Barang Barang

Unfortunately for me, over the past 10 days all of the  other NGO workers I’ve met here, including the 5 volunteers from The Safe Foundation, have left and returned home.

Cambodia is a pretty cheap country and volunteers seem to buy buy buy. As a result, all of the volunteers I’d met couldn’t fit their belongings in their bag to take home.

So somehow, unbeknown to me, I’ve managed to start a business here - The Leah Frazer Donation Dump.

Donated clothing, meds and food

With me being the only one staying and working for a project that covers a lot of remote villages I have been inundated with donations of clothing, medication and food to be given to those most in need.

I was given a mountain of clothing which I separated out and gave about half a rubbish bag full to each of the teachers mothers, on the basis that they distribute to those in their village who need it the most.

One of the women was so grateful she turned up at the school the next day with 5 watermelons and a chilly bin/cooler box/eskie (I’m catering for all nationalities here) full of some white gooey stuff that looked like jellyfish. There was so much of this white gooey stuff and I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat it all myself so I thought “Well I might as well share it round and if it’s seafood then they won’t be able to tell if I don’t eat it”. So I handed it out to the kids, anyone else who was around and tried some myself. It turns out that the jellyfish looking thing is palm fruit, a rare delicacy here that people have to climb the palm trees, with no machines, to get.  Oh crap!! I’ve just handed this stuff out to anyone that wanted it. No wonder the kids loved me that day!

Most volunteers travel with a medical kid and have no need for it and/or can’t fit it in their bags when they return home. So everyone gave me their spare medication as well.

Alys, a volunteer I met here who’s been working for a women’s rights NGO, and I decided that the best place to donate the huge amount of medication was The Angkor Hospital for Children, a charity run by Friends without a Border  (www.angkorhospital.org). Angkor Hospital for Children is an extremely busy hospital that provides free healthcare to those children and families that need it the most and trains young Cambodians to become doctors and nurses. I’ve never seen such a busy hospital. The triage area is overflowing most days and families travel from very remote areas to be treated. Most children are on deaths door with easily treatable illnesses.

We turned up with this a huge bag of various medication which was accepted with open arms by the hospital. In a country where an estimate 60-80% of medication is fake they will take as much western medication as they can get their hands on. 

Alys, who unlike me was in perfect health, decided that she was going to give blood as well. We found out that just over a 1000 people had donated blood in 2010. 811 donations came from foreigners. With a population of 15 million I find that amazing. I have no idea how this place manages to function.

The night the volunteers from The Safe Foundation left their schools they were all given a send off by their teachers and students. Everyone was so grateful for their help and they wanted to show their gratitude in a way that they knew how, so they gave whatever they could. The volunteers were given pictures the children had drawn, bracelets, bananas and nom - rice cooked with palm sugar and pork or banana wrapped in a banana leaf.

There was so much food that during the 45min tuktuk ride back to our house we couldn’t put our feet on the floor. The only small problem was that with a total of 5 villages donating food and the volunteers getting on a plane a few days later, they couldn’t eat it all or take it with them what could we do but waste it? We decided to take it to the hospital and donate it to the kids and their families.  So off we go to the hospital with my handbag (well it’s actually the size of a nappy bag – you’d think I had 20 kids) bursting full of nom and bananas.

The doctors were amazed that we turned up to simply donate food to the patients and their families. We were directed to the unit where children and their families were being cared for before they were about to be discharged. Mothers and fathers were lying on the beds with their kids taking care of them as there are not enough doctors and there are also no seats for the parents.

We walked around with the doctor while he explained to the parents that the food was for them and their children. Most of them were in complete disbelief that we were just donating food and we had to explain that it was ok to take the food and that it was for the parents as well as their sick children. We figured they needed as much energy as the children for the long trip back to their villages.

Now to just figure out how I can make money out of this little business I’ve created?!

There is an organisation here called Ibis (http://www.wildlifefriendly.org/ibis-rice) that provides rice to families who cannot provide for themselves.  They also help farmers who live and work in wildlife protected areas, who have heavy restrictions on their farming, build relationships and produce rice to niche wildlife friendly markets.

You can buy bags of Ibis rice and they will donate it to families who need it the most. Alys decided that she would do this as a gift for her friends back home in the UK. It’s a bit like the Oxfam buy a cow or a goat for a community but is more immediate and I suppose less sustainable on that side rather than the manufacturing side. A good project nonetheless.

Alys jumped on the back of a motorbike, the standard form of transport here, with the project co-ordinator and travelled 10mins away from the centre of Siem Reap, the main tourist city in Cambodia. There she stopped at two homes. As she approached the homes she could see that the area was quite flooded but having worked with remote villages for the past 8 weeks didn’t think what she was going to experience was any worse than what she’s already seen. The first family were very poor and the children very malnourished with big bellies and whispy reddish hair but the second one was to come as a wee bit more of a shock.

The second family where she was donating brown rice instead of white, as it’s more nutritious, consisted of a father and his children. The mother and one of his other children had died of dengue fever a few weeks earlier. He was faced with raising these small children on his own and with no income. Times had been really tough over the past few weeks and he needed to make a very difficult decision. How do you provide for the remaining children? So he made the awful decision to sell his daughter to what he believes is a clothing factory in Phnom Pehn. Unlikey. He’s not heard from his daughter since she left. Welcome to the real Cambodia!

This week at work has been very different.

There was a group of families that arrived at the Pagoda site where I work (I think they were the equivalent of gypsies) and set up a festival for about 5 days.

There were loads of kids but unlike most of the kids here they didn’t come near me. I couldn’t figure it out as most of the kids want to come up and find out who you are but thought they would come and talk to me when they saw me playing and interacting with the other kids.

The next day I was sitting outside the classroom and these kids came and sat next to me. I had the bottom half of my legs exposed and my arms. The next thing one of the girls starts grabbing my legs and squeezes them. She kept laughing and slapping my legs gently. Then she started grabbing my bingos (yeah I admit it I have bingos). I asked one of the teachers why the kids were so fascinated by my legs and arms and he said that I was the first white person they had ever seen.

One of the boys soon realised that if you slap my arms hard enough they go red. Oh the delight on his face as he slapped me over and over again.

To top it all off I had my camera with me and I gave it to the kids to play with. They ran around watching each other through the screen. I had to show them how to use the button on the top so that they could take photos. Thank god I invested in a smash proof camera.

For the rest of the day these kids were stuck to my side pointing at me then themselves saying “Black. White. Black. White” and "Barang Barang" (French person)

That had to be the best experience so far.

The kids who'd never seen a white person before testing out my camera

As I’m sitting here in my lovely wee local café I’ve watched 5 teenage boys walk past sniffing glue. Ahhhh the realities of Cambodia.