A typical day

To give you an idea of what's generally happening:

The alarm clock is set for 5 am. Our first meeting is at 5.30 am, with the other permanent staff in someone's hotel room.. We go over plans for the day, ensure all are singing off the same sheet, work out if anyone needs to take a break/skip something in order to do some behind the scenes arranging. Then all the team members arrive for morning devotions and tea and coffee before eading down to breakfast in the hotel. (Rice, noodle soup, or eggs and baguettes)
At 7am we get on the minibus to go to the village where we are building houses. We head out across the Tonle Sap river via the Japanese Friendship bridge (destroyed in the wars in the 70's, but re-building made possible in 1997 by the kind assistance of the Japanese Government) After the bridge we stop at a stall to buy a big block of ice (25 cents) to put in the esky with the packed lunches. We then drive to the Mekong ferry. Everyone as to get out to allow Sarath, our driver, to reverse down a dirt slope to the ferry itself. We buy bread and fruit here, for lunch. One baguette is about 18 cents. The rickety looking ferry takes 8 minutes to actually cross the river, by E's watch, but loading and unloading take a further 20. Dozens of small mopeds and passengers, and a few vans and trucks park on, in no particular order. Our driver always backs on and drives off, but other trucks drive on and then have to do a many-point turn across the deck of the ferry to get off. Watching the way the ferry dips almost to the waterline as it moves back and forth makes one mildly nervous.
Once over the Mekong we travel slwly for another half hour, along a packed dirt road, avoiding the cows, chickens, dogs, orange-robed monks, and mopeds with three wardrobes balanced on the handlebars that we meet along the way. There are buildings all along this road, monasteries, graveyards, pagodas, but mostly houses, some very nice and new, others just shacks. Most have something for sale on the ground floor, such as drinks, petrol or haircuts. At KleanmouengCheat we park the minibus on a side road near the building site, and work for about three hours, fetching, carryin, chiselling, digging, or whatever. Three hours doesn't sound like much, but in this heat, it's enough. Our translator and van driver pitch in without being asked, so much so that we have to keep reminding the translator that we need his tongue more than his hands.
We also keep some of the local children entertained with football, dancing, and generally behaving like silly foreigners.

More when laptop is recharged !

The first house

Nearly all preparations are complete, the first team of volunteers arrive in a few hours and this pc keeps shutting down every few minutes.

Anyway, here is the first house that we are replacing:

Note the rickety stairs, the holes in the walls and the patchwork repairs.

Here's what it looked like yesterday:


And here's what has happened to the bits that were pulled down:


This is where the family are living until the new house is finished.

Wish I had time to tell you more of the sights, sounds, traffic, heat, the Mekong ferry and about why it's rotten to be suffreing from a bad cold when it's 30C in the shade.

Phnom Penh

The traffic in Phnom Penh is miraculous. Not only do you have people transporting immense loads on tiny motorbikes (so far my favourite is the guy driving the bike, and behind him the friend supporting a five foot high cylinder of gas cross ways across the bike) as well as families of up to four crowded on one bike, kids with no helmets sitting on Dad's shoulders, but you have cars and tuk tuks all weaving in and out, doing u turns across the main road, driving down the wrong side, or getting the passengers out of the tuk tuk because the hill's a bit too steep. We haven't seen a single accident: people all drive relatively slowly so that they can stream around you without stopping.

Our first night here, we walked to the main road from our staff house. It was dark, and fragrant with all manner of appetising smells and an underlying odour of slightly fermented sewage. Children waved and shouted hello. People's houses are often open: there'll be a studio/shop/warehouse on the ground floor, and you can see people working as you walk past. The alley we live on is dirt, but many of the streets are paved with concrete, covered with a layer of rubbish, sand, chickens, etc. At 6.30 pm it was full dark, but very hot.
We got to the main road to find that the restaurant on the corner is in fact slightly dubious. (Girls waiting outside to entertain gentlemen) So we retraced our steps to a place we had walked past, which was basically the front compound of someone's house. The menu was all in Khmer script, but the manager was very patient with us in transalting: Grilled cow, lips of cow, head of cow, bit of cow, um, not sure how you say....
OK, we'll have the duck. And the chicken, fried with a fruit he can't explain exactly, so he fetches one to show us. We share three dishes, and rice, and get some beer and some soft drinks (Lychee juice, Soursop juice, Grass Jelly juice) We discover that in Cambodia, they leave the bones in. None of this taking a fillet and chopping it up, no, take a cleaver to the whole bird. Apparently, they actually eat the bones - for a diet so lacking in dairy, this must be an important source of calcium.When we are stuffed, we call for the bill (Sohm cuk loy!) and discover that we have feasted all five of ourselves for the princely sum of approximately six pounds fifty.

OK, off to New Life Fellowship to sort out details for much of the rest of our time here. They run a drop in for street children, a slum visiting program, english and healthcare classes and many other things which we will hopefully be working on while we're not building houses.

Khnyom mao pro te Kampuchea nam bay san tear!
(I came to Cambodia to build houses. And do other things, but I haven't learnt that much of the language yet.)

Freudian slip

When we visited the village yesterday, our experienced team mate whipped out balloons and blew them up for the children. When Rob was given the chance to blow one up, he once again demonstrated hitherto unsuspected skills as a children's entertainer.

Today, when explaining that you may as well get into the spirit of things, he managed to utter the phrase "Well, if you want to blow up a child then give it to a balloon...."

Give him a break, he's still adjusting to the time zone lag.

Arrived

Once we finally left the UK, our journey was exceptionally smooth. Prior to that... well, think overrunning engineering works near Rugby, signal failures near Hayes, appallng service at the very expensive hotel near Heathrow (thankyou business miles).

It's warm here, but not too hot: a mere 29C today.

Yesterday, we visited the village where we will be doing most of the work here. There is a mixture of housing, ranging from tumbledown-shack to mediterranean villa, though more of the former than the latter.

All is busy, as we have just a few days until the first team arrives in country, and everything needs to be SMOOTHLY in place by then. It isn't that yet. This is being typed during a short gap between meetings, so my carefully planned blog structure has gone out the window already!

Photos will happen at some point.

Keep thinking of us, praying for us, sending positive vibes our way. We need all the backup we can get.