomplished, whether it was intended or not. On the other side is a swamp. Behind me, about a hundred yards up the road, was a health center. You can see the drum up on the stage. You will see it again later. As you remember from a previous posting, the drama has musical accompaniment: a fiddler, a drummer, and a guy playing a xylophone kind of thing.

Here, once again, is the curtain advertising the Capacity Building and Health Education Program. It says:

Friends Without a Border
Capacity Building and Health Education Program
Drama program to disseminate information about education and health
about preventative medicine and tuberculosis

This rather large household sits alongside the road just before you come to the stage. I would guess that this is a relatively wealthy household, given the size of the site, the fence around it, and the multiple buildings. On the other hand, it is thatch, not concrete, and it does not have a wood or metal roof. One of the things CBHEP does in the first year of the program is to get a selection of villagers themselves to produce a social map of the village. The map shows all the houses in relation to each other geographically, the size and composition of the families, the location of streams and other water, the relative level of wealth of each household based on judgments the villagers doing the survey make about the size and kinds of materials used to build the house, and other things. The map is used for a variety of purposes during the four-year program.

Another picture of the same house shows some of the livestock, at least two cows and several chickens. Everyone has chickens running around, including Villa Nida. At Villa Nida, they can’t get beyond the grounds of the villa, but in a village they can theoretically go anywhere. I see chickens big and small running around in the street here in town. I wonder how anybody knows which chickens are theirs. Is it possible that if you live close enough with chickens you recognize them? Anybody out there know about this?

Of course you will be thinking once again of bird flu, which has occurred in Cambodia and killed a few people who had direct contact with chickens. I don’t believe I have read about any cases in several months either here or in Thailand. I have seen reports of a couple in Vietnam and many in Indonesia. Cambodia is a nation of villages spread all across the country, and every villager in the country as well as lots of people in towns, even Phnom Penh, has a few chickens running around. Infected wild birds could land even in Villa Nida if they can escape the anti-wildfowl weaponry installed on our roof. (Note: I’m just kidding about the weaponry. I get comments from readers from time to time who think that I actually believe what I write.) While we don’t have weapons, we have trained our chickens to attack and kill avian intruders on sight. Anyway, as you may know, I am not worried about bird flu. If it evolves to the extent that it can transmit from human to human in my neighborhood, it will come to your neighborhood too. So there.

This picture has the same house in the background but shows actual, live people in the foreground. This is what villagers look like. This is what they dress like: women in a blouse, a "sumput", a long wrap-around skirt, and flip flops, and men, well if I had a body like this guy, I would go shirtless too. Hard, physical farm work does that for you. As we know from a previous posting, however, even a giant can be felled by an invisible germ.

Events like this attract vendors. I don’t know where they come from, but the whole store is attached to a motorbike, so they can come long distances. Some of these food vendors (there were four or five) came with more food than I thought the audience could possibly eat, especially because they would have to pay more than if they ate at home. I did not stay the whole evening, so I don’t know how well they did, but the audience turned out to be much larger than I thought it would be based on the daytime dramas I had attended. The vendors wouldn’t come if they didn’t think they could make money. You will notice that it is still light; you can see trees in the background beyond the reach of my flash.

Next is a vehicle driving through the smoke of cooking fires. This is a typical way to transport goods in villages here. It is also colorful, so people like me like to take photos of it. The oxcart, you will be interested to know, is practically unchanged since the time of Angkor. This thing appears to be made of nothing but wood and leather straps. Oxcarts carved on thousand year old temple friezes look exactly like this. They move slowly, but they carry large loads, and they are pretty stable. They can negotiate oxcart paths, after all. Come to think of it, they are the reason we have oxcart paths.

Here is another vendor who also arrived by motorbike and who seems to be exhausted from his journey. He is selling baguettes that he stuffs with several kinds of meat things. I say "meat things" because I can’t be more definitive. I ate one once, thinking it was going to be something other than "meat things," and it was OK tastewise, but I decided I shouldn’t eat any more "meat things." Another vendor was selling the same thing, so I bought just a plain baguette from her for 12½ cents. The baguettes here are generally very good. We have them most mornings at Villa Nida. Villa Nida gets really good ones from the market.

This woman is selling barbecued meat on skewers. Barbecued meat is obviously very popular in Cambodia. Her child is with her. He looks a little bored. He’s naked too, you may have noticed. That is not an atypical outfit for very small children in villages. Most of them at this age probably wear no more than a T-shirt. Where are the diapers, you say? Ha Ha Ha. Who asked that?

Here is another vendor, a woman selling barbecued chicken. Probably frogs too. She has a little charcoal burner to warm things up when a customer buys something. You will also see that she has a little oil lamp. It is getting pretty dark now. The trees behind her are illuminated by my flash. There is no electricity out here. The electric power grid simply does not reach most villages in Cambodia, which means it doesn’t reach most people in Cambodia. The natural state of things here at night is darkness. You may see a kerosene lamp or, as some of these vendors have, a small fluorescent lamp powered by an auto battery. You also see villagers walking along the canals at night with flashlights looking for frogs. They find them by the reflection off their eyes. I was in Bangkok last weekend and flew back here after dark. Less than one minute before touch down at Siem Reap International Airport, I could see only an occasional light below. As we drove into town after landing, we passed roadside food stalls that were lit by those little battery-powered fluorescent lights.

Not all the vendors sold food. Some had gambling casinos attached to their motorbikes. Gasp! And children gambled. Double Gasp! They were throwing small bills on the table all the time the wheel was spinning. The croupier (no, not that little guy with his eye on the wheel down next to number 82) swept up the bills the moment the wheel stopped and passed out to any winners one of the prizes hanging there. At least, that’s what I think was going on. You will be glad to know that I was incensed and I stormed away as soon as I realized that children were gambling.

And of course there was a vendor selling souvenirs. Mementos to remember this great evening. And people buying, as they will do. You know, you go to the beach and buy a little conch, or a pennant that says "Ocean City," which you quickly misplace and never think of again. I don’t want to give you the impression that these villagers were loaded with dough and were throwing it away on trifles, but my policy in this blog is to be transparent. I do not shade the truth. If these people have a compulsion to buy, well, who doesn’t? Who amongst us would throw the first stone?

Here is another oxcart. Note the man’s typical dress. Yes, I’m sure he’s wearing pants. Note the angry red eye of the ox on the right for having to pull this stupid cart all the time. And that guy keeps cracking his whip! You know, why can’t the chickens do some work from time to time? Just harness a bunch of chickens and the oxen can rest.

OK, here’s my last oxcart picture. For this posting, anyway. At least the oxen don’t look quite so angry. I’m thinking of publishing a coffee table book called "Man’s Eternal Friend: the Oxcart."

I assure you we are getting close to the end of this painful posting. This is a close-up of the drum, waiting to be struck. This looks like it has been passed down through the generations since Angkor. What a souvenir! I should have asked the drummer to trade it for a new one.

And finally, a picture of a small part of the crowd, near the stage. Mostly kids, but the kids sit up front, after all. I would guess there were at least five hundred people at this event, mostly adults. The evening time frame clearly attracted a large audience to our health education drama. More people saw the giant, and the pregnant woman, and the women with babies. They laughed at the slapstick and they learned about disease prevention. We spread a little knowledge, which is a precious commodity in this community. One of our great tasks is to overcome ignorance.

Our best to all,

Jim

November 29, 2006

Hello Folks,

It is time again to read another blog posting. (Gaaa! No, don’t make me!). I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the things that our Capacity Building program spends money on. I happen to have lists of expenditures for August and September here before me. This will tell you what your contributions are used for.

The first item that catches my eye is "car tire patching fees." We have a 4WD vehicle, the "car," that we use to carry things and people out to the health centers and villages. Apparently it had a flat tire, and it cost $1.93 to patch it. That’s US dollars. The dollar, as well as the Cambodian riel, is used as a medium of exchange everywhere in Cambodia. If you live here, you carry two currencies, the riel and the dollar. One dollar equals about 4,200 riel. For everyday accounting the ratio is 4,000 to one. The largest Cambodian bill I have seen (there may be something larger) is 10,000 riel, which is a little under $2,50. Obviously the riel is small change compared to the dollar, so the dollars in your pocket are worth more than the riels even if you have far more riels than dollars. If you buy something for $2.50, you will probably give them two dollars plus 2,000 riel, or you might give them three dollars and receive 2,000 riel in change. There are no coins. The riel comes in denominations of 100 (2.5 cents), 500 (12.5 cents), 1000 (25 cents), and 10,000.

When you give a merchant $20 for a purchase, and especially $50 or $100, they demonstrate their professional expertise in inspecting it’s legitimacy by holding it up to the light, closing one eye and squinting through the other, crumpling it, rubbing it, snapping it. I’ve had a bill returned because someone had scribbled a word on it, or because it was too old. For that matter, any bill of the old style, before the US government redesigned the bills to make them harder to counterfeit, is always suspect. I knew this, so when I got some hundred-dollar bills at the bank in California before coming over here, I insisted that they all be of the new style. So how about Cambodian bills, you might ask. Do they inspect them? Ha ha ha ha ha. They’re not worth anything, so why would they? You get the oldest, dirtiest bills you’ve ever seen, although not always. The newest and cleanest appear to be the 100 riel bills.

The $1.93 for patching a tire reminds me of my recent experience in doing a flush and fill on the radiator of my car, since I had no idea how long ago the last one was done, if ever. I bought the coolant at a gas station for $5.00 and took it to a garage to do the flush and fill. The garage was an open field with two concrete ramps, each with a slot up the middle so that a mechanic could walk (actually crouch) under the car to work on it from below. No hydraulic jacks here. They also drive cars up the ramp to wash them with high powered hoses, which they were doing on both ramps when I was there, probably to avoid creating a very big mud puddle around the cars if they did it on the ground.

The mechanic got to work, draining my radiator and flushing water through both the radiator and the reservoir with a high powered hose to get rid of all the coolant inside. He then closed it up, put in the coolant and the water, started the engine to see if everything was working properly, and then turned to me for payment. I asked my Cambodian friend how much to give him. (I don’t want to give you the idea that I can do Car Talk in Khmer, so I was happy to have a friend there.) He told me to give the mechanic $1.00. Add $5.00 for the coolant and you are paying about 10% of what you would pay in the US, if I remember correctly.

That $1.00 for the mechanic is actually pretty good pay for 20 minutes of uncomplicated work. I don’t know how much training he has had, but I doubt that he is a certified auto mechanic. I wonder whether there is a single certified auto mechanic in the whole country, but they do seem to know what they are doing.

By the way, I also have no idea how many riel you would receive in change after paying $2.00 for a $1.93 tire patching charge. I guess 300 riel. You take whatever they give you. At those amounts, what difference does it make? It reminds me of a three story "bookstore" in Phnom Penh which had only one shelf of novels, all by Agatha Christie, so I decided to buy an Agatha Christie novel to occupy my time. It had a $4.99 sticker on it, probably from some book store in the US that couldn’t sell it. The girl at checkout said she wouldn’t give me change.

The next item on the list is office rental for August, $267.00. Actually, the Angkor Hospital for Children pays the rent for the white house, where we work. We sublet the downstairs for offices while the hospital offers the rooms upstairs to volunteers who provide their assistance to the hospital gratis. Since both the hospital and the Capacity Building program are facing cuts in the budget next year, the hospital will stop providing housing to volunteers, so they will stop renting the white house. That means we will have to find another home. In case you are wondering, I share an office (which was designed as a bedroom) with three other people, including the Program Manager.

The next item is Telesurf fees for August of $63.80. Telesurf is the internet service provider that we use. They charge a flat fee for the month, but add a surcharge if you download more than is allowed under that fee. You can pay more for them to raise the amount you can download. They do that at your home, too. I inquired of an ISP about connecting at Nida Villa. The price was $70.00 per month plus a surcharge for excessive downloading. I don’t remember how much downloading they allowed before adding the surcharge. It sounded like a lot, but do you know how much you download in a month? So we decided not to connect to the internet at our villa. It would not have been a particularly fast connection either. A faster connection would have been $120.00 plus a surcharge for excessive downloading, but even then it would not have been what we call broadband in the US.

Another expense was training materials for four village health volunteer monthly meetings in the Reul, Angkor Thom, Angkor Chum, and Char Chhouk health center catchment areas held between July 26 and July 31. The cost for these materials was $6.20. See? Even if you give as little as $6.20, you can enable us to buy training materials for monthly meetings with village health volunteers so they keep their villagers better informed about good health practices. A little money goes a long way over here. One hundred thirteen volunteers attended, by the way.

Those volunteers received per diem to reimburse them for the costs of attending a meeting away from their villages. It seems only fair to do this; they incur expenses that we should reimburse. The per diem was $1.20 each, totaling $135.60. There are a lot of per diem expenses on the list. We pay per diem to villagers and health center workers to attend our meetings and workshops, sometimes held for several days at the Angkor Hospital for Children. We also give our own staff per diem when they travel.

The 4WD car needed a new battery. $48.00. Another transportation expense: $32.02 to change the oil and replace the front baskets on two motorbikes. And another motorbike expense: $1.00 for unspecified repairs.

Uh oh. Here’s one for $15.25 for balloon and mask to elect village health volunteers in Char Chhouk. That’s right: balloon and mask. Now I am obviously not hiding anything from you. I believe in transparency. I didn’t have to mention this one. If you are going to give money, you need to know what you are giving it for, and here you are giving it for "balloon and mask." I’m sure there is some justifiable connection between an election and balloon and mask. I will get to the bottom of this.

Can you take a few more of these? I’ll post a picture to keep your interest alive. Let me rummage through my picture box here for a minute. There’s one from India; but you want Cambodia. There’s one–whoops! Ha Ha. Got that one off the internet. Ah, here we go, a picture of part of the old market in Siem Reap.

I am standing in front of the Siem Reap book store taking this picture. That’s Pub Street starting over there in the middle; they close it off to cars at night. It is a short street with a number of bars and restaurants. The old market is very nice, actually–there are lots of other stores, including gift shops, bookstores, travel agents, and an open-air market with fresh food, clothing, luggage, and all kinds of stuff. There is a clothing store called Hollywood where I bought some shirts and a pair of LACOSTE pants. That’s right: LACOSTE. It’s printed right there on the inside of the waistband: LACOSTE. About $20, as I recall. Two shirts had a LLBTISS label, and the other one said JINDULUOLAN. I’m not kidding. And they are all in capital letters. Top-of-the-line men’s wear. You can’t find these labels in the States. The old market fills up with tourists at night and–I’m told–keeps going pretty late. We stay home and watch HBO movies. We’re retired, after all.

Anyway, where were we? Another expenditure: $3.08 for gasoline to power a generator to show a health promotion film in the field. Most of the gasoline we purchase is for the diesel 4WD and for motorcycles. There are may entries for gasoline, as you might imagine, with all the motorbike traveling we do.

Another: $24.64 for material needed to renovate a water well at Angkor Chum health center. One of the things the program does is to pay for any renovations needed at the health center when it comes under our care. That includes inside and outside the health center–the water well, a water tank, an external privy, a baby weighing scale, health related posters, medical supplies, drugs, etc.. We bring it up to professional standards and make sure it has what the Ministry of Health calls the Minimum Package of Activities. We also give the staff professional training so they have confidence that they can provide good service.

Here’s a bill for drinking water for village health volunteers training at Char Chhouk, $2.00. Clean drinking water, as you might imagine, is a big deal. We provide it at meetings. Most villages lack clean drinking water, and that is the cause of much of their sickness. Hence our work with Rotary to provide small water purifiers, ideally one to every three households in the villages. I’m sure I will be writing more about that later.

Well, you have been very patient, and I appreciate that. More later when I think of something else to occupy your time.

News break: I have been told, confidentially, so don’t breathe a word about this, that I would at some point witness–yes, witness–the use of balloon and mask, and then I would understand; but that I could not understand without witnessing it up close, deep in the jungle, far from the watchful eyes of The Authorities. I will at that time have a report for you. (Keep this under your hat!)

All the best!

Jim

October 31, 2006

Hi folks!

Bought a car. Yep, we bought a car. I wanted a motorcycle, because it is so easy to get around on a motorcycle. You zip here and zip there. But that is seen precisely as the problem–you can zip right into something. The car we bought is an old Corolla, older than the Corolla that we used to have in Virginia. The air conditioner works, which is important here. The motor runs, which is always helpful. The tires are good. Four of the five seatbelts work. We could even drive to Phnom Penh if we wanted to, but then we would have to drive in Phnom Penh, which is much worse than driving here. I can’t imagine driving in Phnom Penh; it would be suicidal. Every traffic law in the world, including the three on the books in Cambodia, are willfully ignored in Phnom Penh. The three laws in Cambodia are 1) stop when asked to by signs or lights; 2) drive on your own side of the road, Dummy; and 3) you get no points for hitting grandmothers.

I will still be riding motorcycles, or motos, as we call them, from time to time. They are Hondas that the Capacity Building Program bought used. That’s how we tend to get out in the country, given the state of the roads here, and the Program needs to get to the health centers and villages. Moreover, as we add two new health centers to work with each year, we are reaching farther out in the province. Last week, the two dramatic performances I mentioned in the last posting were delivered some 50 or 55 kilometers from home. Even four-wheel drive vehicles can’t go where motos can go, or if they can, they do it more slowly. For that matter, four-wheel drive vehicles on some of the country roads around here get passed by bicycles, which even village matrons can pedal quietly around deep potholes without missing a beat.

To get to the first day's performance, I rode on the back of a moto, holding on for dear life. There’s something more scary about sitting on the back, having no control, being largely unable to see around the driver, than about driving your own moto. So for two hours I gripped the bars underneath the seat thinking that would protect me. Even if we didn’t hit anything, the bumps throw you up in the air and you wonder where the moto will be when you come down. The second day, I rode out in a small bus and rode back in the four-wheel drive. The bus is not a normal part of our vehicular repertoire and the four-wheel drive is not always available, so I have been told to expect to drive a moto in the future when we go out to the villages.

This coming Wednesday I will drive to work for the first time in our new car. Tomorrow, Monday, is a holiday. Actually today, Sunday, is the holiday; it’s the anniversary of the present king’s accession to the throne (King Sihamoni). But the holiday is observed tomorrow. Tuesday is also a holiday. It is the birthday of the previous king, King Sihanouk. So on Wednesday I will drive to work. My guess is that by fighting my way skillfully through traffic I will get there in six or seven minutes. If I were going to the Angkor Hospital for Children, it would take only five minutes. But I go over to the Wat Damnak area now–you all know it: cross the Siem Reap River, take a right past Wat Damnak, turn left down a dirt road to what we call the "White House." That’s where the Capacity Building Program works. We don’t spend our money on frills.

I am actually writing this posting before sending the previous posting, which I hope to send to you tomorrow morning if possible. (Yes, I’ll be working on a holiday.) If I manage to do that, those of you who live in America will receive it today, Sunday. That’s why we will outlive you, having gone west to get east. We do things before you even think of them. We are always in the vanguard. If you remember, we discussed this issue in an earlier posting.

I wanted to get this new posting going so that I can send you some pictures of the performances that I have been telling you about. The two messages of this performance were tuberculosis and childhood vaccinations. We limit the messages to two at a time because it is easier to remember only two. (I say "we" limit, but of course I don’t limit anything. I just work here, trying to help them with administrative stuff. All these decisions are made by people who have experience in these kinds of things. If I were the audience, they would have to limit the message to one, or perhaps not even bother.)

These two performances were both given in the morning, which meant that most adults were working in the fields and couldn’t come, so our audience consisted mostly of rapt children. Putting shows on in the evening can be complicated, though, both for the audience and for us, but we want to try it soon.

The first show was delivered from a concrete stage in the middle of a field across the road from a school. The only shade came from the roof over the stage and from a large tree about thirty meters from the stage and to the right. The audience stayed in the shade. Fortunately, the tree shade fell to the left, bringing them roughly in front of the stage rather than farther to the right, where they would have stayed relatively cool but missed the show. As the sun moved over the horizon during the course of the morning, the shade moved, and so did the people. Every time I looked, the audience had shifted to cover a different patch of ground. The second performance took place in a large meeting hall with a roof overhead in a pagoda. This allowed the entire audience to sit under the roof and watch the performance.

The performances include skits that give messages and other skits that are just funny. The performance started with the voice of a giant coming from backstage. It was a low pitched, guttural voice–loud, commanding. He came frontstage, continuing to talk in this low growl.


Note the shoes and the microphone. All the actors carried a wireless microphone, but only the giant wore athletic shoes. I don’t know if that was deliberate or if that’s just how he felt comfortable. The story line in this skit, I was told, was that a mere germ, so small that you can’t see it, can’t possibly bring down a giant, but of course this giant started getting a cough. The writing and symbol behind him on the curtain announce that the show is presented by the Capacity Building Program.

The performance was accompanied by three musicians, one on a single-stringed instrument played with a bow, one on drums, and one on a kind of xylophone.



The man with the stringed instrument, whom I will call the fiddler, played during most of the performance; the drums and xylophone joined in during transitions between skits. I took another picture of the fiddler by himself and noticed his foot and the television that sat facing the players, not facing the audience.


What was the TV for? Well, later they played karaoke on the TV. The audience couldn't see the TV but they could hear the music. An actor could see the TV and sing the words that appeared at the bottom of the screen. All the power for the sound system and the TV was supplied by a generator that we brought along.

I figured the fiddler was likely to have another foot and wondered where it was. I went around to his side of the stage and got a peek between the TV next to him and the curtain and rail behind him. Here it is:

Notice the rapt audience:

By the way, I want to develop within you a Pavlovian response to pictures of children such as these, so that when you see pictures of Cambodian children you can’t help but think must...write...check, and you will grab your checkbook and write a check to FWAB. With each check, you help fund both the Angkor Hospital for Children and the Capacity Building and Health Education Program. How can you beat that? (Yes, Uncle Gaylord, in the U.S. you get a tax deduction.) For more information, just click here:

http://www.fwab.org/Pages/donations.htm

Another skit dealt with childhood immunizations and why they are critical to the child’s health. Here are two young women carrying their babies discussing the recommended schedule of vaccinations and pointing out that vaccinations are available at the health center.

Here is another skit that takes place at the health center between the nurse and several patients.

There were silly skits:

There was poignant drama:

There was song:

One of the last skits was a boxing match:

The rest of the pictures may gross some of you out. You may decide when you get to the end of this paragraph that you don’t want to see them. Near the end of the first performance, some of the actors who had no more roles to play started cooking lunch for the whole group. I had earlier seen a large frog that someone had captured. They tied a long ribbon around the frog’s leg so he could hop around but couldn’t escape. I had not, however, seen a plastic bag full of live frogs, shown in the first picture here. The man standing on the left is taking out one frog after another and cutting off the head against a tree (second picture) with a machete. The head falls to the ground. (This is not shown clearly in the picture.) He throws the body into the pot of now bloody water (third picture), from which the boy and the two men take them out and pull off their skin, which is left on the ground. (Isn’t it nice to see a young boy learning a trade?) Then they break up the pieces of frog by hand (fourth picture) and place them in the large cooking pot (last picture), to which oil, greens, salt and other condiments are added to cook them. Gross? Think about how you get your chickens pieces or your sausage. The large captive frog escaped the pot. I don’t know whether he escaped from captivity.

Gotta go. It’s lunch time.

October 30, 2006

Dear Readers,

We’re back. Back on line and back in Cambodia. These blog postings don’t come every day, so savor them when you get them.

Got out into the villages again. Best part of this job. We went to see a little drama troupe practice for an upcoming production. I'm told that the members of the troupe are mostly from Kampong Thom Province. They earn money by putting on shows. When they do a show for the Capacity Building and Health Education Program, they include messages about a couple of health issues, in this case TB and vaccinations. The Program has a number of other messages to tell, for example malaria, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, prenatal care, but each performance is limited to two so as not to confuse people with too many messages. The performances are accompanied by three musicians, one who plays a stringed instrument throughout the show, and two others on drum and xylophone who contribute during transitions from one skit to the next.

Villagers love to watch dramatic performances and they remember what they hear in a dramatic performance much more than they remember what they hear in a lecture. Sounds like the rest of us, doesn’t it. So a group of three talk about tuberculosis: one of them is coughing and the other two tell him what it may indicate and suggest strongly that he go visit the local health center to get it checked out. It’s not as dry as that: a little song and a little dance and a little slapstick are included in the skit. Or they discuss the importance of getting a child vaccinated so as to provide immunity against a variety of diseases. Skits with messages are interspersed with skits that are just fun, for example a comic boxing match.

When we saw them, they were practicing under a large house in a village. You will remember that Khmer houses are traditionally built on stilts so as to leave room underneath for live dramatic performances. A rather small crowd of people watched, mostly children. Several of my colleagues from the Program offered support and suggestions.

This performance will be presented twice in the next two days at different locations convenient to as many villages as possible. In addition to passing on important health messages, it encourages villagers to use the health centers that the government has established all over the country. Health centers have not been particularly visible in the past, nor have they been well managed or adequately staffed with trained nurses. So the Program is also working to upgrade the professionalism of the health centers to ensure that it is staffed from nine to five, as promised, that nurses are trained, that it is equipped with appropriate medicines and vaccines, that it has a working well and clean drinking water, that it has a model vegetable garden, and that it has clean sanitary facilities. At the same time, the Program trains the village health volunteers so that they can be effective front-line health workers providing advice and direction to the villagers.

Today’s visit was unexpected, so I didn’t have my camera. When I went to work, I thought I would be reviewing records of Program expenditures all day. Fun, fun, fun! I hope to be able to take some pictures at the live performances so that you can see what this is all about. There are a few pictures below on another subject, however, for those of you who like multi-media presentations.

Where are we back in Cambodia from, you may ask. We went to Vietnam. Why did we go? Because I (Jim) had had two consecutive 30-day, single-entry visas and had to leave. Foreigners have to work their way through a complicated set of steps to get a long-term multiple-entry visa. One requirement is to acquire a written request from the Minister of Foreign Affairs himself that asks the immigration officials at the border to issue a three-month single-entry business (not tourist) visa upon my reentry. I have now acquired that. The final step, which the Angkor Hospital for Children is doing for me (they’ve been very helpful through all this), is to get a six-month multiple-entry visa, which will need to be renewed every six months but with no requirement to leave the country again in order to do so.

The reason we went to Vietnam rather than someplace else is that we were able to book a five-day tour with a travel agent here in Siem Reap that took us to Ho Chi Minh City and Dalat. Simply because of the airfare, flying to Bangkok would have been much more expensive, and we have seen Bangkok often already.

Part of the excitement for me, at least, was making a land crossing rather than flying. Our little bus (a Ford) comfortably carried eight of us plus a driver and a guide to the border, going through territory that was occupied at various times in the 1960s and 1970s by the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese army, the Americans, the Khmer Rouge, and always the long-suffering Khmer people who lived and farmed there and dodged bullets and bombs (unsuccessfully for hundreds of thousands of them) for years.

Vehicles weren’t allowed to cross the border, so we unloaded the bus and took our luggage through Cambodian customs, then shlepped it about two hundred yards to Vietnamese customs and immigration officials, then got on another bus with another guide and another driver to continue into Vietnam. This guide was a Khmer Kraum, or a southern Khmer, which is to say a Khmer from the Mekong Delta, which was Khmer territory before the Vietnamese swept south. He spoke both Khmer and Vietnamese.

We didn’t see Ho Chi Minh City in any organized way, but it appeared to be a very large, sprawling, crowded, noisy, polluted place, which is not so different from other major cities in this part of the world. I remember it from 1970 as less crowded and less noisy and full of barbed wire and Americans, but still a graceful and beautiful place, characterized by French colonial architecture, sidewalk cafes, and women riding Vespas with their ao dai fluttering behind in the wind. The ao dai is gone, unfortunately, except for sales girls in the more expensive shops and school girls in some schools. Clothing of choice for women is pretty much the same there now as anywhere: jeans and blouses predominate.

People getting married, however, seem to dress alike in much of the world. Here are young newlyweds getting their picture taken by a professional (with me horning in) in a public park in Ho Chi Minh City that would have been a nice park in any American city.

We went to a wonderful children’s park in Ho Chi Minh City too, with a lake, a zoo with crocodiles and snakes and monkeys, and an amusement park with full-scale rides including a roller coaster and a ferris wheel (see picture). I thought it was wonderful that the city put money into that park to entertain the children. It is a luxury that you don’t see in many poor countries.

And here are two women in the park hoping to be rescued from the dragons. They are sisters from Cambodia, and part of our tour group.

Dalat is a much different place. It is nearly a mile high in elevation, surrounded by mountains, a small lake at its center, full of French colonial architecture that is clean and well-maintained. It has long been a resort, a place to get away, relax, unwind. It is a place for honeymooners, whom you see strolling by the lake shore hand in hand. We walked around one evening after dinner, stopped for coffee at a café, watched students from two universities waving pom poms and singing cheers (cynical American students would find that amusing), made our way through night markets selling food, souvenirs, warm clothing. It was cool, maybe in the upper sixties. I was wearing a T-shirt, but Vietnamese were more likely to have wrapped themselves warmly in parkas and gloves and scarves. LL Bean (another plug!) could make money with a store in Dalat. Alas, no ao dai here either.

Outside town, you can ride a gondola, climb a mountain, visit a garden, stop at a small shop for tea, buy a bottle of liquor with a cobra and a scorpion inside for potency, ride a sled on a track down a steep hill where you have to do the braking because there is nothing else to stop you. We visited a place where the only activity seemed to be trying to make a wooden tabletop swivel without actually touching it. Nobody accomplished that, but it didn’t seem to matter. Dalat is the most charming town I have seen anywhere in Southeast Asia, though I may still find one better.
Our guide hired a photographer for half a day to take pictures of us. I don’t think he took a single picture of me, which was perfectly fine. Instead, he seemed to want to take pictures of the women in our group. I can’t blame him for that. The women will buy his pictures. He was good at posing his models and I stood behind him to get a picture of this pose by one of the two sisters surrounded by dragons in the picture above.

The next one shows the mountains around Dalat. It has just rained, leaving low clouds in the valleys.

This is a picture of a vegetable garden next to a pond and a shack, possibly someone’s house, taken from the gondola in the mountains above Dalat as we passed over. The Vietnamese have cultivated nearly every piece of land available. They number about 84 million people, compared to Cambodia’s 14 million or so.

Finally, at least for this part of today’s lecture, I took a picture of this woman at a waterfall just below the city of Dalat when we were on our way back to Ho Chi Minh City. I thought she was Vietnamese, but it turned out that she was Khmer too, part of another Khmer tour group following the same schedule we were following.

When we returned to Ho Chi Minh City (I still want to call it "Saigon"), one among our group suggested that we stop at a restaurant he knew where the food was particularly good, a place called "quan an ngon," according to their business card. This restaurant has no kitchen and prepares no food. All the items on their menu are made by carefully selected contract chefs scattered around the first floor who do their cooking in full view of the clientele. Instead of looking at the menu, you can walk around and decide what to eat based on what you see them making. It had been raining (it rained about three times a day in Vietnam when we were there) and the water was dripping from tarpaulins that sheltered the open center of the restaurant, keeping the tile walkways wet and glistening. The waiters were solicitous and polite, but didn’t seem to speak any English, much less Khmer, so our guide was more than helpful. We had thought to have just a snack, but started to order real food and ended up having what looked very much like a full dinner. Ten people. One or two dishes each, plus cold drinks.

We left to go straight to our scheduled dinner, which was on a boat on the Saigon River. (Apparently they retained the name Saigon for the river.) We ate very little there but enjoyed the show, which consisted mostly old people (I'm not one of them!) singing and dancing with a very versatile band backing them up. Our guide, who is young, took the stage to sing a Cambodian love song (they always seem to be about unrequited love) and the band knew the music to that too. After dinner, the boat pulled away from the dock and they gave us a little trip up and down the river.

On the way back to Phnom Penh the next day, we had to wait for a ferry to carry us across a river. I took this picture of a woman waiting in the cab of a truck next to us.

Finally, at least in terms of visual aids in this installment, this picture tells you where those big red aromatic Christmas candles come from. Yes, Vietnam. No, wait! Those aren’t candles. Those are tiny shrimp being sold in the Ho Chi Minh City market. Sorry for the mistake. My bad.


Our best to all of you.
Viriyane and Jim

October 4, 2006

Dear Friends,

We have a lot to talk about today, so put on a pot of coffee, settle comfortably in an easy chair (not a hammock, because we don’t want you falling asleep), and take it all in. I want you to learn as much as possible about Friends Without a Border and Cambodia.

The Angkor Hospital for Children, as you know, serves children in Siem Reap Province, or for that matter any child who comes from anyplace for help. The problem is that many children can’t come here. They live in distant or remote areas. They have no transportation. They have no money to pay anyone to provide transportation. They may not have heard about the hospital. Worse, their parents may not know what is happening to the child or that it can be treated successfully with modern medicine. But the hospital can’t easily be replicated in other locations to make it more accessible to these children.

So in May, 2001, Friends Without A Border initiated a second Project (after the hospital) called the Capacity Building and Heath Education Program (CBHEP). The idea is to build the capacity and improve the quality of community health services throughout the province (Capacity Building) and to improve health promotion practices among the population of the province (Health Education).

Under government mandates, the province is divided into 60 health center catchment areas. Each one contains a health center staffed by nurses who can provide basic treatment and refer more difficult cases to referral hospitals, of which there are only three in a province with nearly 900,000 people. Each village is mandated to have at least two village health volunteers who work with the people to introduce good health practices.

The program which FWAB has undertaken is designed to raise the level of service provided in health centers, to train the village health volunteers, and to integrate the two with each other and with the operational health districts that oversee the health centers. The goal, as noted, is to upgrade health services throughout the province and to increase public awareness of good health practices.

This is a small program with limited funding. The program takes two new health centers each year into a four-year program, so at that rate it will take 30 years to work with all the currently existing health centers. That is not a criticism. Resources are limited.

So where do I fit in? I am now working in administration for the Capacity Building program: I draw up plans, write reports, attend meetings. Sounds like a job. I just got started with this program last week and have lots to learn. Most of the time I will be in the office. The really fun thing I get to do, though, is travel to health centers and villages. It is heaven getting out there! Of course, I know I don’t have to live there, but it is especially beautiful at this time of year.

I have made three trips so far accompanying the head of the program. The first was in a large, old land rover to a health center and a village, the second was on the back of an old motorcycle to a village school. (The program buys only used vehicles.) Both trips were difficult. One village was accessible not by a road but only by an ungraded bullock cart track. The land rover would have been too wide for the track. The third trip was in the land rover again.

This is still the rainy season. It had rained hard the night before we went out on a motorcycle and water was everywhere–in the rice paddies, filling the potholes, coursing across the trail. Whether mud or water, unpaved roads are a uniform reddish brown color, and the road is treacherous. You can slide down the bank into the rice paddies; you can slip down the sides of potholes; you can slide even on level ground. We came upon a pothole that filled the entire road, leaving no way to go around unless we wanted to drive into the wet paddy on one side or the other. We drove straight into the pothole, not knowing how deep it was. At the bottom, the sparkplug got wet and the engine stopped. I got off the motorcycle and found myself standing in muddy water up to my knees. Fortunately we got the spark plug working and we were on our way, until we started spinning and put our feet down to keep from falling over completely. My already wet shoe filled with oozing reddish-brown mud, making a mold around my foot.

Our destination was a school where villagers had gathered to hear about clean drinking water. The program cooperates with Rotary International to install Bio-sand water filters that are cheap, small enough for a single household, and provide clean water instantly just by dumping in a bucket of any water the villager can find, even a bucket of canal water where the water buffalo have been wallowing. They also require almost no maintenance. The only difficult thing about them is that they have to be built carefully (which the program is doing) and the sand and gravel have to be sifted properly so that they will filter the water correctly.

Since I didn’t do any of the talking at this school, I wandered around looking for things to photograph. I did this for YOU, because I know you don’t even read my text, you just look at the photos.

Here is one of a girl riding her bicycle along a path behind the school with rice paddies as far as you can see. (This has nothing to do with the program; I just like the picture.) Note the barbed wire. It forms a fence around the school yard. I asked why they use barbed wire and was told it was to keep out cows.



Whenever such a meeting is held with adults, the children are curious and stand outside at the windows to watch and listen. Here are two of those kids, a boy and a girl. They were a little small to see over the window sill, so they found themselves in front of my camera instead. How can you not love these children! (Please write a check to FWAB today!)

Next is what I think is probably a better than typical house in a village. The woman in blue and orange is a village health volunteer. She held a meeting in the open space in front of this house three days before, when the ground was drier and people could sit down on mats to listen.

Here is a picture of a health center out in the countryside, just so you get a feel for what they look like. A typical health center will have from three to nine staff, all trained nurses and midwives. They will have several rooms for private care and one or two for giving birth.

Behind this health center I found an old ambulance now in retirement, ignored and unused, much like me.

On another subject, a fifteen-day holiday nearly slipped by without waking me from my hammock. I had never heard of Pchum Ben before. Pchum Ben, you say? Fifteen-day holiday?

My usual sources (Hearsay and Innuendo) were not very fruitful, so I went to the internet to learn more. Someone named Vathany Say had actually done research about Pchum Ben. I will quote her in full. It tells you a lot about Khmer people and their beliefs. It isn’t too long.

"Cambodians believe that although most living creatures are reincarnated at death, some souls, due to bad karma, are not reincarnated but rather remain trapped in the spirit world. Each year, for fifteen days, these souls are released from the spirit world to search for their living relatives, meditate and repent. The fifteen-day observance of Prachum Benda, or Ancestors' Day, is a time for living relatives to remember their ancestors and offer food to those
unfortunate enough to have become trapped in the spirit world. Furthermore, it is an important opportunity for living relatives to meditate and pray to help reduce the bad karma of their ancestors, thus enabling the ancestors to become reincarnated and leave the torment and misery of the spirit world.

"Prachum Benda, better known colloquially as Pchum Ben, may be translated as "gathering together to make offerings" (prachum meaning "gathering together" and benda meaning "offering"). The observance usually begins in mid-September and lasts an entire lunar cycle, constituting the fifteen days that ancestral spirits are given to visit their living relatives. In the year 2003, the specific dates for its commencement and conclusion are September 11th and September 25th, respectively.

"Pchum Ben is the fifteenth and final day of the observance and consists of a large gathering of laity for festivities at the local Buddhist temple. Each day leading up to the fifteenth, however, is also important and special. Different families host services at the temple on each of the fourteen days prior to the final celebration. The days leading up to Pchum Ben are known as Kann Ben (kann meaning "hosting or holding") and are numbered one through fourteen accordingly.

"Prior to the day a family or families are scheduled to host a Kann Ben, relatives and close family friends will go to the temple to make preparations. During the preparations, urns of ancestors, traditionally kept on temple grounds, are polished and brought to the viheara (the main chanting room). Also, the names of ancestors are recorded onto an invitation list. This is important because spirits cannot receive offerings unless they are first invited to do so by living relatives. In the evening, the host family and other participants will join the monks in the viheara for meditation and chanting. The monks will then pass on the Buddha's teachings, as well as offer blessings and guidance to those present.

"Before sunrise on the morning of the Kann Ben, special food is prepared for the ancestral spirits to enjoy. Favorite dishes of various flavors and colors are offered. They range from the simple and traditional nom ansom (sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves with assorted fillings) to the more elaborate and rich amok (steamed fish fillet marinated in a complex mix of spices and herbs). As a gesture of kindness, the hosts also prepare bai ben (steamed sticky rice mixed with sesame seeds and then formed into balls) to be thrown into shaded areas about the temple grounds. This mixture is an offering to the hungry souls who have been forgotten or no longer have living relatives to make them offerings.

"Before noon on Kann Ben, candles and incense are lit and the various dishes are offered to the monks. The prepared list of names is then recited and burned. The reading and burning of the list is a ritual performed to alert and direct the wandering souls to the location of their families. It is an invitation for the ancestral spirits to join their living relatives as they commemorate life. After consuming the proffered meal, the monks continue to chant blessings, sprinkling (or showering) holy water onto the families and their visiting ancestral spirits. The Kann Ben is a time of remembrance and an opportunity to accumulate good karma on behalf of one's ancestors.

"The rituals of Kann Ben continue for fourteen days. On the fifteenth day, the traditionally observed Pchum Ben, families in the local area gather to perform the same ritual of ancestral remembrance and offer an immense communal feast. This day is especially important because if any ancestors are unfortunate enough to have become Priad spirits, it is the only day that they may receive offerings of food and benefit from the good karma earned by their relatives. Priads are the most miserable of all souls due to their exceptional bad karma. Unlike other spirits, Priads fear light and can only receive prayers, food and be reunited with their living relatives during the darkest day of this lunar cycle, the day of Pchum Ben.

"Participating in the Pchum Ben, whether as a host or participant, is a very important aspect of Cambodian culture. It is a time of reunion and commemoration. It is a time to express love and appreciation for one's ancestors. By offering food and good karma to those possibly trapped in the spirit world, living relatives help assuage their misery and guide them back into the cycle of reincarnation. After the ancestors are reincarnated, they have the opportunity to accumulate good karma on their own and look forward to attaining a peaceful inner spirit, which is the best blessing a living relative can wish for their ancestors."

My direct experience with Pchum Ben was limited to the fifteenth day, although I started hearing about people going to the pagoda to observe Pchum Ben for days before that. We joined friends on the fifteenth day to take food that they had prepared to the pagoda. They had four containers of food, and it turned out that they went to four different pagodas, presenting one container to a monk at each pagoda. (Monks were stationed at key points to receive the food and chant blessings for the donor.) While the monk chanted, the food was spirited away and the empty container was returned. This happened so fast and with such stealth that I didn’t see it happen at all even though I was watching for it by the time we got to the third and fourth pagodas. (You can see how seriously I was listening to the blessing.)

The pagodas were crowded and noisy. People bustled about, met old friends, presented food, received the blessings of the monks. The ubiquitous loudspeakers at these events drowned out most everything else: always some guy talking with the volume turned all the way up. The monks seem to look forward to Pchum Ben because they eat very well for fifteen days and receive new clothing and money to buy the few things they can own.

The holiday officially covers only the last four days, when all government offices, schools, shops and businesses are closed. Even Angkor Hospital for Children was closed except for emergencies. Fortunately, restaurants largely remained open.

Why did we go to four pagodas? Well, everyone seems to have a different take on these events, and our friend’s mother believes that the spirits of her ancestors may come to only one pagoda, so in order not to leave them without food, it is best to take food to each pagoda which they might choose to visit. Consequently, we spent most of that morning driving from one pagoda to the next.

The first picture was taken at our friend’s house. It shows sticky rice with beans in banana leaves (nom ansom) roasting over a fire. They have already been steamed; the roasting dries out the excess water and allows them to be stored longer. The heat is directly underneath, but they increased its intensity by placing the metal signboard in front and leaning a sheet of corrugated tin over the top. The stuff roasted for hours. It was very good, by the way. The bamboo table did not burn as I thought it would.

The next picture is of an open market next to the West Baray, a man-made lake built in the time of Angkor. This woman is barbequing fish, chicken, and frogs. Most of what you see is already cooked and is simply being kept warm near the heat. We bought some of each to have for lunch. (It was hardly worth it for the frogs, they had so little meat.) You will notice, if you look closely, that hammocks hang in the background. Behind each of these vendors is a long raised platform where people can sit and have lunch and take a nap in a hammock if they wish.

The last picture shows the platforms and the hammocks more clearly. It was still early, so the platforms are largely unoccupied. There are a couple of people sleeping in the background on the left. A morning nap!

Our best to all of you.