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