the saturday before election day

unfinished but thought id put them down:
I have woven-mat marks on my cheek waking from a day-sleep. I returned to bed at a western hour, one in the morning, and awoke at a late khmer hour, 6.30. And its not quite enough.
Today the wat is ringing out on all its megaphones and the thunderstorm this last hour shook the house more than any I remember. But one noise is missing. The parades of men (and some women) in their matching t-shirts and baseball caps, on moto and pick-up truck, loudspeakers blaring with ecstatic crowd noise and the fervent rising of promising speech, have ended from today. Sometimes a thousand people festooned the city in this noisy, unvarying way (the government party, who can give everyone a 10kg bag of rice, two litres of petrol and USD2.5 for a morning's participation). The poorer parties had much less.
Tomorrow Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party will win by a large margin (and they’ve changed the constitution just in case to only require 51% majority of seats in the house to make a government rather than 70%). This will continue the reign of a leader in place since 198>>>>
I feel angry and immensely disappointed about this outcome because I work in government and see the spiky tangled pathologies of corruption that a system with so little public spending necessitates. I feel frustrated because as a foreigner who can understand(ish) Khmai I sometimes hear the despondency of others where they might be more cautious in sharing it with Khmai strangers.
"Look at them, they do anything for gifts" said a motodop taxi driver to me last week as we passed a big CPP parade. "These people, they bring them all in from the countryside and theyre so happy to get a gift they wear the t-shirt and vote and love Hun Sen. But they don’t need gifts, they need jobs and good health and food they can afford and education that works."
We were driving down a newly paved road, along the riverside by the second renovated bridge.
"The new bridges are good, and the new roads, but theyre so rarely built except in the election year" my father-of-five children continued. "People say Hun Sen gives to the people, but how much as taken?"
So there is criticism. There is criticism and there are even presented alternatives.
My Khmer colleagues at VSO are young, educated and energetic. Thida talks a lot about Sam Rainsy, the most prominent opposition candidate who was expelled (and effectively exiled for some time) from the CPP after his attempts at reforming public service spending and monitoring as Minister of Finance. She talks about his record and his manifesto promises of tackling public spending with massively raised salaries and better financial tracking, and repeats again her strong wish to never again work in the government system that is so rotten (while still being technically on the books for a job as a teacher at a school she stopped at 18 months ago and the district education office she stopped working at in February). But Thida says she cant really talk about Sam Rainsy in her village or even with her family.
Part of being here has shown me the extraordinary courage in those lives before mine born on the sceptred isles of the UK that created the kind of insurances and possibilities of change (gravely inadequate though they might often seem) that I enjoy today without much thought. I had thought already about the creation of trade unions and the tremendous risks there were in forming them over so many years. But I'm realising now too that a village voting, for example, for Sam Rainsy, risks being punished for the next five years, being put at the bottom for lists of villages with infrastructure development or even target villages for NGO projects. Patrimony demands loyalty and conformity, and the room in that for making change is a tight and airless squeeze.

Simultaneously there's a strange border dispute with Thailand over the Angkorian temple at Preah Vihear in the north-west. Once it was declared a UNESCO world heritage site, Thai troops seem to have surrounded the area claiming themselves to be on Thai land. People here are nervous about it, Thida's been having dreams about war and protesting self-immolating martyrdom; my tax-office-running neighbours drove there with a van packed with food and goods for the residents and to give Khmai soldiers; my colleague Davy's village apparently raised USD18000 for the effort (?!seems unbelievable), and a text message has reached everyone I know calling for a total boycott of Thai goods. Key personalities in the two governments are very close though, and theres a feeling that its not only a coincidence this has come at election time. Hopefully in the weeks after the election will cool down again. There's a rumour that theyve already drawn a deal to open an international border crossing at the temple point so Thailand can get lots of tourist money and Cambodia can benefit from the day passes. Win win. But for the moment this surge in nationalist feeling's helped the prime minister longsince ruling on his record of stability keeper.

saigon scribbles

me been loving loving this brief step into the gigantic, frenetic, rainy, massively populated world that is vietnam. its been so so short, lots spent squatting under awnings in alleys with tiny old ladies or smiling at non-colinguists over graham greene and sweet potatoes with sugar in the endless alleyways of old saigon. little square rooms with families (literally) nit-picking, tiny quite scary dogs being canoodled with affection, other dogs in less beloved states, shuttered windows upon shuttered windows in rainstreaked multicoloured walls, set about each other in vaguely organised overhangs and crossings..and then the big streets, the massive wide boulevards with one lane for cars and trucks and the other for the rainbows that are saigon urbanites heading off on their business - the compulsory helmets of everycolour god has made (and among them us army helmets - my friend the painter wore as an act of quiet youthful defiance, and spoke with nostalgia about the state of the city in the 60;s, old pictures of young women with bobs and miniskirts riding vespas his first offerings in showing me his pictures) and the giant capes for the rain (as unexpectedly hard and fast as the traffic that flowed not at the 20km/h of phnom penh at its busiest, but twice the speed, unbelievable assertiveness and pushing of the drivers who, when the road began to fill, would break the banks and saturate the pavement space, curving round trimmed decorative trees and leaving the few pedestrians grim-set and heavy-jawed, focused as jesus as they walked between) a techicoloured body-condom fest.
it is a huge huge city, ho chi minh, way way beyond the phnom penh polis thats been the beating big city heart of my life for last 8 months. hcm made me nostalgic for london in a way, though its nowhere near as diverse and much much faster moving; more so it made me feel that prodding reality of this other land, other reality, this sense of a trembling abundant rich deep cultural bellybutton of so many people's lives - yes it was this that reminded me of london, something of the faces of the people in the big cities, a measured anonymity, the trajectories of one and one's meaning among the scribbled infinities around.
i established a short habit of drinking beer and coffee a paintings reproduction shop on the backpacker street and had long chats about van gogh and bonnard and the promise of socialism and its disappointments and about law and taxes and freedoms with the young painter there and (throuhg his translations) with two others. my motodop driver and onno's (we met up after a few days which has been great) were angry and disappointed too - the 50% taxes making great roads and beautifully shaped trees but education requiring payment for from primary all the way up, and health service being a privilege of those who can afford it.. cambodia at least attempts a free education service, and the lack of this basic care shocked me a bit with what my notion of socialism held to be core provisions). one of them fought in the american army and despite his three years 're-education' programme is technically illegal here still, cant own land or work as an official tourist guide (but appreciated his luck in being able to speak english with tourists).
had a great meeting in the history museum with a great young student who spoke great englsh but just couldnt get my accent, so i wrote questions and he told me all kinds of things about the ceremonial drums with female buffalo skin on one side and male on another, we discussed fertility rites and the mandarin governmental system and death ceremonies and the fact (as he said) that vietnamese like remembering their success against the mongols because it strengthens the identity as winners in the world. he was a born anthropologist, critical and drawn to social-functional and symbolic analyses, and my failure to ask him for his contact details feels like a lesson to be learned. lots more questions i wont be able to ask him, but meeting such a sparky mind was, as always, great.
from the glimpses and crossings, people do seem really sharp here, though the recurring sense of 'occupation by the north' really (probably v ignorantly) caught me offguard, and has made me hungry for going north sometime in the future.

phew! an update!! by a rainy beach and thinking to cross to ratanakiri mountains in north east of cambodia on the way home as leaping much further north takes time and money. hope to be back. love lovexoxoxoxo

herbs and spices

The weather was almost British briefly. A strange grey came into all the colours, and, for a few days, skin was cool to the touch. The closeness made us imprudently expectant, and late one night my upward glances were rewarded by a kind of rule-breaking rain, what menstruation literature would call 'spotting'.
Since then its been climbing steadily, 39 degrees and rising. I wouldn’t know what this number means if I read it. It means being woken by the tickle of sweat trickles running down my brow, back, chest. It means looking in a mirror after a gentle cycle into town on a Saturday afternoon and being almost winded in surprise at the red cabbage of a face looking back.

Small seasons there are, constantly of course. Things are born and die, as the Buddhists remind us and as Khmers seem to accept and expect more easily. I get this impression from the way people talk about marriage and childbearing pretty unemotionally, or from the unstirred way people tell stories about their children or parents or husbands having died. It signals to me that there's an edge to my comfortable insulation of do-it-all readysteady healthcare, happy balances of work and rest, vegetables in year-round plasticated availability. Death and seasons are more obvious here, where life's quite a lot more precarious, employment and harvest quick to change, the hormones and fluids and small innocences and sufferings of livestock are everpresent.
So the seasons take different forms here, of course. In January I returned to Kampong Cham in the east and there was a three-day storm of white moth-flies. It was a kind of strange snow, blinding, more of them than air-between it seemed, sticking in the hair and mouth and eyelashes. They turned in the wind like curdled milk in a stirred cup and struck long white spotlights downwind from streetlamps as they struggled for fluorescence.
Chris told a story of a few days in her Devonshire childhood when a plague of ladybirds bombed through town, sharp stinging like pellets on faces, and blew irresistibly to the sea, where they surged in red frothy waves and left red scars of flotsam on the beach-skin.

Seasons are about repeating patterns in new changing circumstance. Mauri the marvel-making, much-loved and many-year-known, came for a month and shared my bed and head and my life here. She is a canny bird indeed and we laughed at ourselves and the world achingly much on a splendidly regular basis. When she left I felt like a warm moneybelt around my waist for months of travel was taken off.

The visit of the Parents Avery was another great transference of homelife familiarity to new conditions. It was pretty weird having their bags in the royal hotel carried upstairs by my friends the staff, or chatting over fried rice with them while getting calls about very cambodian work situations. They were up for everything though (and I got a great feeling driving my mum around on my motorbike, like it was some kind of womb-carriage reversal.. not sure if everyone gets this when they drive their parents..?), and I think got a big kick out of being here. They arrived at a good moment with great big patient ears to let me really shout about all the ways it sometimes feels crap and stupid and, worse, despicable to be here (work-wise i mean, people-wise its been great from the start), and one night I cried dramatically into the lawn of the poshest restaurant in Siem Reap. They reacted great though, my mum by telling me I'm too hard on myself and actually I have lots of skills and gifts that I bring to situations, and my dad by telling me I always crumble and call a crisis on any rare occasion things don't come easily to me, and that I can bloody well get on making a go of it in eight short more months of being here and then spend the rest of my life with my head up my arse if I want to. They're a great combination. It was exactly what I needed, and, whether by their paving some new positive neural pathway or the arrival of THIDA my fabulous new assistant the day after they left, I haven’t really looked back.

festivities, dailiness, work.

Time trickles, tributaries tarry (?) and turn, and the turned-over ideas of things to write and share are like the things my eyes see without a camera.. so much so much, and then it passes, and then something else.. same old story.

The 'festive season' as is in uk passed in small chapters: trips to palm fringed beaches, where whisky (ahh, sweet nectar of home) inspired great storytelling of disabled shellfish and the way of lasting peace, a dusty frontier town on the thai border where the brown barren land of cambodia and its flood-fuck roads of holes and cliffs and one-metre-deep canyons stops abruptly with the eerily lush jungles of the thai side that bought all its timber; an emotional downer after the 26th gave me inward trips into motivations and observations, and involved a dawn-time misty mountain walk on the dawn of january first and hours in victorian london with pip, wemmick and the Aged P in my first (and splendid) relationship with mr dickens. Christmas night into my birthday was passed at the royal hotel drinking ginseng wine and watching the guys there munch on fried crickets as we discussed rebirth and memory and the elongated snouty faces of human babies born from dolphins who still dreamed of the sea.

Uncle mike asked in an email what Im actually doing day to day. And I feel I should have a better answer than I do. It usually involves a cold shower in the cold or a sun-hot-already shower in sweaty heat, some hometime observing and attempting to quell the endless squabbles between the cat and dog and some nature spotting among the seven or eight cockroaches that seem to hang around my sink and clean (previously) plates and cutlery. In the evenings I see the now regular girl crew of american Cassie, french Marion, Malaysian Elyssa and Prema, british Emmilie, sometimes joined by some of the VAs from work, sometimes go visiting the staff at the royal hotel..eating lunch usually in the same cafe and regretting how much when i get tired...
but i think mike was asking more specifically on work. Work. work. w o r k . so. .... Its been feeling really shitty, and then ok, and then uncomfortable and objectionable, an awkward thing and then a necessary-under-unideal-circumstances job for someone and, as dice and decision have drawn, its me. Basically our project is supposed to be supporting the primary and lower secondary Cambodian education system to become more 'child friendly' - involving a change in traditional teaching methodologies, activities to monitor and encourage school enrolment and retainment, engagement of communities and families and of students themselves in decisionmaking and school support, health education, good leadership and management and 'gender sensitivity responsiveness'.
What i do day to day is slightly worryingly hard to say. In theory, and sometimes in practice, it involves a combination of school visits where we ask about the community mapping that schools have recently done, what they learned about kids not attending school and the reasons why, and attempting to draw out, in the enormous tanglement of reasons, (poverty and the need for kids at home being usually most cited, bad roads another), what school staff can try to do. On a good day this involves talking about community-led sessions on learning practical and income-generating skills, about holding open days for parents to attend and meet teachers and play games and see some of the kids' work. On a bad day this involves me talking a lot to fill in some of the shruggy, resigned-smile silences, or apologising for the fact that we can't pay for teaching materials, new school buildings, water pumps but can try to find ways for the schools to access them (not so easy at all, since VSO's not the only NGO to have an academically-sound but practically unstomachable approach to 'capacity-building' as a somehow sufficient answer to serious material lack). Bad days also involve useless time kicking around the office as Chhay, my excellent and highly experienced assistant, has had a whole succession of good reasons as to why he's been away a lot, and in combination with my trips to other placements, we've worked together I think a total of 8 days... He just got a new job, however, (as a PR officer for a petroleum exploration company .... : D ...yes.), which is wicked wicked news for him, and means more delay but maybe a fresh start for me.
i want to say more about work - about the fact that teachers here are basically volunteers; about the effects of low low wages on the mundane necessity of corruption, and the fact that the only skill I am conscious of learning (apart from Khmer conversation) is playing the 'money tricks' that the head of primary education laughingly informed me british volunteers often struggle with "but asian volunteers understand well". I didnt think coming here would involve so much lying-as-flexible-diplomacy, although it is emphatically stated by all my Khmer colleagues that there is no other option but to play this game. The uncomfortable feelings of this can be quelled when i regard my role as administering money (what a joke..me... i think ive lost several bank notes already and can hardly believe the unlikely appearance that Ive sorted the paperwork for distributing a thousand dollars this week), but less so when they turn to the basic alienations of privilege, and the distances it seems to work in getting along with people. The basic feeling of 'why am I here? why are ALL these ngos here, endlessly offering help?' is a tenacious one, and I realised this week I am really drawn to those practioners who are not eager to please me just because Im a foreign worker bringing hope of money, but who have a kind of confidence in their skills. More on this to come i think, but tonight promised to take Savang the girl in my house out to cheer her up, and then later to dance with onno of the video and voeurn of the royal hotel and maybe some others at the crazy mtv-world of sky nightclub.
happy everything, may it be.

not a lot of talking from staff, or a lot of slightly absent nodding
at in the office (at theProvincial Office of Education..but a room just of VSO workers - jean, theang and chhay and whoever else in teh team comes in for somethign, not the POE staff), visit
In practice, there are some pretty good trainers at all levels, some good training materials, some teachers and school directors

christmas video

done with half an hour of daylight and a battery that then died, so unfortunately more of ali laughing than of battambang...but now i kind of know how to do...watch this space (but probably dotn stop doing all your other stuff in the meantime....)

big big love to all xoxoxoooxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxo

stories of smoke and water

Advent in Battambang goes unremarked, except for by my landlady's family, whose hints about the loveliness of the previous barang tenant's christmas tree were added to by a fantastically garish santa card that plays a medley of jingle bells and deck the ?something? halls?walls?

The nights have been getting a bit cooler now, though with a strange unpredictability that makes me sometimes still sweat away and sometimes need more than my fleece blanket. Sensitive Khmers keep their woolly hats and multiple jackets on until about nine each morning. Its also drier, and the roadside leaves (and my trousers and teeth) are thickly dusted pinky-brown. They fall on me sometimes and sometimes i reach to catch them. And they make the same satisfying crumple underfoot.

I returned to the city an hour ago along the bumpiest road I regularly travel, the first long drive I've done at nighttime. There was a stillness in the air as we inhaled (the celtophile head of primary education, my friend and colleague Loeurt and me) the dusty darkness and the purple familiar taste of bonfires. The huge (or it seems it in this flat land) sheer sides of Phnom Sampov were causing the smoke to turn from two funeral pyres, and it wheeled around in the air as we left at dusk. I love, I love I love, the sound of Cambodian funeral music. It is like flamenco grief. It surpasses the stories it tells and the grief it indicates.

Mountains in Cambodia, or those in Battambang anyway, challenge my geological imagination. Working out how time + conditions make the apparently unmoving earth shift so drastically is a stretch of mind and faith and time-sense in any mountain or cave or strange bouldered rock shape (my mind surfs above the world like a google earth angel, covering the isle of eigg, the climb towards applecross, the stepped-hexagons of Staffa in a blink of an instant). But here, they come out of totally flat land like they were pushed, with no other mountain for maybe several kilometres around.

One story is of rain, I today came to reckon. These shapes were formed from the squeezings and burstings of a temperamental earth, and steady strong rains (or maybe just one) have filled in the deep parts, concealing the underside consequence of the rises.

Another story is of the bitter consequences of a philanderous ancient king. His lover, rejected and spurned, dejected and despairing, called upon a magic crocodile she had nursed at her breast to kill the king and queen while they sailed in the sea. The chicken coop on deck was hurled towards him, to quench his hunger and quash his diligent destruction. But it failed. Growing huge, the crocodile snapped the boat into two. There was something with a turtle. And then the queen, who had apparently been trying other strategies first, lifted her magic hair off the toppling deck. She placed it in the water, where it soaked up all the sea.

So tonight, leaving day two of a workshop on 'effective teaching and learning' at a school nestled at the bottom of Ship Mountain, Mister Kim Hoern, Loeurt and I drove flat along the old sea bed and stopped at the side of the road between Crocodile Mountain (which looked exactly, but exactly, the same as the crocodile constellation the older man had drawn for me earlier, though neither looked quite like a crocodile) and Chicken Coop Mountain. We ate bananas. I threw propriety to the wind and climbed a dust-laden tree. I looked at the big blue animals of other mountains grazing to the south west, and the growing pinkorange glow of the sunset to the right of them, heavy and light in the dust thrown up from the road by carts and cows and motos. Rural landscapes like this are punctuated by tall slender palm trees that sometimes make me gape at their strength. A woman in red and purple was walking through the yellowing paddy field (harvest time has just about begun). I regretted that my camera, newly em-batteried, seemed to not work. Please forgive a thousand words painting a photo.

And another: the bananas were finished. I sat and drew the palms. Mister Kim Hoeurn taught me words and attempted to define my learning style into one of the seven types he'd just been teaching about ('interpersonal'). Loeurt rested from a long day on the seat of his bike. I chatted away about bats, sonar sensation, the day my dad woke me up late in the evening to meet a bat woman with three little injured orphan bats in my livingroom (it sounds like a dream..pa please verify..i was about eleven and they chattered sounds out of our hearing range with strange horizontal toothy mouths and i remember the delicate skull under fur under my hesitant finger).
and then they were there OO@ooooooo,,,,,..................,,,.. a line of smoke to the east, like a giant candle snuffed just behind ship mountain. But instead of snuffed and dead, the smoke kept trailing. Low in the sky, a thin black line. More and more and still more. And the wisp turned with the wind and rose and broke into multiple lines, bending and folding through variations of script.
They were still flying out of the cave as we drove back underneath them, uncountable unknowable bat-billions. They are out all night, and at dawn return again, a peppered shadow funnelling and blackening back into their long cool hole.

It made me think: they always do this. they always always do this.
When Europeans are taking coffee breaks and when the Khmer Rouge were executing Mister Kim Hoeurns father on ship mountain and when I ponder the strangeness of being here and doing this job and when the family of the internet shop tires and when I go home and look at crocodile and chicken constellations with my Khmer family and when little kids sit outside the tourist restaurant with puffy gluey eyes and plastic bags for inhaling and for taking the leftovers off the plates and when the bats are completely forgotten by every human head, they always do this.

Kato asked me to tell her some stories of where i am. There are more. I will try to record some more of them.
Enjoy your flight and feeding.

"mouthkissing"

tiptoeing through the day with hungover fragility... colours are bright and beautiful and sore and i keep being struck in the stomach by poetic revelations in the stunned, openpinkmouthed lizard i stepped on in the kitchen or the cups i watched fall out of my unclasping hands and crash. and i come to the internet to see pictures of frost on oxford leaves and read that kosovo's gone to vote on its future.

lots to say, much of which i just deleted, so cant really be bothered again. nice note though:

apparently (i was informed over a beer), elderly cambodians 'havent heard' about mouth-kissing. they instead kiss cheeks and NOSES.. and occasionally foreheads and the backs of necks.. young people have started mouth kissing becauyse theyve seen it on tv. (but my friend said 'but you dont touch tongues do you?')

i thought this was quality information (since been verified by further ...discussions(no, really)). partly because you never see anyone kissing here so youd never otherwise know. and partly bc its a case of apparently natural behaviour being cultural. again.

other nice notes - these are shoes from a workshop a school had to get community support for its initiatives. there was a total buzz in the room, albeit from almost entirely male villagers, as they virtually competed on how much they would support the school environment with seeds and labour and fundraising activities.. it was great. and i did nothing, just turned up basically (and, er, made a speech). all thanks to really motivated deputy school director. nice nice.

Also had nice visits this morn as i rested after party cleanup from TWO poodles!! kam kayoo our regular cutie is on left and 'bupee', or 'puppy', HER LITTLE GIRL as well!! bupee shared her taste for licking people and they were SO HAPPY playing together. made me think all i need is someone to roll around with and lick. so theyll have to do for the minute anyway. going home for cuddles now...

rocking and rolling

rocking
Yes indeed.

Work stuff...whoo...how to say...due to the recurrent sickness of his mother, my designated assistant Chaay has been granted 2 months compassionate leave from the job, and im to work on my own (which doesnt allow a whole lot of information gathering as far as khmer goes) and with other vols' assistants until he comes back. In practice this has meant a pretty nice combination so far of reading things at the office and visiting schools and district offices of education with other volunteers and their assistants, or, a couple of times, with an assistant and me. There's so so much to ask - getting friendly with them, do they like their job? what are the busiest parts of it? what has most satisfied them since they started?, and then asking about community involvement in school decision-making, contact with parents, the making of maps of school catchment areas and the analysis of the reasons they encountered in doing the mapping that some kids dont go to school...about disability and the school's support systems for kids and for teachers, about school councils, health and sanitation, gender differences in the student body, rates of dropout and repetition.... too much for a short meeting, but the longer meetings have brought some great moments. ..One school director talked through most of his 3 hour lunch break about political machinations in the system of school support from the ministry but told us that althoguh he'd only finished primary school and not gone to secondary, he knew that the true inspectors of the school are the kids and their parents, and that by instilling this ethos in his staff his school is one of the most dynamic and high-achieving in Battambang... another who said a big worry for the village is emmigration, and when I asked about what skills there were in the village that were worth passing to the students, he said basketry and fishing tools had long been a strong enterprise and, in a really satisfying unfolding dialogue, we worked out a way of local tradespeople training teachers to train kids in a way that nobody loses money (from lost hours working - includes even teachers who all need several other jobs) in a way we (VSO) can probably fund and support. And some proud kids showing us their work. And ideas flowing all around.

there was a meeting of the new volunteers in which we wrote down our concerns and screwed them up and threw them around and read them out and discussed them. it felt GOOD. issues like
?why are we often focussing on the ministry's chosen 'show schools' which are already doing really well when there are so many neglected schools and no working systems of sharing skills between 'model' and 'satellite' schools?
?when an ngo gave kids in (an area by the thai border) SHOES, the attendance in school rose by 100% because they could walk further.... a school (in the same place) has got a water pump but no filter, and when kids got to school they often became sick and had to go home again, their parents unwilling to send them back.... can someone in the centre (ie me or jean) look into getting us shoes and water filters?

?whose capacity are we meant to be building, that of teachers and school directors or that of their managers (and entitled capacity builders) at the district level?

it complicated and confused as much as it clarified, but it was definitely good to share experiences and ideas and know what opportunities of funding, possible partner ngos etc we can look out for. Present were three brand new VAs for three other new vols who are out in the (4 1/2 hour drive from BTB) sticks. One of them had only got the job 10 minutes before the meeting, and the other two are a school director of a primary and deputy of a secondary in the most remote districts of the province. Their concerns were things like having walls in the school, having a teacher, so it's clear that needs are pretty different in different places. Where I am I think the difficulty at the start might be more about getting bureaucratic access to the more remote schools, those off the main roads that get inspected. But starting learning about it, and the kind of buzzing, critical, sharing vibe in the meeting of our pick'n'mix team, has made me feel really empassioned to support the horribly difficult work of these teachers, support their schools becoming more energising, positive places to grow up and spend time, and made me so glad to have the opportunity to be a part of it.

other rocking things have been meeting SALEE, who is one of my favourite things about Cambodia so far. He is a total leader in the best sense, sharp minded and gentle and clearly spoken, strongly opinionated and dry and cynical but keen and energetic and one of the most eager learners i can remember meeting. He wants books books and Im starting a list for ma and pa to bring out in February on international political economy and radical education!!! He is married with a kid so I am transforming falling madly in love-energy to big-appreciation-energy. I had the pleasure of working with him for two days last week and bouncing ideas around, also on the back of his moto as a group of us went to visit a beautiful pre-Angkor wat. He was a facilitator of a group here called 'Youth for Peace' which sounds like Venture Scotland and Venture Trust with the added extra of a critical political conscientisation that I always felt was missing in those organisations (hey, excluded youth of scotland! why have you survived so badly in society? lets give you skills to change...yourSELF!!... -and stopping there) and was also a monk for ten years, from the age of 12, so lots of nourishment there that keeps him focused and peaceful which i want to learn from (and a good source of questioning about monks and the pressures of materialism!). People people people people, what crazy things we are. How nice to be inspired by other ones and grow.

Also rocking, in a funny catch-myself-here-how-random kind of way, was the massive massive party to raise money for a wat which my merit-rich landlady hosted, totally unexpected by me, for about 200 of her... i think relatives... first i came home to giant pickups unloading multicoloured tents and scaffolding-dresses...then they transformed my front garden and street (pic from my balcony) into a buddhist grotto with altars adorned with wrapped up offerings of essentials like washing powder, cigarettes, perfume and fanta.

i felt quite the random, "matter-out-of-place" as some anthropologist said. I hung out with the kids most of the morning, enjoying catapults and bubbles (oh no i just deleted picture..still getting this sorted) but feeling acutely aware of the burning shyness I instilled in all of them who had learned some English and were being encouraged by their parents to use it on me.

There were lengthy discussions with old men where i found that if i repeated occasionally the last word of long statements it gave the impression i understood, despite my apologies to the contrary. There was lots of smily quiet sittings-with as well throughout the day and into the evening, like with an elderly nun after dinner as she stuffed her red mouth with first betel nut and then a large pinch of tobacco against her gum. nice. It made me vow to get on with intensive language learning though, and have sorted lessons for tomorrow.

Best of all was the musicians, though, who's circular and unending bells and strange pipes and xylophones (?the wooden ones, here in a dragon-boat shape :) ) i found initially annoying, and then strangely entrancing. I ended up bringing down my guitar, which they found quite funny, and towards the end of the night they got my playing the blues (pretty loudly actually, i forgot how much less shy to play and sing when noone understands!!)

rolling

refers to me today, however. the same circular bells from the hands of the same musicians began at exactly five, some way before dawn, and the giant drums (out of picture) with their added electric amplification made my bed shake. I returned to them like a lover who slipped away the night before (I took quite hasty lead when the faithful remaining got pissed and slurringly insistent i try to understand what they were saying) and there were smiles all around before i apologised for not taking the journey to the wat (on four pickup trucks, adorned with the same carpets and yellow umbrellas as our garden had been) to carry the gifts of the faithful.

My head felt gentle and awake but a bit tender for being kind of blown out by one of the volunteers Id been working with in a way that was a bit unexpected, felt a bit winded, and a general flatness after the highs, the energy, the rain. A sense feeling strongly but needing to carry that feeling openly to the people i work with and really shift and expand and listen and respond. The wanderingness of the early evening, however, has led to an internet fest galore which has excited me again (especially realised all the things i HAVENT put in), and now i go to dine with nice beth who is cooking me "tiny potatoes" that she brought back from phnom penh, and the roll rises again. much love feeling anyway, and lots of it sent across waters to home.