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.

my house

bye bye phnom penical, hello houses of battambang (tr: town of the disappearing stick)

...and a few days later:

i am dusty, of the ricefield not the springfield, of the drying-end-of-rainy-season, moto proficient to ride an hour each way through choppy gravel and collapsy soil roads to a school today, tired and dirty, hungry and happy.
i have been in the downstairs of my new house, soon (when i leave the internet now) to move upstairs to my future abode. the family:

lovely chilled older lady whose name ive embarrassingly not remembered so call by the polite term who talks away at me in incomprehensible khmer but we occasionally understand each other. she folds back my shutters at eight when she thinks i should probably have been up for three hours like everyone else and lays her elbows on the sill and talks away. she shuffles in a walk that i can recognise from far away, so we wave at each other in town when i pass her on my bike as she goes visiting the wat and other older ladies for tea (or equivilent). Her seemingly vast family seem to be always dropping in and take some interest in this latest in a long line of tenants - the first being landmine clearance ngo workers in 1996.

two wee girls of said extended family. they LOVE the guitar and although cant play chords have wicked rhythm. may form a family band....the one on the left has a beautiful low singing voice but is too shy at moment to sing around me. nice thing about wooden walls.

her dad, a silent deaf man who is apparently 96, is tall and slow and has a small white beard on his chin. he spends the day in bed or in a hammock and doesnt really respond to much around him i think. he sometimes seems a bit worried and confused if i greet him, but other times smiles a bit, so i generally greet him gently all the same.

savant. savant. last night she told me she had several names, including 'sray kmao' (dark girl -did i say before that every cream and soap in the country is full of bleach?) and 'kom sot', 'sad one', which she said they called her after her mum died when she was five. she's now sixteen, though she's small and quiet and home-based enough to make me think she's about twelve. she does all the cleaning and the cooking for the family, and she sleeps on a mat on the floor outside each night with the poodle. im not sure if she's paid or if she just earns her keep. i found out she comes from a village near to where i was working on friday, about a 40minute moto ride away, and she said she hasnt been back for two years.
she is so practical and capable, constantly managing with ease and grace to open difficult locks or wash with her hands stains that im struggling to clean with a brush. and she is endlessly curious, a face at the window, a finger on my guitar, an extra tool brought to me while im cooking. she seems to pay attention to small things and enjoys my quiet company in the evenings as i try to ask her about what kind of flight she has in dreams, or whether four legs would be better than two, and she plays with expert novice exploration the strings and drum of my guitar. its as if we're both stoned. and its tender and quiet. and i like her a lot.
the poodle is called kam kaioo, which i think means 'bites glass', which althouh ive asked about has yet to be clearer. she is as enduringly loveable as id anticipated. i cant see it waning at all.
moggins is the unexpected name of the cat. he's a weird one, spirited and determined but addicted to human company. i am unpleasantly allergic to him, and he keeps literally throwing himself, claws out, three feet high against the mosquito screens on my doors. i also suspect him of having made all my shoes smell of cat piss.

work has begun, in hesitant earnest and hearty interest. but ill save it for another time. now off home on the moto after 12 hours out and about to clean cat-fur from my new home and move myself in.

love to all xoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxox

pumpkins to carriages, turn of the clocks

Im held in a kind of pragmatic upright position where i think my spine could just about support me even if i gave into the magnetic urge to sleep here and now at the hotel internet in Phnom Penh.
The tuk-tuk drivers and the hotel guys are outside laughing and chatting in the hot dusty night with their radios, and the extended family of the chinese restaurant next door are tossing comments into the kitchen as they wash up plates on the street outside.
Today is the king's birthday and coronation day, and I found myself drinking gin and tonic in a swish hotel with two gently wise older volunteers and two fellow soggy-eared new ones when the brown high waters of the Mekong and the large sky above it lit up in a burst of fireworks. It was the king's view, he from his privileged position in the palace, ours from the Himalia (or something) hotel, but the sounds blasted on the walls of buildings and made a small child run the other way in fright. Everybody in the city would have heard them and would have toasted the king. "King, Religion, Nation" cried the flag of the country, and although it wouldnt be my motto of choice, it is things like this that give people a chance to feel connected and celebratory together, something distinctly Cambodian that wasnt destroyed by Year Zero social planning and the upheavals afterwards, not emasculated by the relial on NGOs, and a reason to have a lovely time.
Another thing like this is the Water feFestival, when the massive Tonle Sap lake stops filling and starts emptying, signalling the end of the rainy season and the signal of change to all the life and livelihood that lives on it. The waters turn and flow outward, and the whole country races dragon boats, in their villages and provincial capitals and, for the winners, in Phnom Penh.
And with them shall be a boat of strange foreigners, life-jacketed in the same orange as the monks. I am one of these, delighted to be aboard a boat again and dazzled with the unexpectedness of it being a 58 person dragonboat.
The first practices this weekend saw us having an audience of several hundred Khmers, laughing at us as they staggered quite charmingly at the edge of a raucous wedding. On our breaks they invited us in to dance and plied us with palm wine, and their kids swam out to our boat at one point, about twenty of them, little laughing heads like otters all over the water coming to play. And I enjoyed forgetting about bilharzia and jumping in to play with.

Tomorrow morning we're heading in a pick up packed high with other peoples furniture and my scarily grown-up seeming matching crockery (!where are the higgledypiggles of arden st plates and cups?! id agreed to this lovely old lady at the market who went hoe specially to get my friend a teapot, so i felt bound. maybe organised dinnersets will signal a New Organised Me) to Battambang, not for a visit this time but to make a home and a life there.
Lots of feelings relief apprehension nervousness bit-too-tiredness excitement resolve... and lots and lots of curiosity.
whiskers a flutter, tail held tentative and watchful to one side with the occasional sharp swish. but now purringly to bed.

Thinking of home, and all the ways I love it, and breathing at the brink of a new one.

love love love xoxooxoxoxoxo

schmolitics. and sea-cows.

Sea-cows, those grazers that, having evolved from water to land, placidly plodded (i am sure of it) back to the sea. Touching the surface with the human name "sea-cow", they feature in Rumi's poems on friendship and completion that got read over the summer in a little blue tent called Haley's Comet and grew into characters in the epic tales that Kato and I spun each other on long walks and under the Scottish night sky. I think in some romantic-era poem they might feature as a 'mdong' (can anyone confirm this? me getting googlelazy), which is 'one time' in khmer, the singular, unrepeated moment. They featured as 'Crodh mara', sea cattle in Gaelic, in an isle of Pabbay folkstory unexpectedly recounted in Duncan's fireworks-of-wonder email sent at the weekend. And as seals-dogs-dolphin crosses, they were in Mauri's dream, transforming fear to play and contentment.



And I found these two last connections strange and soothing, because this weekend I took myself away from the peopled throng of Pteh Bong Proh (big brother house in khmer, VSO training centre for another week before we head to Phnom Penh and then placement) to a town up the Mekong where I had the nourishing pleasure of watching a playful pod of flatfaced Irrawaddy river dolphins feed, jump and dive in the colourful evening waters, and where, for a happy morning, I entertained myself with slightly too-loud laughter by inventing a story of a magical tiny blind sea cow in a rice paddy who adventures in the mouth of a remorse-strucken tiger to illuminate the path of a lost water buffalo...



There was also the time when I visited Battambang, my future home, to have the head of Primary Education, one of my future bosses, talk patiently through the twists of fate for a Scottish selkie, seal-woman too desired by man to be allowed to remain free in the water, but too drawn to the sea and her family there to resist returning when she finds her seal skin he had hidden from her, away from her human family but cursed with a longing for them as strong as that she'd had for the sea. Oh, so beautiful, these stories. Twin pulls that reason and riding waves of time cant quite resolve, to love simultaneously impossible things. So I attempted to stop myself shedding tears over dinner, struck by the strangeness of hearing this story of the cold sea and firesides in stone mountain crofts while sweaty in a fragrant heat in paddy-flat land.



I write this because it continues to surprise me, the regularity of the sea cows raising their shiny heads, and because it makes me happy to think of these lovely beasts, well enough developed in feeding to mix labour and leisure so seamlessly, chirping as they break the watersurface or singing their long long whale songs miles beneath it.



I also write it because the last week or so Ive had conversations and realisations that have made me feel a kind of quiet despair here. The level of corruption in government ive heard about many times, but its just recently Ive started wondering if its not an intentional move to entirely fail to pay teachers monthly, or if they are paid to raise it maybe five dollars a month to a totally unliveable-on $35, while heads of government at all levels pocket vast quantities of money. The same for policemen and for the army, who get a lot less even. The police get bought off on every account, as is their survival necessity, and the army are the number one agency responsible for the rapid and disasterous deforestation of Cambodia.



Subwon, the 30year old guard at Pteh Bong Proh, looks repeatedly and uncomfortably around his shoulder when we talk about government, but clearly wants to tell me that there are no choices of how you make your living if you have nothing to pay your way with, that you have to pay off teachers and doctors and police, that people's land is being bought up by plantation and gravel companies in the immediate promise of a few thousand dollars and leaves people with a purchasing power too low to buy anything like as much land elsewhere. and when we talked about strikes, about Burma and the potentials of organised collective action, he lowered his voice and claimed it is not so different a situation here, that people are threatened and 'if there are demonstrations people get hurt'.



Some people claim that there are positive developments in Cambodia, more roads being built, more wealth coming into the country. I feel I need an injection of faith that these leatherinteriored aircon Lexuses, virtually the only car on the streets, but a common one, apparently only in the last few years, and these dazzlingly huge mansions built on the central road networks (and presumably beyond) represent a wealth that might in some way become distributed to the benefit of the vast majority of people here. The prime minister Hun Sen recently declared that any withdrawal of aid from the World Bank(under attack for ignoring clear signs of corrupted deals with its money) would only affect the poor since he would be alright 'for a few hundred years', and the son of the governor of the province I am in, Hun Sen's nephew, declared that if the makers of a Global Witness documentary about the scale of deforestation and the government's complicity in it returned to Cambodia he would personally see to it that theyd be killed.



And in the middle I am having serious doubts about the good of my project, tweaking at the possibilities of 'community involvement in schools' when the government's interest clearly includes a docile population and a grossly underpaid and overworked (by their multiple jobs) teaching staff, and about my position in an organisation where I will not, it is becoming clearer to me, be able to ask questions about these structures because I am working within the tanglements of their patronage.



But the seacows are singing, wherever they are, and I am to the Mekong to drink a beer and walk the long bridge at sunset with my friends.

ancestors day

hm..weirdly the blog clock is on another time to me and most of the world - published last entry as 8 days before it was..if same thing happens this is october 11th, full moon about to rise, puddles drying in kampong sham streets after big storms night before last, me still feeling slightly weird about blog writing but thought id put my message to clement up on here, and the streets of cambodia buzzing with activity.
its one of the biggest holidays of the year in cambodia today - pchum ben, the end of 15 days giving food to the monks at the pagoda every morning to stave off hungry ghosts of ancestors. the streets are full of traffic but almost all the shops are closed (apart from this internet and a big orange mobile phone shop jammed -as it always seems to be- with monks selecting their purchases, orange orange zesty blast to the eye), just families cooking out on the street together and slick young guys cruising by the river, four to a moped. i went to the pagoda this morning and got welcomed warmly with rice, fruit and smiles and comments of 'madame kampuchea' (i was wearing a khmer long skirt as advised). there is a lovely kind of irreverence to people's religiousity here i think - its very serious, and absolutely everyone seems to have been going to temple these last days - but when people are in the middle of ten seconds praying others grab them by the arm or poke them in the side to say hello, and inside, legs crossed to one side, with chanting blessing the food thats being brought, everybody's quite happy to chat quite noisily away.
feels a very social and nourishing religious life, although the temples are definitely the wealthiest buildings you ever see - get money from the community and from local political parties when they want to win votes etc (is one of really only a few cases where money filters to local level from government). they also obviously have a lot of power, and althoguh it allows people like the english speaking monk i spoke to today to be educated (and poor boys can stay at the pagoda while they study, without needing to become a monk, really good if travel to school is too difficult etc), its very gender biased, as the only women or girls who live there are elderly nuns who are usually widows (as theyre not needed at home anymore, and other than the pagoda and family theres no safety net for them) and even they i think do all the work for the monks in terms of cooking and cleaning and clothes washing etc. so the opportunity for girls as well to live in a pagoda in order to access school (something others in my job have investigated) doesnt seem to be possible.
theres also the strange question of cambodian buddhism as distinct from other traditions ive come across through friends and reading etc. theres loads to say about this. one thing is that monks seem to buy stuff, talk to women, accumulate their personal savings during monkhood and eat meat, all of which i found pretty surprising. i met an ex monk who said he'd once tried to meditate for 20 minutes but found it hard....and from speaking to his monk friend who was currently studying at an indian-named university, studying meditation, although he agreed when i said i had understood this was one of the most important practices in buddhist life, i gathered that it was not a teaching common to the monks' lives here. the stories of the buddha ive heard are all of magic naga dragons protecting him, and paintings in pagodas all feature a blue smiley god surrounded by serving women, remarkably like krishna.
like everywhere, religion here is a mix of roots and understandings and practices. noodles again. and my not really understanding how the hungry spirits of ancestors fit into reincarnation doesnt really matter. more important is the fact that in this very family-centred community, every family has relatives who died or were killed in pretty distressing circumstances in living memory. im not sure if thats the reason that my language teacher dara seemed a bit sad today, and in his grammatical examples started using constructions like 'who killed dara's father', 'daras father was killed in 1976 by pol pot'.
part of me wants to say 'dara's father was killed by a khmer person working as a part of the same system as pol pot in 1976', but i think, aside from not knowing how to say ''same system'', its hardly my place to challenge this more succinct and swallowable way of explaining causation.
im out again to face the music-rippling streets on my trusty bicycle, almost perfectly apt now at moving seamlessly with the multishaped vehicles' pressing flow. (and dont bikes feel like gazelle-glidey bodily extensions vs comfy-but-not-as-much-yet motos).
are nights closing in and leaves starting to turn in the sceptered isle yet? maybe too soon. the cool breeze from the fan makes me think rosily of being wrapped up in cold winds walking to cosy pub-insides. oh the romanticism of winter. enjoy seasonality and its condiments.
may our ancestors be pleased with us...
xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxo

noodles poodles rice nice

NOODLES


are curly, knotted and very slippy, and, although im not eating all that many of them, they are ever present in their metaphorical state. Ive had encounters that make me want to record and replay and freeze and unpack and look into the pixels. So many conversations seem to be like this (probably all if i paid enough attention), with serving vso volunteers whose speech is thick with the kind of knowledge that comes only from experience and the sometimes troubling interactions i observe them having with their 'volunteer assistants', local counterparts who are not so well paid or, without doubt, by vso or by the offices of education, respected; somehow breathless meetings with the directors of Cambodia's provincial and district offices of education, my soon-to-be bosses, 50something year old ex-Khmer Rouge guys who have bought and dealt their way into serious power, who i approach with an enduring feeling of how very unlikely it seems that we should ever meet, let alone work together...
Issues and undercurrents and multiple, uncolliding expectations seem tangled in such a complex embrace Im not sure all the patient anthropology in the world could straighten them.
The noodles curl with thoughts and slip off the fork with the twists of time. 5 or so weeks into being here for at least a year have brought many different flavours and feelings. Starting a blog has been tricky in quickly changing times; its felt difficult having so much to digest, crap internet connections, overheated fatigue and a sense of being FAR AWAY and not always on the articulacy button to try to express. starting's hard, as with anything, and having finally got something written here i hope some kind of newtonian law might mean itll be easier from this point to sometimes share what im seeing, doing or chewing unsuredly through.



POODLES

rhymes with noodles. It was an innocently random addition to this title....




and i didnt even really like poodles, the only ones ive met being Kristal Chow at primary school's little yappy one and teenage boyfriend Chris Matcham's giant galloping one (both snouty snarly big Beckenham hounds)


UNTIL

(imagine insert of photo thats taking too long and seems to have failed)

househunting in the mild dusty heat of Battambang, future home town of mine, I encountered this chirpy little dog on the other side of the gate.
A Cambodian poodle, small soft and mildly acrobatic, perpetually cheerful, bright of face, and continuouslly motional of tail. Missing the hard and jumping trademarks of scabs, fleas and tick-lumps that every other Cambodian dog ive befriended, its curly bright form was like a harbinger of a new home. And, having decided that meeting a poodle in Cambodia after naming a blog like this was too fortuitous an opportunity to miss, i knew Id take the house before i even saw its lovely wide wooden balcony with the rivers breeze on it or met the lovely warm family who live below.
Home of mine from 7th november: Battambong. Town of strangely visceral buzz (hm not sure visceral even means this), people busy everywhere, cleaning streets and mending pavements (unlike anyway elese Ive been), ngos everywhere but many of them seeming Cambodian run, including circus schools and street-kid trainee bakeries and furniture makers, peculiar statues of gorillas and dinosaurs, and a thoroughly unexpected hip hop scene (though could be much more Khmer rapping and the gigantic club has big empty walls ripe for some visuals - will visit the circus schools new animation team and ask them what they reckon to workshops making some creations). Lovely riverside, aerobics at dawn, fantastic assistants in my team who i hope to make good mates with... from the moment of entering, only confirmed by poodle, battambangs struck me firmly as a great place to be. All visitors welcome.

RICE
lots and lots of it

NICE
yes. it often is, being here. sometimes because im sipping beer by sunset on the mekong watching kids play badminton and hakisac, or because its like being in a film thats not been scripted yet but is familiar in its exotic, sticky-skinned, motos-and-rickshaws-in-the-rain, houses-on-stilts and palm-silhouette ways.
its also peculiar, tiring, overwhelming, especially to be the rich one in every scenario. im struggling to navigate this dynamic in a way that feels honest and grounded because although there are so many laughs and some quite funny strange games that make everyone just be where they are for a bit, this background skew of material possibilities, that not everyone in the interaction has, feels sometimes so pressing. bad health is so obvious here, in the way people cough, in the struggles people have to support their families, in the massive lumps on peoples stomachs or the tautness of their faces. and the endlessly uncomfortable dogs are of course only those at the bottom of the pile. and ive met people who simply cant change their job, however much eagerness and talent and energy they have, or support their children to go to school, or even get a girlfriend (one said because no one would go out with a teacher as they get nowhere near enough money to support even one person on).
so. its difficult. but im glad to begin to realise it, out of books, out of tidy arguments or the handwringing distance of home. i hope it motivates something good.

pip pip

love love

alixoxoxoxooxooxoxooox