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
