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.