For Mum

You're always worried about our nutrition. So I thought I’d take some pictures of the vegetables we were eating just for you. Actually this was a few months ago and they are getting sparse again. Just to let you know that we eating nutritiously and also I know that you love the little cauliflowers they get here. I tried to cook it Burmese style with tumeric. Came out pretty yummy. The cauliflowers in the market lasted for a few weeks (in January), then started to get all buggy and now we don’t have any. Also had lots of nice fresh greens for a while there. It is the end of the dry season right now. There are a few tomatoes in the market and some greens (mostly “ga-zuen-yu-et”) and a few other odds and ends. Mostly we are eating mung bean dahl and potato curry. The price of flour locally has increased to $1.50 per kg (compared to 65c in Phnom Penh before) along with many other items (eggs are 15c each!!). Milk is the most crazy item. I have always just bought powdered milk. It used to be about $12 for 1.8 kg of powder. Lately though, it has gone up to $28 for the same amount (it makes about 14 litres). I switched temporarily to UHT milk which was cheaper (and great for making really creamy yoghurt) – that is now $1.60 per litre. It all comes from Australia or NZ. I think we need to get our own milking cow now. The price of fuel has gone up to $1.30 per litre for petrol. Diesel is also over a dollar also. So i should also invest in a bike. It is a good thing we have solar power!

Amelie's Prayers

Dear Jesus,
Please help the Chinese people to be good and get on an aeroplane and drink water and eat fish and chicken. And bless the food.
Amen

Amelie has been praying about the Chinese people for a while. Since we got the baby monkey and told her that the baby lost his mummy and daddy, probably to the Chinese who want to eat monkeys to make them smart, she has started praying for them to be good. She prays for them to get on the aeroplane so that they can bring the mummy and daddy back. And this time, to eat fish and chicken (instead of monkeys I presume). This prayer seems to have replaced the prayer for the pony!

Monkeys, Chickens, Rice, Storks and Fish

25 March 2008

A man stopped by our house yesterday and said he had a baby black monkey that he wanted to give us – would we take it? Of course I said yes, not because I like monkeys. In fact I dislike monkeys and primates in general! Mostly because they are mean spirited (probably a result of mistreatment), you can’t look them in the eye without feeling like they are going to jump on you. And I have a couple of little scars on my arms from their lovely long fangs. Mickey, our gibbon has now narrowed the people he likes to just me and Amelie. He developed a grudge against Ben after he escaped when we had guests over. In trying to protect our guests, we had to wave a stick around at him. Mickey didn’t like that although he placed all the blame on Ben – even though I was waving around the stick just as much as Ben. Since then, he has had it in for Ben. If he does get out, I am the only one who can catch him. Great. Back to the baby monkey, I said yes because I was so surprised that this man wanted to give him to us. I was caught off guard I guess. It not very unusual for people to want to give away animals. Even if they don’t like them and can’t look after them. They would rather have the animal die than give it away. So having this man offer the monkey was strange. He had bought him off kids in Chi Ouk village and brought him to us. Now it is like having a newborn. He screams all the time and wants to be held. He is drinking milk and some food. He weighs about half a kilo (I should go weigh him) and should be with his mother. But now I am stuck with this little dependent. Amelie is thrilled. She named him Chips.

We caught a chicken yesterday. Ben killed it to eat for lunch today so it is cooking now (in the pressure cooker because it is a tough one). I am making curried chicken with Basil and coconut. We have too many chickens. Only 3 roosters (as we had a cull on the roosters a few months ago) but about 20 or 30 hens. They eat a lot of rice and there is no more rice in Rovieng until the next harvest which is in about 7 months. So they are importing it at exorbitant prices. Unhusked rice is about double the price it was last year. Incredible.

The wooly necked stork flew back for a visit on Sunday for a day. We raised him and his 2 brothers (or sisters) way back in 2002. As normally happens, they flew off one by one. But this one has managed to stay alive and comes back about once a year in the dry season when food is scarce. Unfortunately the fish was scarce here too so we only had 3 tiny catfish to give him. And so he flew off again to greener pastures I hope.

Amelie has been praying daily for a pony. A medium sized brown pony. Here is a picture of her on a pony at The Happy Ranch, in Siem Reap.

The Last Week of January 2008

It's Friday night now and I'm sitting here at the computer listening to Positive life radio broadcasting from Michigan or some place very far away. My but things have changed in the time I've been here. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I landed at Poegentong Airport in Phnom Penh and met up with Murray Millar the ADRA Cambodia country director. There were lines of logging trucks going through Phnom Penh toward the port. Army people everywhere with guns and tanks. Generally I had the feeling that I was in the middle of very frontier town and country. Like stepping back in time to Cody Wyoming in 1890 or something! On the one hand, people were going about their lives as they had for years and yet the atmosphere was charged. In a few months there would be an election and no one knew if war would break out again or not. Almost daily there were Khmer Rouge attacts somewhere.

Now the political climate is very steady, at least on the surface. We can drive anywhere anytime of day without being shot at with an RPG (better known as B-40's, here). There are no longer huge swaths of untouched jungle teeming with elephants and other wildlife. In fact, the human population has almost doubled since then, which probably helps explain the almost instant loss of most of the wildlife.

But probably one of most amazing changes is that fact that I'm sitting here on the internet listening to a radio station from America, able to chat with my folks or anyone else in the world. The first few years here we went down to one of two hotels that had phones in Phnom Penh once a day and sent and recieved faxes for 6 dollars per minute. Most of the time the faxes messed up and we would send the same fax two or three times for an average cost of about 15 dollars a page. There was no point in entertainng the thought of calling home when my salary was only 150 dollars a month. And now I can post pictures that I took this afternoon on this site for the whole world to see instantly. I know that change is normal and most people reading this will think it strange that someone finds it quite so amazing. Maybe there is something in me that doesn't want change to happen so fast. Especially here in Cambodia, change is often not all positive. For example, here in Rovieng, a Chinese company is setting up house and preparing to stay a very long time. They are talking 70 years for starters! The object is an apparent iron ore deposit with upwards of 3.5 billion tons of high grade ore. There is also gold which they have already begun to dig for. Last week several villages staged a protest over the fact that the company has been poisoning the local stream and killing dozens of cows and buffalow. The gold mine is extremely small scale compared to the iron ore one which is on the bank of our one an only river here in Preah Vihear. After reading newpaper clippings about Chinese iron ore mines in China where whole villages have cancer and other problems from living down stream of the operations, I have to wonder what this place will look like in a few years. And yet most people here are happy to have them here having bought into line that in a few years everyone will be able to live in high rise concrete apartments with running water and 24 hour electricity. I guess I've gotten carried away here with my reminiscing. I had actually meant to write about my week. I guess I can do that tommorrow!

The Leaf Insect

Amelie picked up this little guy today. She tells me that he loves her.

Conversations with Amelie

Amelie: I picked this flower for Bella my cousin. Can we send it to her in Australia?

Mummy: You probably can't send it to her.

Amelie: Why?

Mummy: Well they don't let plants into Australia.

Amelie: Why don't they like plants in Australia?

Mummy: Weeeellllll... they don't want the diseases from here to get into the plants over there?

Amelie: Don't they want plants there?

Mummy: Yes, they have their own plants.

Amelie: So, I can't send this plant to Bella?

Mummy: No, you can't send it to Bella.

Amelie: What do they do with the plants?

Mummy: Weeeeelllll, they would probably put it in the bin and burn it.

Amelie: What would happen to it in the bin?

Mummy: They would burn it up then it would be no more.

Amelie: But ....

... and this continues....

Wildlife

There are a number of little animals that come visiting. In the daytime we have little Chipmunk Willie (a character in one of Amelie's books) - actually a Bedmore's Squirrel but small and striped like an American Chipmunk. He has these cute little white tuffs on his ears and is mostly interested in the bananas we have hung up. In the nighttime, frequent visitors are the flying squirrels - Rosseals, as they are called here. They are quite tame now and can even be fed by hand if you approach them quietly. Friends of Ben's and Amelie's (and not mine) are a family of Golden/Flying Tree Snakes who live right above our deck in a hole in our Jombok Tree. They are harmless and admittedly pretty. They visit the house about once a year in the dry season (well twice this year). That is enough for me.