Fields of rice and a lot of fish...I'm in Cambodia.

Repatriation...sort of

2008-05-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

It has now been a little over one week in my temporary repatriation to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the city where I spent 22.95 years of my life before I moved to Cambodia. Cambodia is the country I like to refer to as the first of many this migratory bird will visit as the seasons change.

Phnom Penh is also the first city I have ever lived for a more-than-temporary length of time outside of Toronto. My total length here will be between 1.25-1.5 years. Not only is it outside Canada, but it's not even in the same hemisphere. In fact, it takes a 15 hour flight just to get from Toronto to Hong Kong and another 2 hour flight to travel from Hong Kong to Phnom Penh. In conjunction there is also an 11-12 hour time difference. So you can sort of grasp that Cambodia is a fair bit away from Canada, eh?

That said, I'm having a bit of trouble re-adjusting to life, albeit temporarily, in Canada. I continue to look back to Cambodia and cannot wait to return back to Phnom Penh. My time in Cambodia is most definitely not finished. The goals I set out to achieve are not yet accomplished, the relationships I have with the city, the country, the people and my friends are only germinating. The honeymoon with Cambodia only recently ended and I'm still figuring out where I stand with it.

I should also mention that I was in the midst of enjoying a simpler form of life in Cambodia before my seasonal migration to the west. Here is a summary compiled with a fellow expat recently repatriated from Cambodia back to the US.

1. Dinners which cost $2 vs. $40
2. The ease of getting on a moto, saying "kinyum jong dove psar toul tom pong" vs. getting on the subway, getting off the train, changing tracks, getting back on the train, taking a bus and walking for 10 minutes, or paying $30 for a cab ride of the equivalent distance
3. Wearing merely one layer of clothing vs. several layers, a scarf and the possibility of a toque
4. Going to a variation of perhaps 5 beer gardens/restaurants/clubs vs. navigating a complex social scene based on what just opened, what you're wearing and how much money you happen to have in your bank account.

But the glass is half full and some of my closest friends are based in Toronto, or Tdot as we affectionately refer to it. My life in Toronto in 2008 is just as rich and well-loved as the life I had in 2007. I know that I can return to Toronto anytime and be received with open arms. I suppose this is the knowledge that truly keeps me migrating seasonally.

...as well as the hope that one day, teleportation will be invented.

Oh China

2008-04-11T03:42:00.001-07:00

Now this is completely irrelevant to life in Cambodia. Or maybe it is relevant.

I finally learned to say the following

Kinyum chun cheat chien, bontai, kinyum sun cheat Canada.

Translation:

My ethnicity is Chinese, but my nationality is Canadian.

This helps out in situations where a general annoyance with the nation of China is conveyed. Be it human rights abuses against activists in its own country, discrimination against ethnic minorities or the taking advantage of smaller under-developed countries to its south, there is currently a general local and global dissatisfaction felt towards nouveau riche China. I suppose this post is quite timely with the synergy of the global response to China's national and international policies and the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics.

I say this without any particularly strong knowledge of or experience living in the alleged motherland. My parents are from Hong Kong, and they were raised during its 99 year lease from China to the Great Britain. My mother is both an anglo- and francophile and my father's linkages to HK remain solely with remaining family and friends; most of whom are really really old. I have a workable fluency in Cantonese. It's actually more like my French. In fact, I would have to say that my education in those two languages was limited at best, and ended at too young of an age. So with a number of ethno-cultural, political, familial and social factors, I identify as Canadian, rather than Chinese.

Some would find this a bit tragic. I'm not particularly fond of my ethnic roots at the moment due to its ties to a nation whose present day social, economic and political culture and political strategem do not align with my own. From March 19-20, I attended the UN Systems Workshop on Pandemic Preparedness in the Asia-Pacific Region*. In a presentation given by the World Health Organization representative from China, a Chinese-national, a short call was given to support China for the Olympics despite what we, the audience, had heard in news reports. In another presentation given by UNDP-China, the speaker, once again a Chinese-national, asked for what we, the workshop participants, felt were the biggest problems with China. A very large number of hands rose into the air quickly upon the request. Tibet! Food safety! Human rights! That blind activist! So clearly there's some dissatisfaction with China thus far.

So, I'm being a bit of a bully to the motherland at the moment. Over thousands of years, China was a pretty great kingdom. I really love its food. Noodles are pervasive around the world as a result of their birth in China. However, so are explosive weaponry. I think that Wu Shu is a really beautiful art form cum martial art and I'm sure the list would continue. Perhaps I shouldn't be too quick to dis-align myself from China.

My Cambodian, Chinese-Cambodian, and my Vietnamese-Laotian-Thai-Chinese-Cambodian colleagues and I.

Then again, I also reflect back on how many Chinese-Cambodians with long family histories in Cambodia identify themselves. Many identify as Cambodian. Khmer even. At a recent party that my colleague, Khay threw, I found out that one of my new colleagues, Somnang, that ethnically he was Chinese, but he identified as Khmer. It went beyond the fact that his family had been sent to the workfields during the reign and terror of the Khmer Rouge, or that he spoke only Khmer (as well as English and French). This was the same for Khay, and his wife Pharun, who both have Khmer names. In fact, Khay's family name was changed from Wong (which is Chinese) to Phiev (which is Khmer) during the terrible reign of the Khmer Rouge. As with me, identity is a feeling - the accumulation of a number of historical, familial, social and political factors that form one's ethnic and national identities.

I could really go on waxing poetic and confusion about China, Chinese culture, the Chinese in Cambodia, yada yada yada. However, only this remains: 1/5 of the world's population are ethnically Chinese. I'm sure that quite a bit of them have different definitions of their ethno-cultural identity.

HAPPY KHMER NEW YEAR!

* The Asia-Pacific Region is essentially all countries in Asia excluding the Middle-East.

Juxtapositions....or, March Madness

2008-03-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

Outside the Banteay Meas restaurant, where I had my breakfast each morning, in Svay Rieng.

By juxtaposition, I do not refer to the truly engaging student-run global health webzine from my alma mater, the University of Toronto (http://juxtaposition.sa.utoronto.ca/), but to how I have realized the dynamics of development in Southeast Asia, or even much of Asia itself. But first, please do check out Juxtaposition, not because a number of my friends serve as contributors, editors or donor-relations, but because it is a truly well written and insightful publication by future leaders in development.

I also know it's been a while since I've written. I just culminated 3 weeks of travel between and within Thailand and Cambodia. For work, play and work again. It's been a head-rush seeing everything in the past weeks. However, home is where the heart is, and my heart is in Cambodia at the moment. It's nice to be sitting in front of my computer, in my flat in Phnom Penh; not sprawled among my bags in the Suvarnabhumi Int'l Airport in Bangkok, frustrated at a cancelled Air Asia flight back to PP. Although that flight cancellation did allow me to put these thoughts on paper.

Getting back to the subject, I'd first like to quote the insightful writer and anthropological commentator, Suketu Mehta, from his book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found,

"The growth of the megacity is an Asian phenomenon:Asia has eleven of the world's fifteen biggest. Why do Asians like to live in cities? Maybe we like people more." - page 17.

Urban growth in Cambodia is stunning, especially in the last 6 months that I have lived here. I believe this is why work in development, here, can be considered particularly unique in its comfort; compared to settings in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. In these regions, I have heard from colleagues that there is less available in general. Simultaneously, I'd also like to quote my friend, Danny, a former fellow Cambodian expat, who recently left for greener pastures in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Cambodia is 5 minutes outside of Phnom Penh" - Danny Whitehead, Jan 15, 2008

Within a nation, you have your rural quiet and your urban sprawl. Or, your rural poverty and your urban wealth. In Cambodia, the difference between the 2 settings could be no greater. For the first time in mid-January, I made my first trek out to a rural village near the Thai border to visit a friend's community-based tourism project. This involved a 7 hour bus ride from PP to Sisophon (in Banteay Meanchey province), and then a 1.5 hour ride in a pick up truck over dusty and bumpy roads that need to be relaid each each after the rainy season. Mid journey, our pick up truck's suspension actually broke; this was likely due to the weight of 12 people and goods riding on the truck bed. So, on the side of the road, serendipitously next to a roadside mechanic, the driver dove into the problem. During this 1 hr blip in my journey, not a single vehicle passed us by on National Road 69, aside from the single remorque.

Jan 19 - roadside mechnical failure on National Road 69.

Cambodia was and is truly 5 minutes outside of Phnom Penh. For the first time I had been in Cambodia, I was in a place where virtually no one spoke English, aside from my barang* friend, who was actually a francophone. I still really enjoy those memories of waking up to the sounds of farm animals outside the house I stayed at.

March 3 - Crossing the Mekong on a ferry in Neak Luong, Prey Veng Province, on my way to Svay Rieng.

I spent March 3-7 in Svay Rieng (SVR). The eastern-most province in Cambodia and bordering Vietnam, SVR is considered one of the poorest. Regular yearly floods, in the wet season, droughts in the dry season, and inset infestion in harvest season, descend upon the province. Income generation methods, once dependent on agriculture, become limited due to low education and skills. As a result, many residents migrate to Phnom Penh, seeking employment as garment workers, and to Vietnam, where they turn to begging as a form of income generation. Two of my developing projects in Cambodia seek to reduce health vulnerabilities faced by these mobile groups, such as poor hygiene and exposure to HIV/AIDS, complementing efforts that seek to reduce the need for migration itself.

One of the nicer homes, in Tuol Ampil village, Chantrea District, Svay Rieng province.

My familiarization with SVR invovlved visits to the villages of Kbal Thnal, Kbal Spean and Tuol Ampil. In Tuol Ampil, the village-based case worker gave me one of those "poverty tours" to familiarize myself with local living conditions. What I saw in these villages shocked me: huts made of dung and hay, not raised from the ground to protect from the rainy season. Some huts didn't have walls, let alone sources of water. The land was also extremely dry.

Access to these villages is limited. Vice versa, the access of villages to resources and health services is limited. Roads are incredibly shoddy and our IOM Land Cruiser even tipped over on the way back from Kbal Spean. Suddenly the malnutrition, gastro-intestinal disease, maternal morbidity and the desire (read: need) to migrate made more sense.

Comparatively, I live and do most work in Phnom Penh, where there are a series of Chinese and Korean structures being build, like the Golden 42 Towers at the corner of Sihanouk and Monivong Blvds. Expats and rich Cambodians find it wonderfully comfortable to live in Phnom Penh. One can purchase all the foreign groceries one needs at Lucky Supermarket: liverwurst for the Germans, cheese for the Italians and French, Kraft Dinner for those few Canadians.

Roads are generally bumpy but still paved and there is constant activity on them. The Karaoke bar next to my flat, while still operating, would continue blaring until the early hours.

Phnom Penh, street 102, near Sharky's

Something that also amazed me was the amount of choice in PP. Down Kampuchea Krom Street (Plav 124), I once counted 30 stores which sold TVs and speakers.

Regionally, you have the juxtaposition of countries like Thailand, with Cambodia. It is also remarkably different. I wrote this post, originally on March 12. I had just spent the weekend beaching on the island of Samet in Thailand. However, just before and after the beach was the drive to and from the port and Bangkok. It was ridiculous how many times I needed to remind myself that I was driving down a Thai highway, and not one in Florida.

The cities are no different.

Bangkok is rife with mall culture. At the Siam Paragon, were temptations like Balenciaga, Zara, Porsche and Lamborghini even! At the more bourgeousie Siam Centre, my friends and I succumbed to home-y comforts of a 6oz cut of prime rib at the Outback Steakhouse.

Instead of a predominance of motos and cheaper toyotas streaming down the bumpy roads, you have a greater selection of cars. And then there are the hotels! Himawari and Hotel Cambodiana - eat your heart out! I should also mention that a purchase of an issue of Vogue or Nylon would have also helped me alleviate feelings of inadequacy concerning not being dressed more a la mode. After that weekend in Thailand, I was more than ready to return to my considerably more limited diet in Phnom Penh.

I expect my year in this region to continue to be full of these strange observations. I often forget that the poorest can be found a 5 minutes drive and not 10 hours away; and that the even richer can be found less than 1 hour's flight away.

To conclude, I'd like to quote Suketu Mehta, from Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, once again,

"Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see where the action was in India, you went to the villages." - page 17.

I think the same can be said of Cambodia, but the action is in the now. Much of Cambodian culture remains rooted in the rural areas; only slightly injected with Western cultural subjects that development has brought.

* Barang is a colloquial Khmer term that describes a foreigner. It has its roots in French expatriates due to France's former colonial position. It is used as a term which refers to any non-Cambodian expatriate.

and now for something a little different

2008-02-24T03:08:00.000-08:00

Since I live in the anglophone expatriate bubble in Phnom Penh, I felt I needed to expand my horizons and have slightly infiltrated the francophone expatriate bubble.

Compared to my last post, this is not very relevant to anything political, but was a cool experience. To quote a musician who is also irrelevant to this blog, it was "sweet & dandy".

My German friend, Anna, is friends with Manu. Manu works at a French-supported community-based organization (CBO) called Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS). Actually, it was started by youth living in Thai-Cambodian refugee camps in 1986. PPS is now a Battambang-based NGO which seeks to use art as a method of rehabilitation for youth who have undergone experiences in trafficking, drug-abuse, sex work, abuse and the plethora of other traumas which can severely affect a young person. More information can be found at (www.phareps.org). On a nice side note, Anna met Manu on a bus to Kratie province. Such is the wonderful world of travelling, no?

We found out this week that the Centre Culturel Francais (ou le French Cultural Centre for those of you who weren't lucky enough to undergo mandatory French education until grade 9) was hosting a performance by PPS this samedi. The CCF (www.ccf-cambodge.org) is a really cool place and has been a nice diversion from my usual night-owl activities for the last month, which I was slowly getting really tired of. Anyways, this wasn't just any performance.....it was a really unique one.

It was a cine-concert. Music and cinema? How does that work? Don't they already go fairly well together? Well, you need a silent film, a Buster Keaton one for that matter. And you need a band. A Cambodian one, comprised of young people who learned the craft from the wonderful teachers at PPS. I forget to mention that this was all under the stars...in the outdoor theater at the CCF. The film was The General....ou Le mécano de la General Création...and because it was a Buster Keaton extravanganza that took place in Civil War Era USA, the combination of local sounds, not only your toots and whistles, but also some nice Cambodian melodies as well, meshed extremely well! BRAVO! I should also mention that it was a live band performing this congruous euphony. I couldn't decide whether I should be watching the screen or the instruments. Of course, the film was a silent one, so watching probably would have been better. The sounds could speak for themselves while the screen couldn't necessarily do that...

And then it started raining.

It had been trickling down on us throughout the cine-concert, but who can't handle a few drops, no? Then it really started coming down....Cambo-style. So alas, I will never find out if Buster wins the war, saves la femme and gets back on his train.

I suppose this is where I end this blog-post.

Alas.

health care....a la cambodge

2008-02-22T00:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, shortly after the noon hour, my flatmate Georg had a realization. "Oh right, you're Canadian."

How did this realization come to be? Well, I was really sick. High fever, body aches, some other symptoms I'd rather not talk about in a blog, for about 24 hrs and ongoing at that point. Essentially, I felt miserable, in no mood of going to work or even getting out of bed.

But what really motivated me to not see a physician was paying for one. I lay in bed thinking "why oh why am i not friends with a physician?" Finally, I succumbed to the fact that I was incredibly sick and made my way to the Intenrational SOS Hospital where most ex-pats go to see physicians.

My hospital bill came to:

Physician Visit - $60
Blood Tests - $19
Medication - $40
Total - $119

Being Canadian, I have the right* to free, at the point of visit, medical coverage. The health care I am provided for, as a result of my citizenship, in Canada adheres to the 5 tenets of the Canada Health Act. It is portable: I can use it in whatever province or territory I happen to be in. It is universal: it covers anything that is medically necessary. It is accessible: I can get it regardless of health status, age, gender or any other demographic constraint. It is comprehensive: so it will cover anything under the sun except for my teeth or drugs. Finally, it is publicly administered: the provincial government pays the doctors - I don't.

Cambodia is my first experience residing for a long term outside of Canada. It's been about 5 months now. For the first time working in the health and development sector, I have the experience of associating cost with health care. This is particularly relevant to the subject of migration and health that I am working in.

While there is publicly administered health care in Cambodia, it continues to be viewed with a lack of trust, according to a colleague. Many Cambodians continue to see private health care providers which cost an arm and a leg...or your home and plot of agricultural land. There are also the cost of drugs on top of that. A leading cause of landlessness, and therefore migration, in Cambodia, is indebtedness as a result of health care costs.

What often occurs among many Cambodian families who live in both the middle class and below the poverty line, is that they make the choice to see the pharmacist, rather than the physician. The pharmacist can make an apparently reasonable diagnosis of the affliction and sell the medication thought to be necessary - oftentimes this is paracetamol. This of course, is not a proper way to make a prognosis, diagnosis and treatment.

In fact, in early March, I will be making one of my first site visits to the border province of Svay Rieng, which sits next to the Tay Ninh Province of Vietnam. Here, I will be conducting a rapid needs assessment of knowledge, attitudes and practices of sexual and reproductive health care seeking behaviour of repatriated trafficked women who come back to Cambodia having worked in the begging and sex-work industries in Ho Chi Minh City. My provincial counterpart has already alterted me that one of the reasons that few women, trafficked or otherwise, see publicly administered health, if at all, is due to a lack of trust in the system. I am hoping that this project will inform a more in depth study that will eventually help guide provincial health care policy makers to improve systems such that public trust and practice would also rise as well.

The Asian Development Bank estimates that an investment of $4/head in Cambodia to contract health services from private providers would ensure that the poorest in Cambodia would be covered by proper and decent medical care**. While I am against the notion of public-private partnerships in health care provision since the have the ability to drive costs higher, this does appear to be a good step towards a publicly administered health care system for Cambodia. I am also against the notion of contracting with NGOs for the provision of health care, which is also a strategy advocated by the World Bank. Cambodia should be moving towards the freedom to provide health care to its own population by its own practitioners. What I propose is a simultaneous and step-wise system. First contracting for health service provision with both internal and NGO providers, technical assistance to develop a funding and public provision system and then a slow conversion to a publicly administered system with all stakeholders, especially physicians and patients, satisfied monetarily. The provincial base of this system would also satisfy decentralization goals of the Royal Government of Cambodia. The system can be strengthenned while aid is being provided such that when such aid begins to leave, the system will be able to run on its own.

Of course, this sounds a tad daunting, but it did take over 30 years for Canada to get its act right, no?

* I believe that health is a human right that should be afforded to all regardless of status, demographic or any other measurable, definitive characteristic.
**http://www.adb.org/Documents/Periodicals/ADB_Review/2004/vol36_3/healing.asp

I'm Such a Delinquent; Identity

2008-01-08T04:51:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to keep this as a log of everything I'm experiencing as a newbie to the field of development in Cambodia. Of course, that excitement stagnated around the months of November and December. One could call it the end of my honeymoon phase with Cambodia. Others would diagnose it as a function of my business with work, which I was. I'm just going to call it sheer neglect and laziness on my part. I should also mention that there were attempts to write. There are currently about 3-4 unfinished drafts sitting in my Blogger account.

However, I find myself a tad bit cash strapped (a result of a recent trip to Bangkok and a recent bout of a strep throat). The introspective self has also re-emerged vis-a-vis a dip in professional confidence (read: competence) in the past weeks. So where to start where to start where to start?

Ah. Before I left Canada, the man overseeing my internship asked me "So what do you think it will be like, as an person of East Asian descent, working in an East Asian country?" As a first post among my resurrection-posts, I want to point out first: I am Canadian first and Chinese second....and yes, I'm Chinese. Neither Khmer, Japanese, Khmer-Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Philipino, Native American, Hungarian nor Russian.

A common conversation:
Tuk Tuk Driver: Where you from?
Me: Canada
TTD: But....you look As-iiiiii-an.
Me: Yah....I am.

Another funny conversation.

TTD: You look Hung(a)ry.
Me: No...I'm fine...thanks.
TTD: Russian?
Me: oh he thinks i'm Hungarian. No. I'm not Russian or Hungarian.
TTD: So what are you?

I started to get mistaken for Russian and Turkish more frequently this past month and I couldn't help but wonder why?

It seems a bit strange that I rarely get asked if I am Chinese. The question of my race comes up quite a bit. A funny moment was during over lunch during a recent workshop I attended. My Dutch colleague, of the National AID Authority, said to me, "the moment you walked in this morning, I couldn't tell what you were. So my guess is Half Khmer, Half Japanese".

When the question of "what are you?" or "where are you from," my immediate reaction is Canadian, as in my first scenario. However, this answer is often not satisfying enough. The other party then goes on to list possibilities. Do I not look that Chinese really? Growing up in Toronto, where we apparently account for 11% of the total population, the subject of what ethnic group I belonged to was never a question. I didn't think it would be uncertain here.

It finally dawned on me one day, walking down good ol' Street 278.

I dress like a Westerner. The East Asian aesthetic didn't really get translated from my DNA. I'm kinda bigger than most Chinese girls that I know. I speak English without any accent, but the Canadian one I am said to exude. I'm also quite tanned. Many people here still shy away from the sun, preferring to keep a lighter skin tone as an indicator of wealth and prosperity, and not having to work in rice fields. I, unfortunately, like to tan, and instead, should be keeping out of the sun to avoid skin cancer.

The Chinese in Cambodia are a large population. Prior to the destruction imposed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, huge numbers of my country-men fled China when Mao Tse Tung imposed the restrictive policies of the Cultural Revolution. Many fled to Southeast Asia, to countries such as Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. Many Chinese were already in these countries as a result of trade and economic growth. By 1964, we numbered nearly 500,000 in Cambodia. After the KR's decimation, however, the population slipped to 5 figures in 1979. In the recent exponential development of the Chinese economy, however, there's a new resurgence in the Chinese population here as trade barriers lift. 5 blocks away from my flat, you can even find Mao Tse Tung Blvd. However, you can definitely tell the difference between la nouveau Chinois and that of the first exodus. There is a difference in ethnicity: China is made of many different ethnic groups reflected in the sheer number of dialects that exist. Chinese diaspora and migration patterns are a function of these ethnic differences. However, there is also a question of identity. A conversation with the Chinese-Cambodian owner of the guesthouse I stayed at when I first arrived revealed that he identified first as Cambodian, and then Chinese. His family spoke both Khmer and Cantonese. I wonder if this is similar among other multi-generational Chinese living in Cambodia. I wonder if its also similar to my own identity as a Chinese Canadian.

Cambodia itself is considered one of the most homogenous in Asia. 90% of Cambodia's population is made up of ethnic Khmer. Yet meeting the Khmer that are both friends and colleagues with reveal that ethnic homogeny may be in how one identifies oneself and cultural membership. I'm sure that closer inspection of family histories and genealogy will reveal inherent migration throughout East and South East Asia, which I see most evidently in Cambodia. What defines a particular ethnicity may not necessarily lie in the genes, but rather identity, language and culture. What is ethnicity therefore? What is national identity? I ask this in the post-colonial, globalized and travel-efficient world we live in now.

I work for the International Organization for Migration. How perfect.

so what do you do when....

2007-11-20T02:44:00.000-08:00

So what do you do when you're a Cambodian-American permanent resident, but you've just been deported back to Cambodia because you've infringed the American "3 Strikes and You're Out" rule and are now being sent back to Cambodia because of a new deportation policy enacted by Homeland Security in the aftermath of 9/11?

Before I get to the answer to this question, let me first explain this is probably one of my more positive and refreshing experiences I've had in Cambodia's NGOland since I've settled into life and work here. I suppose that the overhanging annoyances of the corrosive mixture of race and gender here have been a major theme of my thoughts of late, and I didn't want to necessarily taint my blog with angry typings about post-colonial-subcontinent-fetishizing sexpats.

The answer to the above query: www.korsangkhmer.org

In the aftermath of 9/11, national security policy sought to be-rid American soil of any possibility of a homegrown terror, be it of the Al-Quaeda sort, or the poverty-born criminal sort. As a result, criminals who were not American citizens and had infringed the "3-strikes and your out" law found in many states, were deported back to their home countries.

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the USA was a recipient of many Cambodian refugees. As many of you may, or may not know, the genocide and destructive activities of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime displaced many Cambodians to refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodia border. One of my drivers, whom I like to call good friend as well, Phirath, was raised in such a camp. The UNHCR and IOM mediated much of the sending of these refugees either to be re-patriated to Cambodia, or for resettlement in the USA, mostly in the recipient states of Florida, Kentucky and California. Many of these refugees resettled in the USA were small children, who's would only know the USA as home.

Arrival in the US was tough. Children old enough to remember bore the psychological scars of the genocide and civil war. Those young enough not to remember found lives embedded in poverty as new arrivals with parents who had limited social networks and social or fiscal capital. The combination of rampant poverty, a poorly constructed education and social welfare system in the USA caused many of these kids grew to be adolescents who turned to crime. Being such a youth in the 21st century was clearly not easy. But with 9/11 in the background, things were made tougher.

Approximately 10-15 such youth, between the ages of 18-30 are deported back to their supposed homelands of Cambodia each month. In 2004, several of such youth collected together and formed Korsang.

Korsang is an NGO in Phnom Penh, which seeks to provide harm reduction, HIV/AIDS prevention and rehabilitation services to drug users. They use peer education, skills training, needle exchange and safe injection, and health service provision to accomplish their goals to reduce the risks associated with injection and amphetimine drug use. An exciting program is the use of hip hop (and might I add, Khmer hip hop is awesome) for both skills building and physical strength training for recovering drug users. By teaching music production and lyric development, recovering drug users also build a great foundation for the nascent hip hop scene in Cambodia. By teaching young recovering IDUs the styles of breakdancing and hip hop dance skills, it is not only building up their physiological status, but also bringing in a very cool cultural imprint on a North American cultural phenomenon previously relegated to the urban hip hop scene.

They have been so successful in Phnom Penh, that they now work with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The WHO and UNODC recently worked with Korsang to produce a music video/harm reduction campaign to teach IDUs how to reduce their vulnerability to HIV infection by the proper cleaning and use of needles....through a hip hop music video.

Sitting in my Joint UN Team on HIV/AIDS meeting and having just watched the premiere of this video by my venerable colleague at the WHO, team members remarked "well, it's a little fast isn't it? I don't think they'll get it?" To which I thought - "no! the song is still reverberating in my head! it's catchy! and awesome!"

The success of Korsang can also be seen through how much funding they receive and how much they have expanded their activities since their limited beginnings. They are now internationally renowned for their established best practices and I look forward to seeing them at AIDS2008 in Mexico City...spreading the word of rehabilitation and harm reduction in the aftermath of deportation and crime and in the crushing environment of the slums of Phnom Penh.

I was lucky enough to meet the founders and heads of Korsang at a Livelihoods and HIV Knowledge Sharing Meeting at the Hotel Phnom Penh last week. They even had members of their hip hop dance class put on a show. It was amazing and I thought these kids had just hopped out of a KRS-One video.

I don't think I had felt this excited about something since arriving in Phnom Penh 2 months ago, and I'm really happy that I didn't write about the activities of post-colonial-subcontinent-fetishizing sexpats. It would have been a terrible post filled with angry observations made from the club scene here.

how to halloween in PP

2007-10-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

First, get invited to a party.

It really helps to have attached yourself to a well oiled crew of fun people who embrace the holiday with open arms and a bottle of something. It also helps that they know of a mansion complete with a dancefloor and bar, rented by a couple, one of whom was a choreographer for Disney and are more than ready to put on a good party.

Second, come up with a costume.

Thoughts of the easy costume options may come through your mind. For example, the ethno-culturally appropriate: geisha, Yoko Ono, or the easy because you own stuff for it already: punk rocker, cow girl. And then there are the costumes your friends already have planned and make you go "damn, i wish i had thought of that": Angelina Jolie, Jem and Wonder Woman are such. For those who are especially eager, you might want to choose a costume which has different names, depending on where you are in North America, or may not even exist where you are currently: a pylon, or as they call them in the US, a traffic cone comes to mind. Also be prepared to realize that this costume actually have quite a lot to do with your work. Afterall, you might be both an advocate for safe migration in both occupation and costume.

Of course, this costume also comes with assembly and a challenge to ensure that its cost does not rise above $5 USD and you can find a tailor who is willing to make you an neon orange dress in less than 24 hrs. If you cannot do so, one may assemble the dress yourself...with inspiraton from those sexy geniuses at American Apparel. However, this may include a fairly treacherous trip to Russian Market during one's lunch break in order to look for neon orange material and brave the hardware section of market where there is a chance a huge jackhammer may fall on you.

Third, put on your costume, add some requisite sex appeal to it and tah dah, you have it done. Also, take that sigh of relief that you didn't go as Yoko Ono because someone is already dressed as one.

Fourth, and finally: Be prepared to be misinterpreted as a gnome.

"while getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all"

2007-10-26T08:11:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday, my friend Mary was in town before leaving to start her internship in Kep, Cambodia. There were some tourist sites in PP that I had yet to see...well, most of them actually given that I work all day. One of these was the Tuol Sleng, Genocide Museum. I had been afraid to go alone.

Tuol Sleng, known under the Khmer Rouge regime as S-21 (Security Office 21), was used as a prison and institute of interrogation (read: torture), prison and execution of individuals termed anti-KR during the years in which the KR were in power: 1975-1979. Of the 12,000 children, prisoners and other general workers who passed through its doors, only 7 left S-21 alive.

In 1980, it was reopened and is now operated by the Royal Government of Cambodia to comemmorate the history of those horrific 5 years. It is a testament to the absolute fury which can be wrought by human hands. I felt a feeling of strangulation and

I was going through my harddrive tonight, since it's a quiet Friday evening and there's a raging storm outside. I found something I wrote. It was in response to a talk I went to back in March. I was lucky enought to be invited to, given by Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, current President of Liberia and first female state leader in the continent of Africa. Liberia is currently recovering from similar horrors wrought by human hands. Following the development of my interest in Cambodia as a kid, I became very much interested in the little known, but very much sinster events occuring in Liberia in 2000. All from a Rolling Stone article I read. While I listened to President Sirleaf-Johnson give her speech, I wrote this,

*

as humans, we are gardeners of our bounties and architects of our own madness
it is the balance of these 2 mechanisms of human development that we can truly ameliorate the cosmos of concerns we face in the 21st century

by bounties I do not mean a vegetable garden
for it is possible to flourish pests of uncontrollable growth as well
by madness, I do not mean to insinuate psychosis,
for it is insanity that mankind has brought to life the grandeurs of imagination

it is thus best to recognize the power we wield
harness it to the best of our powers
be wary of our own boundaries
cross those boundaries
and to lookout for the ones who stand most vulnerable.

*

Reading that tonight, I guess it brought back memories of last Sunday. Especially when the man without a face, a man, scarred by either land mines or perhaps even horrors wrought during Pol Pot's regime and begs outside Tuol Sleng everday, came to Mary and I asking for money. For whatever reason, the destruction done to this man's face: his missing eye, his reddened and deeply scarred flesh, had an even greater effect on me that seeing a man wheel an older man lacking all 4 limbs on Sisowath Quay. With all the office work I do, expat social life I have, its easier to lose sight of why they heck I wanted to get myself here in the first place.

Is such destruction and carnage a part of our genome that we will never be able to shed? Similar horrors are occuring in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Sudan at the moment. Eruptions in Burma loom near. We just kinda let them happen while trying to tackle avian flu

the word intern should be replaced with "gap filler"

2007-10-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

This is a realization I come to and embrace with open arms. My conception of intern, previously, had been filled with assumptions that I would be merely a support worker...filing away reports, proofreading, and perhaps even the odd chance to follow around the big boss and make notes. All of this would be done without complaint as the guarantee for salaried employment, the result of a job well done, would arrive at the end of one's tenure.

My experience as Migration Health Associate at the IOM has been so much more than the word "intern." I might as well be called an employee with benefits.

The lengths to which the IOM Cambodia mission engaged in health promotion activities to ensure that the risks associated with migration were minimized as much as possible was limited to mental health. They had a very successful 12 year run with this mental health program, which was a priority in 1992. The years prior to 1999 were marked with civil conflict amongst a society already quite burdened with the recent genocide. We now sit in the stormy waters of the Asian HIV/AIDS epidemic, in the environment of a proactive government whose Ministry of Health is unfortunately muddled in corruption. The threat of avian flu making a big jump between humans is also on the line. Cambodia is being threatenned internally and externally by microbes of a few micrometers in length. The Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs are of course involved. Migration health is therefore back in the spotlight.

I'm now in charge with building up IOM Cambodia's Migration Health Department. That means tackling the issues of HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, mental health and avian flu in a country that has not yet even experienced a decade of stability. I'm fresh out of college, my leadership activities are fairly hefty, but limited to an array of "student leadership activities." The kind that admissions officers look kindly upon.

And so, engaging in meetings with the Ministry of Health Secretary of State, the Joint UN Team on AIDS*, and the head of the National AIDS Authority, elicit feelings I liken to staring down the barrel of a very well polished sawed-off-shotgun.

Until drinks with an slightly older well-established friend this weekend, I never exactly realized the full scope of what I was doing here. For someone my age, you actually don't get this much responsibility - developing research plans of rapid baseline assessments to identify gaps in reproductive health care services available to Vietnamese migrants, representing an international organization in large national organization. It is the experience of a lifetime.

Simultaneously, I almost liken this to medical tourism. I don't mean the type in which people, from Western countries, go to places such as India for medical procedures, in order to bypass long wait lines or heft medical costs. What I mean is taking advantage of locations, in the world, which have sparse medical personnel, and being able to do procedures that one would require years of experience back home. In my case, I am doing the work that requires a person with at least a master's degree, from an institution with some pedigree, in something like public health, health promotion with at least a couple of years of professional work in the field. The letters W, T and F are very commonly used in my head when I think about the work I have been placed in charge of.

Today is Friday and I had my third and final lengthy meeting of the week. The Chief of my operations here even introduced me as the "expert" in Migration Health. I finally feel comfortable enought to provide my opinions when asked. While the term "expert" and my business card which says "Migration Health Associate" perplexed me, I still went on to offer my two cents on how the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training could best tackle the issue of labour mobility and HIV/AIDS. Afterwards, the Secretary of State and head of the National AIDS Authority patted me on my shoulder and said that he enjoyed my recommendations and criticisms.

This would never have happened in Canada and I am still in sheer disbelief with the responsibility I have been given here. While the term 'medical tourism' still lurks behind me, I do recognize the drive and the reasons that brought me here; that I'm not merely using this experience to rev up a CV in the hopes of admissions to a medical school, or Harvard Public Health.

*the Joint UN Team on AIDS is referred to as JUTH, however, i like to refer to it as JUNTA, because its funnier that way

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

2007-10-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

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.

relativity, my dear watson, that's all it is

2007-10-05T22:42:00.000-07:00

My last 2.5 weeks in PP can be described as some sort of drug-induced high. The amount of validation I'm receiving by working in this environment, from my colleagues and new friends can only be compared to the not-so-delicious taste but quite favourable outcome of some sort of absinthine concoction.

One of the most validating experiences this week was my chance to place comment on Cambodian and Vietnamese Cross Border Health priorities. To have my thoughts listened to by 20 or so older male state officials, and then to see my older IOM colleagues nod in agreeance...

However, there have been certain realizations about why I feel this way.

In a recent conversation with one of my best friends, he commented that I've always had a low sense of self; that I never believed in myself. He couldn't blame me however, given the environment I had just emerged from. The University of Toronto is a gritty place. It crushed my spirit, and it was very easy to lose sight of those alleged life goals, bliss and potentials that one is supposed to achieve in postsecondary education. In the pyramid structure of the UofT populace, you were always made to feel that you were on the bottom rather than the top. I suppose the psychology of that was to create a student populace constantly striving to perform their best. Well, let's say it didn't too much for the psyche.

As a Libran, I do have to bring out the scale and balance the situation however. I became more resilient. Patience and endurance, those open-to-close days at the library, engaging in what may seem like shouting matches in policy classes so that the professor notices you, these are skills you accumulate. They are assets in the end; especially in this line of business.

So to those UofTers who are probably not reading this blog...the academic environment you find yourselves emerging from is one which can turn you into something which is hard and cold. Don't lose sight of what you really want to do....and you can maintain being soft and warm.

***

On the subject of soft and warm, I'm actually beginning to hone those creative juices that I tell myself that I have. That's right people, that film talent I keep on going on about that I think I have...well, it's going to be put to a test.

I arranged to have drinks with the creative director of Meta House last night. Meta House is a German-founded art house that seeks to promote and develop an interdisciplinary and contemporary art industry in Cambodia.

The next thing I knew, she was asking me my opinion on curating an exhibition of work by an aging Cambodia political cartoonist and then agreeing to do a short documentary on him. While things seem to move fairly slowly in Cambodia, agreeing to do things usually happens really fast.

I'm also working on my own project. It's a bit self-involved actually, as most of the things I do are. It's self-introspective, it's illustrative of mostly me, and yet it's not about me, directly. I've temporarily titled it "Should I stay or should i go", after my beloved Clash song. I'm a tad nervous to get it started. I suppose it was spurred by various encounters I've had over the past 2 weeks I've been here.

The vision is to not only examine the micro-psychosocial elements that push individuals to enter a career that involves moving to a developing nation for a lengthy period of time, but also why they leave as well, and perhaps where they go next? I want it address larger issues of sustainable development, where Western stakeholders begin and end their relationships with nations. There are also the individuals who chose to stay. I can already name a couple of colleagues who have been here for 10+ years. I'm hoping to answer some questions about why I'm here as well while I'm at it.

However, in the short term, I need to give the partying a break. Cirrhosis of the liver is something I did not come here to accomplish.

NGOland is like David Bowie's Labyrinth

2007-10-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

In Phnom Penh, or PP as we all affectionately refer to it, many of the NGOs are within a 5 km circumerference. UNIFEM is a hop, skip and a dash away from my IOM office. As is the World Health Organization, UNAIDS and UNESCO. Save the Children Australia can be seen from where my old room was at the Golden Comfort. I think UNICEF is the only one which makes life a pain, since its situated at the other end of the city. All of this is being soaked right now in the first rain of the day, which I suppose is what spurs me to write this post instead of reading a quarterly report from the National Centre for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and STDs, better known as NCHADS.

I liken NGOland to David Bowie's Labyrinth because navigating it as a newbie to the environment is a bit daunting and restrictive. Walls smack right in front of you when you think that you have a novel idea. Differentials in which of Cambodia's 60 days worth of holidays are recognized by which organization are like growths of ivy that suddenly prevent you from making big steps. And of course, there are the monsters that try to drain you of your already pauperized resources at every turn. What is a newbie to do?

Well, patience is key. Not getting driven from your purpose is also important. Marketing and communications appear to be what program directors and project managers seem to be blessed with here. They are essentially very talented salespeople who make it easy to buy that dress that you don't really need and will never actually wear. Because HIV/AIDS can be such a broad topic, its often easy to forget your true purpose, which in my case is to decrease the risk of health issues as migrants and other mobile populations make it from source to destination. I feel like things happen fairly slowly as well. However, those feelings are probably rooted in the fact that I have yet to meet with UNAIDS, as I think they are stuck in Geneva for a UN employee pomp and circumstance at the moment. The HIV/AIDS component of my work rests on seeing them first.

UNAIDS therefore would be my Holy Grail. Or perhaps some sort of chalice holding the elixir of life for the HIV/AIDS component of my project. Once I get clearance to go ahead on attempting to get funding for HIV/AIDS and migration health promotion materials my work life more or less becomes a snowball rolling down the Alps. Hopefully I won't get too drunk from this elixir of life.

***

It is currently 1420hrs in PP. It's been raining on and off for the last hour. Really hard rain too. The kind that feels like hail pounding at the back of the neck but in actuality are large drops of water hitting you at full force. I wouldn't mind leaving now and bringing home work with me. Tonight's a fairly packed evening as well:

630pm - meeting with Meta House re: me, Cambodia, filmmaking and new media
9pm - goodbye party
12am - Elsewhere party - 300 drunken expats in a chic club? I'm there.
3am onwards - recovery

Oh my goodness, the lightning has started. I don't really have enough cash to get home on a tuktuk. Walking home will not be fun.

circles, karaoke, and total awesomeness

2007-10-01T07:02:00.000-07:00

It's strange to actually begin to see the realities of international health work. How difficult it is to make positive changes. That any sort of positive change is stepwise, requires a lot of patience and the ability to giggle at the strange behaviours of the Deputy Director of Communicable Disease Control.

My approach to elucidating what I'm actually doing in this position of "Migration Health Associate" actually got brighter today. I served as a monitor for the IOM-funded meeting between the Ministries of Health of Cambodia and Vietnam on Crosss-Border Disease Control. We were talking avian flu here. It's not an emerging infection disease that we're holding student-run conferences to discuss the the exact genetic mutations and their sustainability that can cause this virus to go global. It's a reality here. There are cases, there are deaths. There is actully an underrepresentation of the actual number of cases out there. We can respond to it in 2 different ways. We can prepare for it. We can also understand that it is a part of human history; that plagues rise, like phoenixes, every half century..that they reach a plateau, and next think you know, 92.5% of your population are vaccinated against it to ensure that it doesn't emerge again. People do die but they're just necessary casualties to ensure global survival, no?

Today's meeting was definitely an exercise in that, cross cultural communication and the example of 2 very different forms of state. Vietnam and Cambodia do not speak the same language. If decisions are made, we follow scenario 1, or similarly nothing happens and we follow scenario 2. While the Ministers of Health, at the federal level, both had very good English to communicate with each other, this skill was not necessarily applicable to everyone else in the conference room. Some important members of the round table also had a very limited understanding about what was actually occuring. Vietnam and Cambodia also both underwent prolonged periods of conflict, and although they are NAFTA defined Most Favoured Nations, their development trajectories are on entirely different pathways. The nature of the recent conflict and its proximity to the present are important to note here. Vietnam was Agent Oranged, yet it came out of the 'Nam with the same number of doctors and a close relationship with Russia. Cambodia emerged from Pol Pot's violent genocide and civil conflict in 1999 with a definite paucity of doctors and learned individuals. Cambodia only possesed a trade relationship with Russia. Vietnam is a socialist republic. A communist centralized system with checks and balances; rules and regulations that are mostly adhered to. Cambodia seems to fear that centralization, most likely a result of the past. They have a highly corrupt government at all levels that seeks to mutate donor money into all creatures great and small. Today's meeting at the Cambodian Ministry of Health, room 202, definitely exemplified all of those things, as well as a CDC Deputy Director who defintely should have become a pop star instead of a doctor in charge of implementing policy.

He is a man who exemplifies the corruption of certain parts of Cambodian governance and the circularity of what defines politicking. You could see the Minister of Health of Vietnam cringe everytime Dr. Moneth never actually answered any of her questions but still had the hand gestures, finesse, articulation and blaming that would best characterize a politician. It transcends borders, you see.

Of course, I should not forget to mention that he did regail us with Khmer karaoke love songs later on in the evening, in addition to hitting on me. As did the head of Communicable Disease Prevention in Vietnam. He even had the snazziness to include a WOOOOOOOOOO at the end of his verses. They should seriously form a band called "Mao is dead and alive" or something of the sort.

Anyways, Bruno and I get to make a trip to Svay Rieng, which shares a border with Vietnam's Tay Ninh province, to check out border health controls. That's pretty awesometastic.

they tend to come out after it rains...

2007-09-28T20:02:00.000-07:00

says the bartender at Metro, this place on the Tong Le Sap river I checked out with some new friends last night. They being rats. I'm still reeling from last night's incident actually. It involved me, some new friends, sitting on the patio at Metro, and me feeling something soft graze by my sandaled feet. Then, my consequent peering under the table to see what it was...and the release of a slight scream upon the realization that it was a rat. It's been about 10 hrs since the incident and it still gives me shivers. 30 minutes after my incident, I should mention that the dude sitting next to me got bitten by a rat, at which point he needed to be taken to the hospital to get some anti-rabies medication. All I can say is that at least it wasn't a monkey. I've heard that they bite a lot deeper.

I've actually never seen so many rats before. My new friends and I left this lounge called Pontoon last night. Pontoon is a, well I guess you can figure out what it is, on the river. Upon leaving, my new Zambian and Italian friends saw what seemed an entire pack of rats to rival both the Crips and the Bloods run across the the muddy road near us. Screaming resulted. Some hurried navigation of huge puddles of mud and dirty water in heels and flip flops and then me....almost falling. Keywod ALMOST. I think i've learned to save myself from such events these days.

So aside from learning a little too much regarding the happy hour activities of my boss from his friends yesterday, I have to say that the rat thing is still a bit blood curdling. Ewwwwww. I'm good with the smells of raw meat and fish, and their rotting consequences, in the Russian Market (I'm East Asian, I suppose such things are in my blood), but this whole rat thing still irks me, despite having read the seminal epidemiological work on rats...called...Rats. I highly recommend!

Cambodia: Donors Scale Back HIV/AIDS Funding

2007-09-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

From my work-Inbox and the newsfeed on the Global Fund Website on Monday:

The Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, USAID and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development have decided to scale back HIV prevention funding in Cambodia, Xinhua/ People's Daily reports...organizations made the decision because the country reportedly has achieved satisfactory progress in curbing its HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV prevalence has declined from about 3.3% in the 1990s to about 0.9% in 2005.

While it is wonderful that Cambodia has been able to successfully reach one of its Millenium Development Goals (Combatting and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS), this new development will raise new problems for Cambodia's population as well as make my work a tad bit harder.

Cambodia's government relies, quite heavily, on the donations of developed countries and both local and international NGOs, ranging from UNAIDS, to the Cambodian Action Research on AIDS and Mobility. This money not only funds a large number of Voluntary Counseling and Treatment centres around the country, but as well helps provide for antiretroviral therapy for an all too small portion of the HIV+ community and helps fund condom supplies for the country's extremely successful 100% Condom Use Program among its sex workers. Such moneys also fund research that advises Cambodia's fairly liberal, albeit corrupt, government. Althought Cambodia has been fairly proactive in its abilities to limit the spread of HIV throughout the country (it received harm reduction with open arms), it remains that which has the highest HIV prevalence in the Asia-Pacific region.

The IOM Cambodia office hasn't really had much activities regarding HIV/AIDS. I hoping to change this during my placement. The assignment that Bruno gave to me was to find advice on potential donors for a Safe Mobility education package entitled For Life, with Love; this is a title that Bruno and I consistently fumble around with. It's essentially a social marketing/health promotion project that seeks to reduce the risk behaviours among vulnerable migrant populations.

There's also this really interesting research project that Bruno's got under his belt...but not yet actually started yet on account of that small problem of funding. It's a Foresight project that seeks to predict the depth and breadth of HIV infection when the new Asian Highway System is built in Cambodia. Given experiences already seen in truck drivers in East Africa, and then mining communities in Zambia, this would be a wonderful piece of work to advise the government in policymaking, no? Of course, it also requires $$, six figures of it to be exact. I really want to see this project come to fruition.

Of course, that will be a bit harder since NGOs will probably be scrapping and fighting over money for the next while. Anyone friends with a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt?

purposes, motives and desires

2007-09-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in my previous post, the notion of what brings comfortable Westerners to places such as Cambodia, and a struggle with my own motives that brought me here.

Sitting at my Khmer cafe in the humidity that's hovers over PP right now, I couldn't help but wonder, beyond the tourists, what does bring people to work and live in PP and Cambodia? Is it the alarming ease to access prostitutes of all ages, types and psychological states? Is it the heat? Or possibly is it some sort of redemption from prior crimes that one can expect salvation through some act of altruism; playing with children in a Battambang orphanage comes to mind, as does, publishing useless and repetitve research papers about the forces which drive prostitution. Over dinner, I watched a white dude with the dreads park his moto across street from my outdoor table, and the older British man with the arms of a young Khmer girl wrapped around his waist while jetting down St. 278. Then there are the military offspring, or adult army brats, for whom consistent migration hass been engrained in their genes, such that the DFID contract in public health consultation in Cambodia comes with an obvious yes.

Finally, there are the people who just care. Like my boss Bruno. I can count him as one of those that I hope to look up to because they've essentially focused all of their time and energy, and perhaps have even made many personal sacrifices to get the work they want done. Over lunch at the one Italian place so good that it attracts Mafiosos galore, Bruno essentially gave me his life. Italy, Sarajevo, the Balkans, Mexico and now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and Vietnam. His only mandate being that the place must be warm, such that the Balkans for his doctoral dissertation was a bit of a fluke and parts of Central Asia are out of the question. He's really passionate for his work concerning labour migration and human rights. To the point that I think he tried to continue doing it despite the physiological intensities that wrack him right this moment. I suppose I shouldn't deify him since I've only worked with him for one day thus far; any deities I have created in this field tend to crash into pieces of defiled rubble. It must be the heat that drives these illusions.

I bring this up because I question my own motives that bring me here. I mentioned before that it was the film, The Killing Fields left an indelible image of Haing S. Ngor, crawling his way through a swamp of deceased Khmer, skulls and blood in his escape from Pol Pots agrarian work camps. I think I was about 11yrs old when I saw this, and the helpless Sidney Schanberg, journalist, abandoned by a government who could not give a damn about the million Khmer dying. I've been criticized for this. For a film, and its most likely romanticized, aggrandized, bleached out images to impel me to pursue some sort of god-like solvent for the remnants of crimes against humanity; its absolutely ridiculous. But at least it happened, and that I'm aware of the very important fact that I am here to learn. It was a question that constantly haunted me at these expat gatherings. "What makes you, fresh out of college, decide that the only internships you really want are the ones in Cambodia?" Well, why not? If Welcome to Sarajevo, After the Wedding, or god forbid, Hotel Rwanda push you into that field, well, at least it succeeded, and it got to someone. Manufactuered motion pictures are not short term levers that pull at the heart strings. Sometimes the effects are permanent.

On a lighter note, I did order something for lunch without actually knowing what it was since the waitress didn't speak English and the menu only featured Chinese and Khmer. Thankfully 5 yrs of Chinese school was able to indicate to me that I had ordered something with beef.

expats, my birthday, and heat

2007-09-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

None of the events of the past 48 hours would have occured without the help of the expats. While I continue to possess a strange disdain and perhaps even confusion about hanging out with expats, I feel extremely lucky and really happy to have met them still. My ultimate goal is to build sustainable relationships with local Khmer. However, having a non-tourist population to discuss episodes of How I Met Your Mother, the sociocultural implications of Knocked Up and Canada as the 51st state is a nice cushion to have.

A more appropriate title for this entry therefore would have been Tiff Tsang HBSc or: How I learned to stop self-loathing and learn to love the expat bubble.

I bring up the subject of expats because I spent the large part of Friday pondering about my birthday, which you all should know is today. Of course, all of my fears of doing this alone were dashed once I met Prateek and company. Through Prateek, whom i consider of social saviour and big brother typology, I've had the chance to meet really interesting and amazing characters in the NGO population in PP.

What I've learned from meeting them, however, is that I seem to be the only one who actively sought to get myself here. Through work and such, this collection of USAID, PeaceCorps, JSI, PSI, UN, WHO, Save the Children employees, and consultants of other acronyms seems to just have found themselves in Cambodia on the single factor of circumstance, or paycheque. Nonetheless, they are really great to talk to, and to hear Happy Birthday in Khmer from. I've deviated from the subject of why exactly I chose to come to Cambodia, and not Latin America, Central Asia, the Middle East, or that sexy region of sub-Saharan Africa, but that is for another posting.

But, self-involved as I am, back to my birthday. I spent last night at a house party discussing the trials and tribulations of the expat community, post-conflict psychology and the retributive lyrics of the song "date rape" by Sublime. At around 130am, we wound up at this club called Heart of Darkness, more affectionately known as "the Heart". Joseph Conrad's vision of subcontinents really hit the right note here. In a crowd of equal parts tourists, expats and rich Khmer kids, I couldn't help but wonder..."this must be Orientalism, Chinoiserie, and yellow fever, applied..." All to the sound of not so great house music and the occassional Macarena. I kid you not. I especially enjoyed the Anglo grandfather-type (replete with sweater vest), standing in the corner and watching all of this rhythmic thriving of inter-cultural bodies injected with many doses of alcohol. And the icing on the cake were the not so inconspicuous body guards fervently monitoring the activities between their rich Khmer clients...or rather, their children.

My new friends, Drew, Liz and Annie informed me that this was all quite normal...and that there was a hip hop night if I so desired as I'm not the biggest fan of house. We even tried to play charades with the caged, and elevated DJ in order to communicate to him HIP HOP:

2 Words....then hopping around for a bit. He didn't really get it.

A final word about the expat community is that they are really protective of each other. While PP is safer than I expected, acts of violence against foreigners do happen. Rumours of an Australian girl getting sexually assaulted after leaving the Heart, as a result of her moto driver steering her in a direction that wasn't home are abound. I'm really lucky that Prateek, who is embodied as a football player-like South Asian dude, lives above me and has been around to slowly engrain PP living here. Like I said - turning 23 without my new friends would have been a tad lonely and I would probably be on the computer @ 2pm (Cambodia time) without the excuse of a hangover and 5 hrs of sleep. I also have the excuse of the heat.

It's about 38 degrees celsius out there. I suppose I should make another venture out again.

jungle parties, poutine and the lot

2007-09-21T23:20:00.000-07:00

I've now begun my first foray into living abroad. Sure, South Africa was 2 months, but really, I was more of a tourist in that setting.

The romanticized musings of a foreigner introduced to the new lands of the east continue; I'm a honeymooner essentially. It's now been 48 hrs since I've arrived and for some strange reason, I find myself sitting here, typing this out before I head off to see the waterfront.

Since I've probably communicated with many of you (thank goodness for the internet) as a result of being smacked in the face with a mean case of jet lag (I am 11 hrs ahead of EST), some of you probably have heard the following....

1) I found poutine in Cambodia. I later learned that a Quebecois guy came over, married a girl, and opened this restaurant that's just down the street from my hotel. Oh Chinoiserie, how you make the world go round. I suppose he missed the mixing of melting cheese curds in hot gravy slathered on French fries so much, he insisted on putting it on the menu. I'm slightly hesitant about this, and we all know that curiosity killed the cat.

2) I rode my first moto! The first of many subsequent rides I'll be taking while i'm here. For those worried about my neurologic health, yes, I will be buying a helmet once I move into my flat next week. I also rode my first tuktuk, but unless it's raining, I much prefer the wind blowing through my hair and watching my motodriver deftly navigate the uber-busy streets of Phnom Penh. In fact, this morning, my moto-driver managed to move in the opposite direction of the lane we were driving in.

Success has also been wrought in making friends! As much as I wanted to first avoid the expat crowd at first, I now realize that the melting pot is inevitable, and could never be a tossed salad. Through a fairly convoluted 6-degrees of separation, the guy who had booked my hotel for me, Prateek (who is friends with future roomie, Tara) came knocking at my door yesterday, when I was coincidentally shacked in while waiting for a perpetual rain storm to stop. He's a USAID public health specialist from Texas. Meeting him lead to really good Khmer food, and an invitation to an expat party in which he dressed up as some sort of Jungle warlord, in uniforms bought from some black market army outfitter. Now let me offer you a key piece of advice to travelers going to the other side of the world. Alcohol, in this case, "Jungle Juice" and jet lag do not necessarily make the best of mates, but in the end produce what's probably the best solution to jet lag. But aside from Jungle Juice and jetlag, I did manage to make a very diverse group of contacts, including an Aussie mercenary who patrolled the Lao-Cambodia border, and told me this while adjusting his loin cloth so that all necessary bodyparts were appropriately sheathed.

On the way home, I also heard my first gunshot in the street while tuktuk-ing along a seemingly quiet, barren, street. This was around the tacky and glittering Millionaire's Club. Note to self..stay away from there around midnight.

I've also managed to find really good Italian food in PP. It gave me the first sense of home, or Toronto, since arriving here (which I suppose speaks heavily about Toronto itself). This was a result of finally meeting my boss, Brrunnnnnnnnnnno Malton-i. At least that's how I like to pronounce his name. I look forward to working with him, and hope he gets over his Dengue fever soon. Despite this, he insisted that he give me a short tour of PP on his moto this afternoon, which was really great. We then spent lunch discussing Fellini, Mexico-US border issues and being sick in Cambodia. All of this took place sitting in an Italian restaurant, next to 2 Italian men, who appeared to have some sort of stereotypical affiliation with a certain organized crime posse from Italy. Globalization is wonderful, no?

I also learned today that Cambodia has 60 days worth of public holidays. Yee-hah The IOM, my employer, however, is the one who decides which holidays we get. Damn it.

TIFFANY TSANG IOM PICK UP.

2007-09-19T22:50:00.001-07:00

That's the sign that the IOM driver, Prak Lay held when I stepped into the ARRIVALS section of the Phnom Penh Int'l Airport. I suppose that's also when all of the adrenaline came coursing through my veins. I am in Cambodia now.

There are not many traffic lights so I might just get hit by a car, a tuk tuk, or a moto, again. (I say that in jest) Everyone is really nice, and it seems genuine. My boss, Bruno, has Dengue fever (for the 2nd time) right now, but insists on having lunch with me on Saturday since he couldn't meet me today. His Italian accent is really thick, but absolutely lovely and charming nonetheless and I eagerly await to meet him. My current temporary living situation is called the "Golden Comfort Hotel" and is next to "Golden Gates", "Golden Bridge" and across the street from "Golden Sun Hotel". They are all in front of a golden bridge. I really hope you expected that. All of this appears to be in the NGO area of Phnom Penh as I already have seen Save the Children, some sort of German agro NGO and various other social jusice affilated organizations in one city block. Oh, and my office is across the street from the Embassy of Pakistan, and there are a lot of Indian restaurants on my hotel's street. Halal even if anyone needs. It seems that I cannot get away from all things South Asian! Perhaps I will later watch a downloaded bollywood film in my jetlagged stupor.

In sum...i'm apparently in the "honeymoon phase" of my intercultural adaptation. Conflict and crisis to come soon, but i seem to love it thus far. It's really hot here. However, that thought came secondary to me upon my release into Cambodian air; the first being my sheer delight and excitement in finally living and working in a country I only knew in moving pictures. The city is not as dense as I thought it would be. It's actually quite reminiscent of Havana, or any other post-colonial city in a developing nation. I suppose if I were in Nairobi, I would see similar architecture and urban planning.

Cambodia is nothing like I expected. It's much more and I really can't wait to soak it all in.

I wish I could take a picture from my hotel room, but the window faces a brick wall and another apartment building I think.

However, I expect to spend most of my time at work. They really think that I know quite a bit about HIV/AIDS. I learned this when I visited the office of the IOM (non-religious) Mission to Cambodia today, where I'll be sharing a room with Bruno, my boss. I have learned much about the social determinants of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, but much of it remains in North American and southern African contexts. As a result, and thanks to the free internet in my room, I will be reading papers from PubMed about migration health and HIV/AIDS in the Greater Sub-Mekong Region this weekend. Oh, and getting my Japanese Encephalitis shot and hoping not to catch Dengue.

In the meantime, as Bruno and my friend Sadia would say,

Ciao.

Not yet in Cambodia, but almost

2007-09-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

So, here goes my first foray into the newly culturally embedded phenom of cyber-voyeurism known as blogging. I'm currently in Hong Kong, having survived a not very difficult 18hr flight from Toronto. Actually, no, the man sitting next to me had this profound smell of mothballs and not having showered in several days. I should also mention that he had a couple of moles which seemed to have some sort of lengthy beard growing out of them. They were reminiscent of some wise old Chinese man circa-1920 growing out of them. Kung Fu: The Legend Continues comes to mind.

Otherwise, the rest of my flight was spent passed out, or having sudden spasms relating to the fact that I'll be in Cambodia for 8 months or longer. I'm not actually too sure what to expect and having realized that my childhood viewing of The Killing Fields can become an asset and a fault. Having to balance the expectations of seeing small children wheel their limbless parents around in wheelbarrows, while simultaneously offering themselves for sex tourism, and the sheer immensity and beauty of Cambodian history is a tad daunting.

Speaking of media and it's role in the amelioration of the density of social justice and development issues...it's an interesting topic of contention. What are the roles of movies like "The Killing Fields", "Hotel Rwanda" and "Blood Diamonds" in the current global environment? Do they have the ability to inspire and teach to those who merely glanced over the headlines in the newspaper like they did during the actual events? Or, do they merely engender a sense of comfort among the population, knowing that these issues weighing upon their oh so fragile consciences are now over? And what do films such as Brian de Palma's "Redacted" and Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah" also indicate? These are films that are regarding issues in there here and the now..and depict actual world events. Do they even fall in the same sphere? Do they further support Naomi Klein's notion of the Shock Doctrine?

But getting back to Cambodia...I suppose I should leave my mind open for what to expect. To understand the rampant poverty and the results of the genocide and decimation of culture and economy caused by the Khmer Rouge is what I should have in my mind if and when I see such things in about 3 hrs. I really can't wait to arrive in Phnom Penh.

I think I've wanted this since I was about 12 years old. And now it's here, 10 yrs later. I should take life by the balls and kick really hard.