Coyote in Cambodia

Going Out and About

3 of the 4 best types of transportation around Phnom Penh made it into this picture: cyclo, tuk-tuk and moto. What's missing? A bicycle.

Moto Helmet

One thing that I regret never doing while in Cambodia is buying a moto helmet! My mother would have had a heart attack had she seen me one morning - I was running late to catch the bus to work (about 4 blocks from my apartment), and jumped "sidesaddle" on the back of a moto, carrying my packpack and lunch bag and talking away on the cell phone with her! We wove between all the cars, ran a red light at the intersection (quite common in Cambodia), and then I did my usual run across three lanes of traffic to catch the bus, which would stop in the left hand lane for us, hopefully on a red light when fewer cars were brave enough to whiz by! What a stupid thing that I didn't have a helmet - they are only about $10.

I love this picture I caught of a little girl waiting for her father to start up their moto on the road to Angkor Wat. I snapped it from the tuk tuk as we went by, although I was also distracted by the silhouette of Cambodia's most famous temple rising in the background as the sun began to set.

Doomed Ducks

taken from the window of our bus on the way to work

Artisans D'Angkor Silk Farm

All my recent (and ongoing) wedding planning keeps reminding me of the visit Adam and I made to the Artisans D'Angkor silk farm when we were in Siem Reap.

(cocoons drying in branches)

According to their statements, "Artisans D'Angkor was created to help the young rural population to find work in their home villages by providing them with high-skilled trainings and a vocation from which they can earn a living.

(heat treating cocoons to kill the silk worm so it does not eat through the cocoon)

Today, Artisans D'Angkor employs over 1,000 people. The establishment of rural workshops has significantly helped to slow down rural depopulation in Siem Reap surroundings by increasing rural Cambodian families' income.

It is also a social policy model in Cambodia with contracted working conditions along with extended social and medical benefits. The craftsmen have formed an association which holds a 20 percent share in the company which means Artisans D'Angkor is a fair trade development company."

(a spinning wheel made of bicycle parts!)

Apprentices at Artisans D'Angkor go through an internship training period and also have many opportunities for professional development once they become craftsmen.

(this piece of ikat, a type of woven fabric wherein the threads are dyed and the pattern set before the weaving begins, was over 5 feet wide and took over a year to complete)

The Artisans gallery also displayed examples of stone carving and sewing, including a set of traditional Khmer wedding attire. Adam and I really enjoyed seeing this!

The couple wears a certain color depending on which day of they week their wedding is held (although many of the loud and joyful weddings I witnessed in Phnom Penh went on for two or three days!) Looks like our color would be blue, as we will be married on Saturday, June 20th - so it looks like our sisters chose their blue bridesmaid dresses well!

Welcome to Phnom Penh

From January 10th to May 9th, I moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia to work as an intern in the United Nations side of Office of the Co-Prosecutors (OCP) in the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) - the court established to try the remaining senior leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. I thought I would start a separate blog to document some of my thoughts and memories about that experience - which I didn't have the time or energy to blog about during my time there for multiple reasons.

The first and one of the most daunting (for me) tasks I faced was finding somewhere to live. I arrived about a week after most of my "batch" of fellow interns, and they had all already found apartments! (Which are always coming and going due to the high expat population in Phnom Penh - Cambodia has the highest concentration of NGOs, with accompanying nomadic staff, of any country in the world.)

I ended up living on Street 113, near the intersection of Sihanouk and Monivong. Phnom Penh is theoretically designed on a grid system - but neither the streets nor houses necessarily go in numerical order! But in broad terms, odd-numbered streets run north-south while even numbers run east-west. I had a teeny and relatively expensive studio apartment in a building owned by a Korean man and full of Korean expats, often working in the development of retail and hotels. I chose it because it was safe, and in a location that I would feel comfortable walking home to alone - an important concern in Phnom Penh.

That's my building - the one with the balconies. I was not so lucky as to have a balcony or be in the front of the building! Also, some sort of machine shop was located right beneath my window, and made ungodly grinding noises from about 7 am to 7 pm every day. I never visually located the source of the noise, but boy was it loud!

And this is what happened to my street when it started to rain. The rainy season began just before I left, and I missed the worst of it. Nevertheless, we drove home from work on some streets that had 2 or 3 more feet of water than this. Some of the uncovered sewers would overflow and fill the streets with a delightful smell. I once watched with alarm as a woman fell neck-deep into an uncovered sewer because it was invisible under the water. Luckily she was with a friend who pulled her out, but it made me nervous for all the children I saw playing merrily in the flooded streets!