i finally figure out work...and then it's a long weekend?

Three weeks have gone by since my feet first pounded the asphalt of Phnom Penh International Airport. I'm still trying to integrate myself into the PP social and art scene, expand my Khmer vocabulary, and come to grips with the fact that I really should start applying to graduate school.

However, the more concrete event that's occured is realizing exactly the scope and focus of my work. Migration Health Associate is a fairly broad term. Focal Point on HIV/AIDS for the International Organization for Migration is also a really specific term. After a meeting with the Country Coordinator of UNAIDS this past Tuesday, I actually have something to focus upon, which I suppose belies my subtitle of "Focal Point on HIV/AIDS".

In the vast NGO environment that comprises Rue Pasteur/Street 51 to Monivong, it's ridiculously easy to feel like a kid in a candy store. Program Officers and Project Managers thurst seemingly amazing ideas at you which feel like they are the complete solution to all of Cambodia's HIV/AIDS woes. While they do this, you must jump in at those elusive windows of opportunity to promote your own projects, cause and resource needs. Because I am fresh out of university, an intern, and more importantly have an excitable personality, I have the propensity to jump on things far too quickly. It's a part of my personality that's always been present and has occassionally been an asset. Some people think it's kinda cute.

A conversation with UNAIDS,

me: "So in striving to build up IOM Cambodia's involvement with migrant health, I was thinking of integrating our safe mobility and HIV video with the regular WFP maternal-child nutrition program since women have a greater propensity for migration, as do their husbands. I think it'd also be a good way of helping the high married heterosexual HIV infection demographic in Cambodia"
UNAIDS: "that won't really work, and you're assuming that all migrants are all vulnerable to HIV"
me: "right...what do you think of integrating it with the curriculum set out by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training as some sort of pre-departure training, for those who are interested in migrating?"
UNAIDS: "why don't you just concentrate on migrating" [what he really means is that UNESCO is probably already working on that]

So this monster needs some control. My boss was really right about how I should've met with UNAIDS before I met with everyone else - alas these staff meetings in Geneva. Yet, the UN already has a Regional Task Force on Mobility and HIV in Greater Mekon Subregion as well as involvement, through UNICEF and UNESCO on introducing safe mobility curriculum with the Ministry of Education. Where's a girl to begin?

My big meeting, as representative for the IOM, with the Joint UN Team on HIV/AIDS this coming Tuesday will just be a show of that, as well as a test of my needful ability to suppress my excitement. I will have to really FOCUS my advocacy of HIV/AIDS topics only to concern that of the vulnerabilities of migrants, trafficked peoples and mobile populations. I've already met with about half of the team. They are all wonderful people seeking to ameliorate the same global health disparities I am. Simultaneously, each represents an organization with different agendas and resource dilemmas to promote and solve. I eagerly await to see how a meeting of this nature unfolds.

***

In the meantime however, I have a really long weekend, which started yesterday evening with dinner and drinks with a professional photographer and novice American documentary filmmaker who was screening her work on the psychological aftershocks of Hiroshima, expressed in the form of art, at Meta House. I'm beginning to really love that place.

It's Pchom Benh in Cambodia today and Friday. Many of the friends I had made before are still fresh and all had plans this weekend. Losing my phone was probably not very helpful. So, it's me in PP, whose silence today is a tad deafening.

Thank goodness that bus stations will always be unusually busy no matter the holiday. Pchom Benh is a Cambodia Buddhist celebration of ancestors. How better to celebrate than to take a trip to Oudong?



Oudong is not a deliciously thick noodle from Japan.

Oudong was Cambodia's capital city during the 17th century.

And I was, from what my observation, one of 3 Western tourists visiting it this weekend.

I had heard that it was a quiet place to visit. My train of thought was if I was to spend this weekend with a bit of solidarity, why not do it in the shadows of Cambodia's formerly illustrious and underappreciated capital, with all of its Buddhist temple wonders?

There was of course a traffic jam on the short course from Route 5 to the bottom of Phnom Oudong. After getting off a bus that took me an hour outside PP, I hailed a moto and actually sat in traffic in the middle of this fairly rural area.

Thankfully, my moto driver is adept at navigating between cars, and after minutes, I was in the midst of thousands of Cambodians visitng, and this makes sense, paying respects to the ancestors?

So, I think, I was a bit rash in my thinking that Oudong would be as quiet as my social life was to be this weekend.

Despite the great numbers of people visiting, I was able to find my quiet places of for thought and reading at Oudong. It was simply amazing to find myself pondering life, as a result of reading the philosophically dense Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner, in the midst of terrifyingly beautiful Vihear Preah Ko. Simultaneously, I was also able to see some of the remaining structures that had survived bombings by the Khmer Rouge in 1977. I have yet to go to the Killing Fields at Cheoung Ek and the genocide museum at Tuol Sleng yet, simply because I don't feel ready yet. I don't want to rush it and not be able to take it all in. Seeing the wounded remains of these huge structures, was therefore my first experiences with it. To have this matched with the sight of so many beggars missing limbs, losses from the number of landmines that still dot the countryside and the sheer numbers of people, the entire experience was quite revealing of Cambodia's state of development.

It is clear why holidays such as Pchom Ben are necessary in Cambodia's path to freedom. Although it is merely plays only a part in the grand production that Cambodia requires to achieve its development goals.

***

Since it is Pchom Ben, I suppose the ancestors were extremely pleased with their gifts and decided to make it a clear weekend, compared to the random moments of rain we've been receiving. So I decided to go out exploring again.

My attempt to get to Koh Dach ended up a bit of a farce, although quite enlightening. Koh Dach is an island up the Mekong River which is supposed to have an awesome beach plus a great silk weaving industry. The island is only 30km in area, so I thought it'd be a great place to spend attempting to read Sophie's World and buy some gifts.

My tuk tuk driver, whom I decided to use because he'd been so nice to me the first time, seemed to know what I was talking about when I said, "ferry to Koh Dach, harbour, Japanese Bridge, Mekong?" After conferring with a fellow tuktuk driver, he smiled and nodded and we were on our way!



Little did I know that the next 30 minutes would be a really confusing ride to nowhere and I would end up back at the other side of the Tonle Sap river from where I began. It was clear that my tuktuk driver didn't know where this harbour of Mekong ferries was that I had been told about. So we kept looking for about another 20 minutes. While this brought up nothing, I did get to see a different side of Phnom Penh that wasn't NGOland, expat bars and rich Khmer kids. Rather, this was a Phnom Penh founded upon boat homes and raised houses to beat the higher water levels that come during the rain season. There were also a heck of a lot of cows roaming around. It was a bit amusing and reminded me of awkward junior highschool activities. Bulls on one side of the street, cows on the other.

So after wandering around the city for a while, you now find me here...writing this post and struggling to convince myself that I really should apply to graduate school.