mandevu.net

At the request of Refuter, here are some fish.  Actually, I do not have any images of the ones caught by the kids behind the house.  These were caught in a gillnet which was stretched perpendicular to the current, along the border between a rice field and a pond in a completely flooded landscape.

When the heavy rains hit the mountains in the neighboring province a few weeks ago,  all of this water flowed downhill into rivers and onto the floodplain.  Many people have lost at least a portion of their rice crops, because this wash of rainwater came about a month early.  So in many fields, the rice was not yet tall enough to withstand the flooding.  Next year, many families in the village will have problems both with having enough rice to eat, as well as seed for planting.  Ironically, there has been little rainfall the village itself.

This early flood also brought a flush of riverine fish out onto the floodplain, into the waiting nets of fishers.  For a week or so, harvests were pretty good.  However, the water level has since dropped and fewer fish are moving from the rivers onto the floodplain.  Catches are now generally small, both in the total weight of the catch, as well as the average size of any one fish caught.

The water under the house from my earlier post has drained, so the kids have taken their fishing elsewhere.

ifocus and Details are Sketchy have posted a bit on some newspaper coverage from the 2007 Clogger Summit. Give it a read!

This past week, I took a couple of days off from my work up on the floodplain to come down to Phnom Penh for the Cambodian Blogger Summit. I had a great time! This event featured two days of presentations and discussions focusing on blogging, ranging from the technical (e.g. an introduction to podcasting) to the more theoretical (e.g. envisioning the role of blogging and the internet in Cambodia in the future). I met a lot of neat folks, and learned a bunch too.

One of the particularly inspiring aspects of the conference was that it crystallized out of the efforts of the Cloggers Team– 5 young Cambodian bloggers who are so motivated about the medium that they developed Personal Information Technology Workshops which they then voluntarily facilitated at 14 universities and high schools. To date, they have taught over 1700 students about blogging, Khmer Unicode and related topics– all on their own time, driven by their own passion. I have immense respect for the DIY spirit of this crew, and am grateful for their efforts. Plus, they put on a great conference.

In light of the fact that part of my reasoning behind this blog is to share some of Cambodia with people abroad, I am going to start pointing you towards other blogs about Cambodia– other people, other themes, other ideas. Check them out– they are a refreshing change from my usual, “How about this fence…” kinds of posts.

As an appetizer, I will refer you to the blogs kept by the members of the Cloggers Team. All Cambodian, all quite different, all fun reads…

Joke 4 Everyone!– He’s got jokes! But he writes in Khmer, so you need unicode installed to read it.

Ms. K.– She’s in the U.S. on a Fulbright, but joined us at the Clogger Summit via the magic of webcam.

DeeDee, Schoolgirl Genius! Khmer Cyberkid– She just graduated high school in Phnom Penh. (Congratulations!)

Someone: a dreamer– Named after a brand of soap, he writes a lot about personal development.

KhmerAK– A self-avowed Phnom Penh geek. Plenty of fun techie topics.

So check them out and see what they have to say. I’ll post more links in the coming weeks and months…

And, thanks to Preetam Rai for making his image of the summit (above) available on Flickr under a Creative Commons 2.0 License!

Over the course of my project here in Cambodia, one activity which has sucked up a lot of time is the accumulation of spatial data, ranging from paper topographic maps to digital orthophotos. These are invaluable for general thinking about land use, as well as developing landscape histories, which are an important aspect of my research project (as well as not getting lost!). One sort of data which I have yet to properly assemble, are locations of government land and fishing concessions to private individuals, companies and communities.

However, a post from Details are Sketchy drew my attention to Alt.Map.Cambodia. There, one can find Google Maps of fishing, mineral and agricultural concessions (like the map above), documents dealing with border negotiations, and more miscellaneous geographic information. An excellent resource!

Alt.Map.Cambodia subsequently pointed me to the Danida-funded Cambodia Atlas project. The website features an interactive Java-powered map of Cambodia, which allows users to modify which information is displayed on a base map of Cambodia (i.e. which layers of the GIS are active). It includes layers for forest cover, UXO and land mines, community fisheries and much more. Fun to play with. According to the site, this is part of the effort to get this data into the public domain, which is a good thing. However, I am not sure if they are making the datasets available for download so that we can actually use them in our own spatial analyses. That would be a really good thing.