Wheelchairs at last!

A few of you have asked about the wheelchairs, and yes I finally got them. And yes, it was as nightmarish as my first attempt, maybe even more so, knowing how corrupt the system was this time. This time I went to the customs office with Mony, the Khmer man who has been acting director of TTLC. I had written a letter on his behalf with all the required information, checked that he had his Khmer ID and the registration documents for TTLC. We handed over the documents and the official took his time going over them. Then he asked "Who is Mony"? I pointed to him and the official said "no he's not, he is Kosal" and showed me his ID card. Sure enough that was his name. Frustrated I explained that he failed to mention his REAL name and he demanded that we go away and re-write the letter (this would be the fourth), with his actual name, his date of birth, his postal address and ID number at the top. Frick! We spent 40 minutes driving around the busy streets of Phnom Penh, ducking and weaving people, bicycles, motos and dogs to find an internet cafe where I could re-type and print the letter. I added the necessary details, and wrote the address shown on Mony's ID card, rather than his current address, just in case the official would complain because it doesn't match. 


So off we trotted back to the customs office. He fluffed around a bit more, stamped each page, told us we had to go downstairs to have someone stamp it again. By the time we got upstairs again it was 4:30, and he said he would give the documents to the right channels and to come back at 11am the next day.


So dutifully at 11am we came back to the office, only to be told that the official was not there and was busy in a meeting. Not knowing whether to wait, our translator explained that it would be best to come back at 2:30pm after lunch break, as it was unlikely we would be able to see him before then. When we came back at 2:30, he eventually arrived at 3pm, saying that he had everything ready that morning and when he came back to the office we were not there. Well perhaps the message could have been passed on to us, so we don't have to guess his every move?! Once the documents were handed back to us, we rushed out to the dry port. Once there, we were informed that I had not yet paid the leg of the shipping from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh. Oh the irony, considering if I had know it would have gone there first I wouldn't have shipped it to Phnom Penh, as Sihanoukville is significantly closer to where I live! So we had to go back to that shipping office and fork out over $200. By this time the port was closed. Another day with no results.


So onto day three, we took a tuk tuk out to the port early in the morning. We were shuffled from office to office for over 2 hours, waiting for databases to be pulled up on computers, admin and processing fees were requested at every stop along the way "you need to pay for the typing", and documents checked over and over. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the way they operated, we went upstairs to a room on the left, then across to a room on the right, then downstairs to a room on the right, then back upstairs to a room on the left, then right, then left...more money requested $3 here, $10 there. No one used a telephone or email for communication, everything was done face to face and I felt like a piece of driftwood, alone and awash in a sea of excommunication, being pulled on an unpredictable current, destination unknown. 

Eventually, bewildered and very near ready to call it quits and just put it down to a big mistake and count my losses, we were ushered to the  nearly empty warehouse. More fluffing around, showed packages that clearly were not wheelchair shaped as they ummed and ahhed over whether they were the cargo or not. Finally we set eyes upon the actual boxes and the process of storing them on the tuk tuk began. 5 boxes got strapped to the roof and 1 in the actual tuk tuk. Now to work out how to get them them back to Kampot, a 3 hour journey. We managed to fit 4 in a van and 2 in a car. Steve is currently helping me adapt on wheelchair for Sok, a boy I am working with and I hope to give another to a little girl with an intellectual disability.