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