Babs’ travels -The Peking to Paris Rally and other driving adventures.

I have been watching the fruit growing on the large mango tree at the front of the house with great interest.  I love mangoes; what could be better than that soft, juicy, succulence?  I was chatting to Ponheary on the verandah yesterday when she noticed hat one of the fruits had turned yellow and was just right for picking.  It is very high up but Dara has an amazing ability to be able to do almost everything practical without the benefit of any modern  device.  He can fashion extraordinary tools that work wonderfully for the task in hand. During the genocide time the family were kept, for a period, in a Pagoda compound along with several hundred other people.  Ponheary said it was a prison without walls. Her mother, like many other people, had hidden some jewellery in the waistband of her skirt.  Coming from the town they were classified as 'new people' The 'old people' were the original village occupants.  There was a big divide between the two.  The 'old people

Children here are generally known by a nickname which tends to stick.  For in stance, the children in this house are Sith, Sasa, Fifi,Alice, Nini and Yaya.  They all have proper Khmer names but there is a belief that if you call a child by their real name then the bad spirits will get to know them and can inhabit them whilst they are still vulnerable.  Often, children are given the names of common household things for their pet name. I was teaching colour to a class recently and afterwards one of the boys came up to me to tell me, very proudly, that his name was Purple.  I love that; what a great name.  I have a girl called Mum and a girl called Srey Mum.  Sray means girl, woman, sister, female, anything to do with gender.  Another girl is called Thai; Pepsi is another common name.   The best of all though goes to a boy that Lori had been teaching.  His name was Top Sirloin.  Beat that!

Nicolas, a post grad volunteer fro Belgium, Janet, a teacher from Canada, Lori and me all set off to Knar school bright and early to wash filthy kids.  Armed with huge bowls, a ton of soap, shampoo, scrubbing brushes and all the medical supplies we descended. It's the smallest children that are the most filthy;  you cannot begin to imagine just how dirty these kids are.  Many wil never have had a proper bathe.  There is no soap in the village, no clean water, except at school thanks to the foundation and subsequently the dirt is ingrained in a way I have never seen before; tattoo like.  The kids rarely have shoes, if they do it is just plastic flip flops and the state of their feet is just dreadful. Some kids were reluctant to come at first, but then I think word got around that it was o.k., felt nice and you got to play with latex glove 'water balloons' afterwards. We started scrubbing, literally, to get the skin clean.  Some kids were so filthy that it took many, many a

Knar school is about an hour away from Siem Reap but could almost be on a different continent.  It is in a very poor area with all the complex problems that affect so much of Cambodia.  When the foundation became involved with the school about 2 years ago there were just two tumbling down wooden classrooms, that are still in use, and about 60 kids.  Now, there are 260 children and Plan International have built a concrete block of four classrooms to accommodate this increase  This is a a village where children are hungry.  The World Food Bank provides supplies for breakfast for the children.  Rice, tinned fish and cooking oil. This is supplemented  by vegetables that the children grow in the school garden.  The cans of fish are meant to be enough for 4 children a day but here they have to stretch to 27.  But, it is better than nothing and it makes a big difference to the health of the children.  Because of the split day system here the kid's rotate between morning and afternoon scho

We were invited to the funeral of a highly venerated Monk on Sunday.  The procession to the Pagoda was starting at Tchey school, one of schools I have taught at.  We were not quite sure what to expect but it felt unmissable.  There was one very strange thing though.  The Monk had been dead for two years. Lori and I set out at lunchtime and got to school to see a large ceremonial coffin with two splendid papier mache horses pulling it,  a lovely little chariot for the Head Monk to sit in large numbers of 'our' children and lots of Monks.  A large canopy had been erected in the yard and there sat rows of the deceased relatives.  All the women in white with shaved heads and the men in white robes as they had become Monks for two days for the Ceremony.  There were many old women but very few old men as is the case all over Cambodia.  Indeed, there is huge shortage of old people generally, for obvious reasons.   Over half of the population is of school age.  Just think about that

Things you can eat in Cambodia: Barbequed rat Fried crickets red ant sauce fried cockroaches cow uterus pig snout fish head rice paddy snails, raw and heated in the sun on metal trays spiders just about anything that moves or grows. The only one to tempt me has been duck with red ant sauce which was actually good even though some of the ants were still crawling!