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.