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.