Monday 4 July 2011

Settling in

Hello from Phnom Penh and my first proper blog!

I flew in here from Thailand on Sunday, and the main change since I visited seven years ago is the volume of traffic. This is really obvious in the remork (a kind of carriage pulled by a motorbike) that I caught in from the airport. You can really smell the difference! I am staying in the Riverside area, a place of bars and restaurants where you can sit out and gaze at the river, traffic chaos and hawkers going about their trade. I must admit to finding it quite relaxing.

I have been working for a few days now, and it has been really interesting. I am working for a tiny charity called Meakea, who try and support very poor families in an area of villages outside PP. They do this by providing English language teaching, basic health education as well as other services like house building for very poor families and a small amount of micro-lending. My roles is to help them with the financial side of things such as how they prepare the budget, watch what they spend, and report this to the people who provide the finance. The main problem not surprisingly is a lack of money! My office is based in PP quite close to S21, the school where thousands of people were tortured during Pol Pot’s era before being sent off to the Killing Fields at Choeng Ek to be slaughtered. This very recent history makes PP a fascinating and somewhat poignant place to visit. There’s loads of other things to see and do here, but the lack of old people is very noticeable.

So far at work, it has been a case of getting used to the differences, the main one of which is working in extremely warm conditions. I also lost a couple of hours the other day because of a power cut caused by one of the fairly regular violent rainstorms. Apparently this doesn’t happen very often – I certainly hope not.

I have also been out to the school where most of Meakea’s work is based to meet the team and see what they did. Everyone was extremely friendly and seemed pleased to have the chance to speak English with a native speaker – they want me to go back and take some classes, so it will be interesting to see how that goes. I just hope they can understand my flat Northern vowels. Until next time, when I should have some pictures......

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