Month 3

The weather at the moment can only be described as divine.  We are in the cold season at the moment and according to the Cambodians ‘the wind is falling down’. We have lovely hot sun with a cool wind and the nights are cooler at the moment which has meant I have been sleeping really well, though the cool weather does make cod showers quite a challenge. I have worked out a method of one limb in the shower at a time.

We took the children to the dentist this week. The children were so brave, not making any fuss despite many of them having baby teeth pulled out and it seemed most of them left the chair bleeding. We were told that is clear through their visits to the dentists how well magna are looking after the children, apparently the condition of their teeth is hugely improved and whilst it previously took a week to get through all the children it now takes a morning. Whilst at the dentist we were surprised to be invited to their Christmas party, so we are looking forward to that, especially as the dentist has some expats volunteering for them.

Much to the children’s excitement the Magna Christmas party is fast approaching so this week we began the rather daunting task of buying Christmas presents for 48 children with a budget of $144. It has taken us two trips and some very sugary drinks but we now have a complete and very big selection of outfits music, pajamas, jewelry, hairclips and toys, all ready and waiting to be wrapped.  We also have a Father Christmas outfit ready for me to wear on the big day.

We had a meeting with our Boss this week and we have some new exciting and rather daunting tasks. We are going to be pretty much solely responsible for activities and education of the young children outside of school, we are going to be doing updates for the children’s sponsors every month. The Magna orphanage in Cambodia is quite new so this is the first set of children they have had, many of the children are now turning into teenagers so we are going to start holding PSHE sessions. This involves teaching topics such as politics, sex education, drug abuse, exploitation of women etc. Denisa wants us to hold these using the teacher to translate. These PSHE sessions are really important as the schools don’t really give the children any of this information. The government includes ex-khmer rouge and the political system is far from democratic therefore the teachers are scared to talk negatively about the government or the Khmer rouge regime. Magna had some problems when the eldest girl started her period and didn’t tell anyone and apparently there are problems in other orphanages with the children having sex with one another due to ignorance. I can’t believe this would ever happen here as there is such a family atmosphere but we are to help discourage them. We have been asked to encourage the children to question and discuss as this is strictly discouraged in the schools.  I’m a little scared but I’m sure it will be ok; I will have to do lots of research. Denisa has told us some slightly scary stories, for example last year they had a couple of people trying to give the orphanage free cakes after some fuss the police were called and apparently the cakes were laced with drugs. They were trying to get the children and caregivers addicted. Apparently this is common outside of the schools.

The oldest boy at Group Home two has taken on the role of Magna hairdresser and has given poor blind unprotesting Sothy a hideous haircut. He has shaved of (very badly) the bottom half of Sothy’s hair the whole way round. It’s awful!

Week 12

One, maybe two of the children are going to be leaving the home soon. Sokong is 18 and is being handed back into the care of her sister. Sokong ‘s sister will pay for her to go to a training college so that she can then get a good job.  I think Sokong will be magna’s second child to leave due to their age. Sayha is the three year old sitting on the Tuk Tuk in a previous picture, he has been taken off his ARV treatment as it is suspected that he maybe HIV negative. If so he will have to leave the home as it is an HIV orphanage. It would be very sad for him to have to leave his magna family especially as he has lived his whole life here. The magna staff was praised for the excellent care they gave him as it was suspected that he would die as a young baby malnourished with TB. His mother unlike his father is alive but addicted to solvent abuse and has no contact. Of course it would be great if he was negative though. Sayha is so cute it takes all my willpower to stop myself giving him a huge cuddle when I’m meant to be telling him off, sometimes I can’t resist.

I have a very exciting project at the moment, that will help me, if successful, to leave my stamp on the project. Magna have had a few members of staff leave recently leaving other members with a greatly increased work load.  Key, who I love, is the Group home manager, and has asked me to help make a system of collecting all the profiles of the children, working out the yearly costs for all the children and work out a rolling budget for the Group Homes. Which they don’t have already! I think that when staff left they didn’t pass on various pieces of useful information.  So, lovely Key and I are going to set up a database. Neither of us knows how to use Microsoft access so we are going to learn which should be very interesting.

We have been experiencing lots of power cuts recently, almost every night in GH1 where we live, almost  every other hour at the hospital, and at GH2 electricity is a rare luxury.  At the hospital there is the added excitement of temperamental running water. The bathrooms have huge buckets of water that are kept full ready for the common cease of running water. Last week the buckets ran out though, so I was forced use the toilet using just my baby fingers so as to avoid getting my hands too germy. Whilst I’m on the topic, the Cambodians don’t use toilet paper, all the toilets are accompanied by tiny shower hoses as a replacement. On my arrival I thought they were for washing your feet, I still use them for just that.

Beth and I went to Sihanoukvile for a long weekend as it was a national holiday yesterday. We visited two project trust volunteers who are in a teaching project. They teach 18 to 24 year olds. They have accomodation with en-suite, and a big kitted out kitchen, with a big kitchen table that doesn’t wobble! We are very jealous.  Some of their students were Apsara dancing at a Christian church service so we went to watch. It was a Christmas service in Khmer so we saw a nativity play, was the story we know but with some small Cambodian details, e.g. they wore adaptations of the traditional Khmer dress. It was very entertaining and interesting to see. We spent the rest of the weekend on the beach, seeing Sihanoukville, and eating some delicious seafood. On two of the bus journeys we have taken we have been given food by Cambodians, they are very generous with food, I have been told that this stems from the huge amount of starvation during the Khmer Rouge era.

My Khmer is getting quite confident now, I’m not really learning anything new but I am confident with the vocab I learnt on the course. I’m particularly good when I’ve been drinking. I was under the impression I would absorb vocab without really trying, it turns out that’s not the case at all.

King Herod

Week 11

I'm feeling great this week, very settled and happy.

I am also feeling better about my teaching I was beginning to worry I was falling into a teachers rut and my lessons were becoming a little repetitive so this week we played lots of new educational games including the children's particular favorite 'bang bang'. The children compete for the winners position by being the first to guess the name of the flash card. The winner 'shoots' the looser who must die dramatically. I am going to make them a worksheet this week to help them learn the order of the days of the week, they were being a bit thick about it last week.


We began advent by introducing the children to advent calendars we had made for each home, with a day for each child. They found it very exciting and had memorized their 'day' very quickly. The advent calendars consist of a sweet for each day wrapped in a square of red material tied onto a long green ribbon with thick gold thread. Each sweet is numbered. I think they look pretty good.

Aids day on the 1st went well. We did some hygiene related activities including teaching the children to wash their hands properly using glitter and matching body parts to utensils. Its particularly important that these kids take care of their hygiene as their immune systems are low due to the  HIV virus and their treatment causes side effects such as very bad teeth.We spent the second half of the session playing some fun games. The day didn't go quite as well as hoped as some activities took longer than expected and others less time than expected. I also found it hard to give instructions and explain to the teachers and children what I wanted them to do  because of the language barrier. It was quite stressful but a very good experience. I expect the next fun day will go more smoothly.

This weekend we went to the cinema and then dinner with two expats which was really nice.We also decided that we are spending 2 weeks for New Year on the Thai island, Ko chan which I am very excited about.

Also I got two hugs from my favorite ma this week.

Week 10

I went on my first home based care visits this week. I went to two homes. The first was the home of 4 children and their parents. One of the children and the two parents are HIV positive. I found the first home really sad. It was in a big block of flats that were still being built at one end. The flat consisted of one room with a tiny balcony and a small bathroom built into the room. The father is a motodop (scooter taxi) driver and the mother sells dried chilli. They are very poor and were both out at work leaving the children at home alone. The flat was a mess and very dirty and had just a double bed frame and a small TV. The Home base care worker Srey mom and I sat with the children for a bit and Srey mom spoke to the children about not being lazy about their hygiene and invited the HIV positive boy to our aids day celebrations on the 1st. The second home seemed much nicer, it was a similar size but had more furniture, (some deckchairs and cushions and matts that are used to sleep on) and was much cleaner. A family of a Tuk Tuk driver and his wife and daughter, they seemed like a really lovely family and they gave us cold water and jack fruit to eat, which I considered very generous. The mother and daughter had both been in a traffic accident but they were pretty much fully recovered.We spent more time with this family, I got a little bored as I couldn't really understand what was being said but it was really interesting to see the homes. At some point Bethany and I will start updating all the files of these Home based care children.
We have been doing some much more productive liaising with Lakina, one of the Cambodian Magna staff, about Aids day, this week. We have it all organized, Bethany and I will spend most our day doing hygiene related activities and playing games with the younger children. These children are very early on in the stages of disclosing their HIV status, so we are not doing HIV related activities.

Bethany and I have been finding living so closely together in the orphanage a bit emotionally grueling so we are looking for some outside activities. Bethany has found a christian home group which she is going to start attending and I am looking for a music group to play with as I (much to the children's and ma's amusement) brought my trumpet with me.
We made an English speaking friend this morning! She is doing an internship for the Phnom Penh post newspaper for 3 months and she is going to come to the cinema with us next week to see 'Breaking Dawn'.

Skin infection much better :)

2 Months

We split the classes this week, which worked really well. My slightly smaller class takes place in the hallway and Bethany's more advanced class use the desks to write, in the classroom. We did the first of out monthly mini tests, they generally performed very well, with a few extremes, one very clever girl amazed us with her speed and accuracy whilst Vicheka the boy who's memory was affected by meningitis remembered one flash card. He seems to absorb the vocab quite well in the class and I had hope that the meningitis hadn't effected him as much as anticipated, but it must be his long term memory that is the problem. He also seems to have problems with pronunciation in Khmer and English, which I would be interested to know the cause of.

Bethany went on the home based care visits this week, but she think we may not continue this as the families don't want their neighbors to find out that they are HIV positive, and having westerners going into their homes will make the neighbors suspicious.

We also had a meeting with the Cambodian hospital staff about International Aids day on the 1st. We found it slightly frustrating as the response to most of our ideas was telling us what they had done in previous years. It was nice however to find out that it was not our sole responsibility to organize the day.

I look a bit of a mess at the moment our swim in the reservoir in Siem reip has given me an infected leg, foot, fingers and face. Its really hard to keep wounds clean here as our feet and legs are so exposed, and due to humidity and sweat I assume, they don't scab easily. Gross I know, poor Bethany has to look at me all day. I have started taking antibiotics though so should be back to my gorgeous self soon.

Week 8

We have had two little traumers this week at work. Sayha, the little boy pointing at the camera in the picture of the tuk tuk, fell down the stairs and had to spend a couple of nights in hospital, we couldnt really find out how he was hurt because of the whole translation issue, but hopefully he will be back at home bouncing about, when we return on Monday. Thearak, a girl of, I think 9. Has a recurring scalp condition. Therefore she has had her head shaved a couple of times. She had gorgeous ringlet hair to her shoulders but it was shaved of  at the weekend. It has really knocked her confidence, in the lesson she didn't want to join in and she has been very clingy. I feel very maternal and extremely sorry for her.
Group Home 2 had a bit of a roof mallfunction this week. We had extremely heavy rain and then our lesson was interrupted by water gushing through the ceiling. We had to do some frantic 6 man mopping and pushing water on to the balcony before it went through the floor, so that was quite exciting.
We also had Sorn, our supervisors leaving party, which consisted of really yummy food. We had beef kebabs and stripped vegetables with bread and chicken curry wth rice. I enjoyed it a lot, I even ate some of the beef.
We have spent Wednesday to Sunday on holiday in Siem Reip visiting Gabby and Katie, two other project Trust volunteers which has been really nice. Siem Reip is really lovely. It is cleaner and smaller than Phnom Penh and quite quaint. The French colonial influence in the architecture is very prominent here. We decided to wait  to see Ankor wat and the temples, when our families visit. We visited Gabby and Katie's project, I think we have it a bit tougher than them, they have a lovely big ensuite room a short picturesque cycle ride from the childrens home. They provide their own breakfast, so no rice. They have alot of short term volunteers that come and go which must be really nice to add a bit of excitement and much needed effortless  conversations in English. Seim Reip seems very western compared to Pnom Penh, and they often go out and weekends to bars and restaurants where they meet other westerners.They also have internet access at their accommodation. I do prefer our project though as we seem to be involved in more aspects of the NGO, I prefer our children and I just get a better feeling from our project,  but then im probably biased.

Week 7

I've been a little bit homesick mid week this week. I think it was because I was getting a bit bored. The lessons are great but in between I have about 2 hours spread out of just playing with the children which gets a little bit tedious. However we had an educational meeting on Friday and we have built some more into our schedule.
After the water festival we are going to start doing Home based care visits on a Friday afternoon, we will visit the homes of HIV children on the Magna program but not living in the orphanage, so as to monitor their health and the taking of their treatment. This means that we have had to shuffle our schedule leaving us with less free time, which makes me much happier. We are also organizing trips swimming at a hotel with Sothy the deaf and partially blind child, and an arts and crafts club on a Thursday morning. Application for materials has to be made a month in advance though so it can be put in the monthly budget, so the arts and crafts club wont start for a little while, its very strange and a bit frustrating not being able to have materials and stationary on demand. We have  been asked to set monthly mini tests for our English students, write reports on the kids every 3 months and update the children's files and send reports to the sponsors every six months. Hopefully this will all keep me sufficiently busy.

The very young children started pre-school this week  which means that we are left with the slightly older ones for the morning lesson. I am happy about this as the children left in our class  are old enough to learn some English, and some of them are behind in their education due to time spent ill or in hospital so it is nice to give them extra attention.

This week I was taken for dinner, by a couple of the staff to a street cafe serving what they call porridge. It ][you either couldn't taste or got overwhelming amounts of in a mouthful, strips of a vegetable which tasted like ginger soaked in sugar, eggs which at first I was pleased to see but I think they were pickled and in the very early stages of growing a chick, served with stuffed intestine and stomach. I don't think i disguised my horror very well and ate very little under the excuse that I find rice incredibly filling. I went home however to find the mas had cooked my favorite of their dishes, a spinach and chicken and sauce stir fry thing. Which I ate with delight. We had our first Cambodian deep fried battered banana, it was sooooo yummy, but I think contained enough calories to last a week. I am getting used to the orphanage food now and enjoying it, though I still pick around the meat.

I received parcels this week! I had to wait 5 days before I could go to the post office and pick them up, I am pretty sure I was more excited and probably more grateful for those parcels than I have been about Christmas presents in a long time.

We only have two days of work this week and then we are going up to Siem Reip as we think there will be some celebrations for the Water Festival, and we are going to visit two of the other Project trust volunteers, I am very excited. 

Going back home now to see how well our mattress is drying out, we had a massive downpour in the past 12hours, so we came in for lunch today to find the home surrounded by water and a huge puddle in the middle of our room and our mattress was sodden.

Jum reap lear