Angkor part 1

 In early July we stayed in Siem Reap for a few weeks and took in the temples. For me it was one of those experiences where you are confronted with how your own life is just one of trillions of stories in the book of history. To see buildings circa 801-1431 and to imagine how these people lived through the inscriptions and pictorial carvings on the walls was humbling. Not to mention the exceptional craftspersonship of the carvings...intricate, whimsical, humorous, fragile, robust, personal and exceptionally clever. Jed and I had a 7 day pass to the Angkor Park and organised a guided tour for 2 of those days. 


David was our guide, he spoke English well and drove us in his air-conditioned car and led us around the temples. On one day we saw 16 temples from 6am to 6pm! Although Angkor Wat is most famous, it actually has the least wow factor compared to all the temples that we saw afterwards.It was built in the 12th century by King Suryavarman and is both Hindu and Buddhist. The temple was constructed as place for buddhist pilgrims all over Asia, was completed in 30 years and is the world's largest religious building. The outer walls of the complex are 1500 by 1300 metres with a 200 metre wide moat all around. 

Lotus motif at Angkor Wat

Lotus shaped towers of Angkor Wat, 5 in all, the tallest being 65 metres

Carving outer gallery wall, Angkor Wat

Water lilies in the Angkor Wat moat

Angkor Wat outer Gallery

Angkor Wat at sunrise

Angkor Wat at sunrise

If you thought Angkor Wat was large, Angkor Thom (meaning big) is a ruined citadel 9 square kilometres in size. It is enclosed by a mostly dry moat and is thought to have housed 100 000 people. People used to live in thatched and tiled houses and tended to rice fields outside the grounds.

The South Gate into Angkor Thom, the next kingdom after the Angkor Wat Complex. There is a northern southern, western and 2 eastern gates, all the same. 

Right in centre of the grounds is Bayon, the temple composed of erratic towers with 216 carved stone faces. Scholars believe the faces bear resemblance to that of king Jayavarman. The lower outer gallery walls are covered with stories of everyday activities, cock fighting, fishing, a woman giving birth, circus jugglers, elephants being ridden and people being thrown to crocodiles. 

Bayon, outer gallery

Detail of the outer carved wall of Bayon

Faces of Bayon

Ta Prohm- Tomb Raider temple

View from the top

Elephants guarding each corner

Apsara with feet on the side as the step were too shallow for feet to face forward. This creates humility when climbing the steps to the inner sanctums of the temple

Moss covered temple stones in the Angkor Thom complex

Carvings in "The Terrace of the Leper King"

Epic Arts

Three weeks ago I started my new volunteer role at Epic Arts in Kampot. It has been completely wonderful. Epic Arts is disability arts charity which works in the UK, Cambodia and starting in China. In Cambodia, it is based in Kampot where I live and consist of a Community Outreach Program, which go out into the community and find out in which ways people are affected by disability and how they can be integrated into the community, a Vocational Training Program, in which deaf and people with physical disabilities learn dance and performance and how to run workshops, and a Special Education Program, which consists of 2 classes of children with intellectual disabilities. It is a very exciting time for Epic Arts, as a new building for the special ed program will be completed in October. There will be two separate classes, one for the older students and one for the younger students, a sensory room, an office a student kitchen and student toilets, a play ground, sandpit, sensory garden, vegetable garden and meeting room. At the moment the special ed program is running in the art room, which currently is not in use for art activities. 


It makes me wonder if all the ground work I did at St Pats in setting up a sensory room, a sensory garden, the playground and therapeutic spaces was in preparation for this! It is quite strange how I have landed on my feet in this role, disability and arts together in a developing country and I still get to work as an OT. I could not actually think of anything better at this stage of my life. It's about time!


This week has been particularly inspiring. Epic has been training up 2 women to be special ed teachers (as special ed is not recognised in Cambodia) and also several teacher assistants. This week has been the start of a 3 week training for the staff, run by Claire, the SEP Manager and myself. I am so touched by this whole process of fostering capacity building in people who would not otherwise had a chance to fulfil their passions for special education. This week Claire has run all day workshops on the history of the SEP. She used a visual road map of who has been involved in the journey along the way and staff were asked to draw the people on a road on butchers paper...I was even represented on the road! Woo hoo! It was such a lovely, inclusive way of representing how the program has evolved and how everyone has had an important part to play in it's development. We discussed what it means to have an intellectual disability, stages in child development, communication strategies for children with ID, teaching strategies for cognitive skills and I ran a morning workshop on sensory processing. 


One activity that really stood out for me was when Claire presented a photo of a "typical" 17 year old boy living in Cambodia. She asked the staff to write around him all the typical activities he would be doing, such as going to school, helping his family, riding a bike, reading books, watching TV, having a girlfriend, smoking, going to bars etc. We then had to imagine this boy had an intellectual disability and the capacity of a 4 year old, and then circle all the activities he would be participating in. Obviously this list was quite limited. Thirdly, in another colour we circled all the activities he would be doing if he had the support of an NGO or disability support service all his life. The staff managed to circle every activity, which demonstrated that the reason epic arts exists is to facilitate access to everything a person without a disability can access, but also to exemplify that having a disability does not need to limit options in life. It was so awesome to have discussions about human rights and dignity in a country where this philosophy is few and far between. It gave me great hope.


The staff are delightful, Sarom will be the younger class teacher and Kagna, who has an adorable little boy with down syndrome, will be the older class teacher. Then there is Roeun, who is a translator and is working on the new vocational program for SEP, Channy, a teaching assistant who has a little girl Sokcheata who has a severe ID, Phea, a 20 year old girl and Tune and the two cleaners. 


It is a particularly exciting time for Epic as we dream big about the future and where our students could be in the community. Chok, a 20ish year old who experiences down syndrome, has an amazing story from having challenging behaviours, no social inclusion and no formal communication a couple of years ago, to now fully participating in the epic arts community and producing his own line of cards and art works. He is such a character around town with his little back pack with a broken zip, stuffed full of photocopied passports and important document that he had picked up some where, wearing women's clothes and turning up at Epic at times where he should be elsewhere! We are starting a new vocational program for SEP and considering training the students to start adapted work at the Epic Arts Cafe, washing motos, making glass bead jewellery, gardening, tending to animals, pottery, photocopying etc. It's pretty ground breaking stuff here!


When I did my Landmark Advanced Course training in January this year I committed myself to being the possibility of social inclusion for everyone. I think it's happening...and it gives me tingles!

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. 

Siem Reap Silk Farm and Acoda Orphanage

In early July, Jed and I went to Siem Reap. We caught a bus from Phnom Penh which took about 5 hours. Siem Reap was nothing like any other place in Cambodia I had seen. It was very westernised, jam packed with pubs and cafes and restaurants and massage parlours. There is even a street for westerners called "pub street". There are little laneways leading off pub street with quaint Italian cafes, icecream parlours and garden bars, much like Melbourne. Felt nothing like Cambodia, except for the tell tale tuk tuk drivers bugging you every step ("tuk tuk Miss", or "Sir" sometimes!) and the notorious Dr Fish Massage tanks on every corner! Jed was offered heavy drugs several times, must be his suspect shady facial hair. We soon found the markets; the markets along the riverside selling colourful pants and dresses, mostly from Thailand, silver jewellery, shoes, wooden souvenirs and oil paintings of the temples and the Night Markets, with much of the same, but with slightly higher prices for tourists. 


We discovered a gem of a place, The Blue Pumpkin, a bakery and icecreamery with a upstairs floor with wall to wall couches and folding lap tables, menthol infused cold refresher towels and crisp air conditioning. It was a welcome sanctuary from the outside bustle. 

We found out about a free trip to a silk farm, with Artisans d'Angkor which was an eye opening experience. Here, mulberry trees are grown and the leaves are picked and fed to silk worms which reside in trays in the nursery, where they are fattened up to produce silk. They eat for 26 days continuously and when they are fat enough, they make cocoons, expecting to turn into silk moths. Unfortunately for them, this will not be the case as the cocoons are boiled to kill the pupa and make it easier to extract the thread. 

Coocoon shells in the sun

Raw silk thread being extracted from boiled cocoons

Getting thread straight from the cocoons

Working at the loom on intricate patterns

The raw silk thread is rough and thick, and dyed using natural dyes from herbs, plants and even rusty nails. The silk is thinned further then hand weaved on primitive looms by women who earn less than $90 a month. The work is intricate, repetitive and time consuming. I was fascinated by how these women have the art down so precisely. The silk thread is actually dyed at intervals along the strand, in order to create the pattern when it is woven on the loom. So the colours on the threads all need to line up to reveal the pattern - talk about tedious! I have much admiration and respect for this craft, but also great sadness for the quality of these women's lives, holed up in a warm shed doing back breaking, finger numbing craft for such little pay. As tourists we feast upon purchases of silk scarves in the market, without a thought for the person who crafted it.

Check out all the threads she has to keep track of!

The same evening we visited Acoda Orphanage for a free Apsara dance performance as recommended by Trip Advisor. The children put on a musical dance performance every evening and afterwards tourists are asked to give a  donation for their education. 

TTLC

As you may remember, I was volunteering at TTLC, a therapy centre for children with cerebral palsy. Last February, I had my doubts about the types of methodologies they used which are based on the Doman-Delacato philosophy of cross patterning, however I thought I would go with it for the time being and do my own research. I soon discovered that it is not evidence based practice, has been banned by some paediatric boards and was actually created in the 1960's and not reviewed! The more I read about it, the more my suspicions arose that this was not ethically sound practice and the more I saw at the centre, the more I felt very uncomfortable. 


The straw that broke the camel's back was the day I saw the staff workers neglect to engage with a 4 year old blind girl, except to administer the passive movement of her limbs on a table (the cross patterning), and to push her head first down a wooden slide on a river of talcum powder, in order to induce a "crawling reflex". She was so traumatised, she went from crying and screaming to completely shutting off. It was only when I rocked her in my arms for half an hour that she calmed down. I was torn between the opportunity of modelling care giving and contemporary practice to the Cambodian workers and taking a stronger stand by withdrawing my support altogether. 

Da and Ly play with the new alphabet puzzle I bought

Feeing Sophanna (the 4 year old girl mentioned in previous post) pumpkin soup from Veronica 

 It was numerous lengthy emails back and forth between myself and one of the TTLC directors in America that eventually confirmed my decision. I had been told that I has to do the cross patterning for 2 weeks and then I could very slowly introduce some new treatment techniques, but the Doman Delacato method had to stay. Despite arguing the lack of evidence, providing 6 control trials and articles and citing contemporary neuroscience, there was no room for leeway. It was a heart breaking decision for me as the children are simply gorgeous and I fear for their well being. However I know I couldn't remain in a situation that was going to compromise me professionally, ethically and not to mention psychologically! Thankfully, I have been able to drop in every now and then to check on the kids and have been delighted to see the malnourished children look stronger and healthier. 

Sophanna plays with gloop (corn flour and water) for the first time

Warning: The video below is a bit distressing, but I wanted to share what I witnessed. 

Wheelchair woes

On the second day in Phnom Penh, I received a message to report that the wheelchairs I had shipped over from Wheelchairs for Kids had arrived in Phnom Penh port. So exciting, as I hadn't expected them for another week. I looked up the address of the port office, which was near to where we were staying and they spoke to my tuk tuk driver about how to get to the port. It was going to be an hour round trip, so we would have to come back another time. 


So this brought us to our second trip to Phnom Penh a couple of weeks later, for the sole purpose of sorting out the wheelchairs. We drove for 40 minutes from the city in a tuk on highway 3, past the airport out to Tec Srun Dry Port, arriving about midday, armed with the shipping documents. The guards at the gate turned us away as it was lunch time and said to come back at 2pm, as of course government officials need a verrrrry long siesta. At the suggestion of our driver we headed back to the airport to wait, as at least it had air conditioning. 


After some terrible and over priced coffee, and an impromptu Khmer lesson we were back at the port after the obligatory rest. Moved from office to office, I was sat down on a chair whilst the documents were whisked away elsewhere before being told that we had to have the documents stamped by a government minister back in Phnom Penh. Argggggh! 


So back to the Pehn, jiggegy jig, presented my documents and a timid woman told I need to write a letter stating what the product is and its weight and show a copy of my passport. Never mind that the shipping notice I presented has all this information! So we went back to the hotel, I whipped up a letter, printed a copy of the passport, back in the tuk and away we went. We were handed a manilla folder to house our documents and sat and waited....and waited. People came, people went. 


Eventually a man ushered us to his desk. He looked at my letter and laughed, saying it was very short and needs to not be written to this "Whom It may Concern" but to some minister's name. He then brings out some one else's letter as a template, saying it needs to be on letterhead and contain all this other information. Plus we need the registration documents for TTLC and  the letter and the passport need to be in the name of the person who is the manager/director of the centre. My heart sank. They are in America. I fought back tears as my ears buzzed and things flipped out of focus. I was so disappointed that it was so difficult to help these children in their home country due to their own country's red tape! I had paid for the shipping, the chairs were not being resold....it just didn't seem fair. If only I had shipped the goods in my name and not TTLC's I would have the authority to pick them up. Big mistake. 


Heavy hearted we stumbled back into the tuk. A whole day gone wading through bureaucratic bullshit for no result. Sigh. 


To top things off, back in Kampot, 3 hours away, I receive a garbled phone call in broken English from the shipping agency and freight company, Straights International in Phnom Penh asking why I hadn't collected the authority to release goods customs document from them and paid them $150. Oh, maybe because no-one told me to?

Kampot

After a few days in the Penh it was time to head down south to Kampot, which takes 3 hours by car taxi. Stayed the first night at Les Manguieurs for $10 in an airy hut on stilts with cracks in the walls that opened to the great outdoors and the ground below. Concerned about mozzie born illnesses as we were right on the river, we packed up and stayed at Veronica's. When she had visitors, we found a new home at Natural Bungalows. with a little private beach. This was our residence for the next 2 weeks. 

Ordering pepper crab at Crab Market at Kep

Fishing boat- they go out to sea at 5pm and fish all night ready early in the morning for the market

Tek Chou zoo, 8 km from Kampot town was well worth the visit. We were the only visitors and our Tuk Tuk driver took on the role of tour guide. He had about 3 words of English. He proceeded to lead us around the cages, which were not were not fenced off at all. He tried to get a rise out of every animal by banging on the enclosures; snake, lizard, vulture, you name it.  He threw a stick in at a sleepy looking croc, whose eyes just poked above the slimy green film of it's pool, and then jumped a mile clutching his chest when it launched in his direction, jaws snapping!

We walked past an aviary like cage of monkeys and it took us a while to realise they were exiting from a hole in the roof and coming down to greet us outside of the cage. Suffice to say I started running in the opposite direction! One great scorched orang-utan held out an empty drink bottle, which we filled and he gulped down the water gratefully in the most human like way possible. 

The zoo was not complete without some photos of some very creepy statues and abandoned merry go rounds. 

  

The Tuk Tuk driver actually turned these two figures like this and spent 10 minutes getting to line their hands up in a hand shake!

Face Your Fears and Eat Them

After a sombre day of reflection we wanted a nice dinner to cheer us up. TripAdvisor suggester Romdeng so we thought we would give it a go. Friends and Romdeng are sister restaurants and are part of Friends International – an organization that assists urban children and youth by providing a safe environment to learn skills for becoming productive members of society - bonus! Plus we were curious about the fact that they had tarantulas on the menu. We had already committed to giving the arachnids a go, and chose a Lotus bud chicken salad and a fish amok as our mains. 

The 3 crisp spiders were brought out on a pristine white plate, resting on salad like they were perched on foliage about to scuttle away. It was mighty strange seeing big fat spiders immobilised like that, like it was some freakish trick and they would soon be released from their frozen state and come alive again just as you pick them up. Just the mere sight of them turned the stomach a little. 

Bravely we ripped off a leg, tentatively dipped it in the lime pepper sauce and had a nibble. Totally fine if you keep your eyes closed. Tasted like deep fried nothing, crisp, almost hollow airy tubes. So far bearable. Meanwhile, Jed had ventured to the body and encouraged me to give it a go to get my opinion. It took quite a few mouthfuls of fish amok to pluck up the courage. I bit into the bulbous sac and a squishy nutty texture oozed into my mouth. Nasty! Didn't warrant spitting out, but still, not exactly a desirable flavour/texture combo that I need again. We ate through the rest of our meal, feeling a little ill sharing our table with the remainder of the spider carcasses, but proud we had a story to tell and for our culinary bravery on our second day!