Exciting news

We have had some of the best news of the year this week. The woman we met at the swimming pool has contacted us as she and another want to do some work with Sothy. The arrangement we have agreed on couldn't be more perfect. The woman called Debbie is American and has experience with working with deaf blind children. She will come to the orphanage two to three times a week to work with the staff on how to communicate and help Sothy, she will be in Cambodia indefinitely, so I hope will form quite an attachment with Sothy and become a long term mentor. There is also a university student who is taking a year long break in Cambodia who is looking for volunteer work.She is deaf herself and is willing to volunteer full time doing activities and teaching Sothy sign language (through touch). Amazing that we managed to bump into Debbie! I was very worried for Sothy and his future prospects but I think Debbie and Holly  will be able to make a big difference to his quality of life. I am very very happy for Sothy.

For Project Trust we have to do a community study. I am doing mine based on the trial of the Leaders of the Khmer rouge regime. I have been having some interesting conversations with various people about the trial and Beth and I went to visit the court. I found the visit to the court surprisingly interesting and enjoyable. The court is made up of a mixture of international and Khmer people which means that french English and Khmer are all being spoken at the same time. Everyone wears a headset tuned into a channel so 3 languages are flying around the court which I am pretty sure was causing some problems, but I was very impressed with the system. The session I watched was the giving of evidence by a man that had run various communes, he had clearly spent years justifying what he had done to himself and was desperately trying to convince the court he had treated those in his commune well. This man will never go on trial though so I don't think the court were very interested. Through talking to Cambodians I have discovered that the interest in the trial is very low and suppressed further by the fear of talking about politics.It does seem that putting so few people on trial especially as they are so old is slightly futile, but the main thing I learned at the court was that it doesn't matter what the convictions are, the trial is very important for extracting information on the regime. I think it is so important that the Khmer people are educated on what happened during the regime and the trial is discovering lots of useful material. The court (I expect the UN section) is keen to increase awareness of the trial amongst the Khmer so offer group visits to the court with costs covered, we are really hoping to be able to arrange a visit with some of the older children before we leave in a month. The court is on a break until the 16th of July though so it will be tricky.

We took all the children to a small water park last week which they loved. We stayed all day and had the whole park to ourselves which was nice. It was much less stressful than you would imagine as the swimming pools were like giant paddling pools so not too deep. The children only left the water for lunch in an 8 hr day! A few of them have consequently had sore blistered noses and to their great indignation they all turned black and have extreme tan lines.

Thats all the main events of the past couple of weeks. Other news is that we have finally got a delivery of money from unicef so we have been working on budgets which I find very boring. We have now got a routine for when the children will recieve new clothes which will be good but sadly we won't be here for the first installment. Beth and I are finding it rather sad at the moment, as there are quite a few things we are discussing and initiating which we won't be here to follow through with or see the results, it will be nice for the next volunteers to arrive to some intersting activities though.

Elections, difficult children and sex

So the disciplinary method for Sothy was an utter failure, he found it to be far too entertaining trying to remove the strappings from his wrists and was very successful, the punishment was a game to Sothy. His behavior has improved a little, I'm not really sure why, it may be due to a little increased attention, I've been doing my best to improve my patience and be more affectionate with him. We took Vichet, an older boy who is brilliant with Sothy, swimming last week and he was a great help. Hopefully Sothy was just going through a rare bad patch before. We have had no more success either with organizations that could help Sothy. He needs one on one care which is too costly. We have a couple of other organization/people to contact but we're not very hopeful, we are beginning to consider sending him to Thailand. We didn't seriously consider sending him to Europe but we have been told that the only European country that will allow those carrying the HIV virus in is Greece!
Another 'child' I have had difficulty with is 18 year old Sok lin. We had a very bad lesson where she was being incredibly grumpy and I was having to be the strong teacher. It was horrible she doesn't see us as equals, but I am very aware of our small age difference so it make disciplining her hard. She was being very unresponsive in the lesson and refusing to help others that were having difficulties. I made her move to the front which she did very reluctantly and we had quite a struggle over, she was arsy for the rest of the lesson and I caught her mocking me which wasn't very nice. I spoke to her after the lesson after another struggle and she had an excuse of course so I did the you should talk to someone about your problems speel, I was so nervous about that chat. She was much better the next lesson though so hopefully it will be alright now. The whole thing made me feel bad for giving my teachers a hard time, I never really considered that they had feelings, they do! mocking hurts!
I've also realized that I couldn't ever be a full time English teacher as I don't understand the English language myself.

In the last two weeks Beth and I have done PSHE sessions on puberty and sex ed. We felt very brave tackling such taboo topics, I kept finding myself coloring up. Bethany had an interesting chat with Key about sex in Cambodia during which she found out; it is ok for men to sleep around but definitely not for women, women should be virgins on their wedding night and if they don't bleed the husband can easily justify divorcing her the next morning, Engagements are very short on average lasting between 2 weeks and a month, Women are expected to have sex whenever their husband demands it, it is not a problem that families all share the same bed children are simply sent out to play, it is not uncommon for women to have surgery on their vaginas to try and prevent their husbands accusing them of sleeping around before the marriage. Girls and boys can't walk alone without being thought badly of, families like to have a lot of control  over dates and romances.

We have taken the children on a couple of walks to the riverside this week, the riverside seems to be where the khmer socialise. The streets are lined with little food stalls and a couple of sets of big speakers are set up on the pavement which people dance in front of. It was really nice taking the children, its strange seeing the children outside of the orphanage they behave quite differently and its lovely being their source of security, it made me realize quite how much I have grown to love them.

It's election weekend at the moment and although there is little doubt over who will win, campaigners are out in force. This article though sad is really interesting. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/opinion/10000-days-of-hun-sen.html?_r=3&smid=fb-share. Campaigning here is quite different to back home, it seems that we campaign using information where as in Cambodia they campaign with a party atmosphere. For the last couple of days trucks of people covered in flags and banners have been driving up and down the streets blasting music and persuasive messages into every corner of Phnom Penh. On Friday there was huge gatherings of people trucks, food stalls and speakers in Phnom Penh, there was an amazing atmosphere. It feels quite brain washy but it seems a lot of people fall for it. The campaigning is pretty much solely in support of the Cambodian people's party and I am very aware of how corrupt it all is but it is really hard not to be affected by the hype, the tactics work! I left feeling jubilant. A couple of examples of corruption that I have heard is, people being offered bags of rice in return for votes, and my language teachers whole family were deprived of votes last election as they turned up to find someone had voted for them!