mandevu.net

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!

It seems to be roof repair season in the village.

Over the last week, I noticed that many households in the village were cutting down sugar palm (Borassus flabellifer L., ដើមត្នោត) leaves for the preparation of roofing shingles (ស្លិកកន្ដប). This is not a simple process. First, leaves are cut down. Older leaves are taken, leaving a tuft of newer leaves on the top of the tree for continued growth. I find the cutting to be a daunting task, as the trees grow up to 30m tall. No one else here seems to have a problem with that, as the trees are regularly clumb for palm sap collection. The trees themselves are quite common in the Cambodian farm-scape, and are often found along field and property borders.

Cut leaves are then left for about a day to dry, or until labor can be mustered for the next step. Then, the laminae of the leaves are liberated from the massive petioles (which are set aside for use in other projects, like fencing and cordage preparation– an example is in the background of the picture below, with petioles used to construct a duck coop). The next step is splitting the palmate leaves into individual fingers, each with an intact central vein. This adds structural strength to the individual blades. The intact leaves themselves are very large, so they are first split into managable portions (primal cuts). Then a machete or sharpened wooden wedge (in some cases, made from a piece of petiole) is used to split the fingers apart, nearly down to their base, leaving a fasicle of several leaflets. At this stage, small leaves or severely damaged leaves are culled.

The base of each fascicle is then trimmed off with a hatchet or machete. Once trimmed, individual blades are bundled, and left in a shady spot to cure further. These bundles are later opened, and individual blades flattened. Management of leaf moisture is very important throughout the process, as leaves which are either too dry or too wet are difficult to work, and may lead to a weaker shingle.

For the shingles themselves, leaves are folded in half over a bamboo splint (ពុះដើមឬស្សី) ​of about a meter long. They are added individually, so that each overlaps the next. The blades are then sewn to each other, using one row of stiching up near the bamboo splint. Finished shingles are then soaked in a pond for around 3 months– until they turn black. After soaking, they are dried, then washed and dried again. At this point, they may either be used for roof construction or stored in a shady spot until they are needed. As roofing material, they can last several years. Sewn, but unsoaked, shingles may be sold to itinerant merchants for about US$0.02. These are then sold in town. The child pictured here has since sold this batch and started another pile.

So, the other day I joined a team from the provincial agricultural department on a trip up to Prasat Balang District, northeast of town, in order to arrange an extension session on the improvement of watermelon production. Neither watermelons nor the rainfed production systems of that area are a real focus for me. However, I like farms, I like extension work and I like tasty, little Cambodian watermelons. And in this village, approximately 75% of households produce watermelon. I was pretty excited. This trip was to lay the ground work for an upcoming event, which would be attended by the Minister of Agriculture and a number of other dignitaries. We were planning to meet with the village headman (actually, headwoman in this case– not too common) and a crowd of farmers to feel out their interests and gather some information for the planning process.

Due to a scheduling snafu, we were stuck with several hours to kill before the appointed meeting time. Since we were not far from home when we discovered this, I thought that we would just go back and wait at the office (it has air conditioning and a TV). There was some debate, and then one of the guys came out with “I know someone over here who has some interesting mangos…”

Our next stop was the home of a family who indeed have some interesting mangos.

These guys are big– they come in at about 1 kg per fruit (that’s just shy of 2 and a quarter pounds back where I come from). If you look closely in the picture above, you will see one of the extension agents holding a fruit in his hand (second person from the left, black t-shirt). That will give you an idea of how big these things were. The farmers did not know the name of the variety. They just found them at the market in Kampong Thom town, and propagated the trees themselves. Though some from my party suspected that they were an Australian variety.

Mangos aside, they had a great little integrated system. In front of the house, the family was preparing rice-based liquor (in the past, deepwater rice has been important for alcohol production, but I am not sure what rice varieties they used, and whether or not they grew them themselves). After a batch is prepared, the remnants of the mash are brought back behind the house and used to feed the little crowd of pigs that live back there. The family had several low-roofed piggeries, with occupants segregated by age, and a massive boar tied to a post in a little wallow nearby. Their manure then went to fertilize mangos, papayas, bananas, limes, a patch of pineapples (pictured below) and probably a bunch of other things which I missed because I was totally distracted by the mangos.

We did not stay long, and I left their house with more questions than answers (hence my cursory description). I really hope to get back and interview this family sometime, just for fun. They have such an fascinating set-up.

In Phnom Penh, I was lucky enough this year to be able to get in on the fun at the Royal Plowing Ceremony. I enjoy this particular ceremony. It is full of royal pomp, Brahmanist practice (harkening back to pre-Buddhist Khmerness) and of course, is focused on agriculture (plus, who can’t love fertility rituals?). In a nutshell (there’s much more to it than this): the King, or in this case his desigante (as the King himself is unmarried, and so cannot perform the ceremony), opens the planting season by plowing several furrows running around the field next to the royal palace. This year, the King’s designate was Prince Norodom Singharath, pictured above. Following this procession, one of the ox teams is offered a range of foods, in a row of golden bowls– sesame seeds, rice, beans, wine, grass, water and corn. Their behavior, what they choose and how much of it, is then interpreted by the royal Brahman priests in order to forcast the coming year (the Brahmans are on the left wearing white in the image below). This year, neither animal was particularly hungry. One ate 45% of the bowel of corn. The other refused to eat altogether. As I understand it, this suggests that corn yields will be fair. However, rice producers should be worred, as the team avoided eating any rice at all, which predicts a poor rice harvest. Likewise, neither drank any water. This predicts a dry year. So, the outlook is pretty negative, since the majority of Cambodia’s agriculture is based on rice. And much of that depends upon the rain.

Another thing that I find interesting about the Royal Plowing Cermony is that I keep getting my pocket picked there. In 2005, a girl tried to sneak my camera out of my pocket, but I interrupted her mid-sneak. This time, my ziploc bag of toilet paper was removed from my back pocket, despite it being securely buttoned in. I caught on quickly after it was gone, and recovered it from the ground next to me (beneath the feet of the guy who I think stole, then discarded, it). Then, not 10 minutes later, someone else tried the same thing. This time I was onto him before he got my pocket open. Interestingly, I had to nearly turn my entire body around to face him before he let go of my pocket flap (reminding me of a friend of mine, who caught someone picking his pocket, grabbed him by the shirt with both hands, and while he was administering the pre-beating cuss words, the slickster stole the watch right off of his wrist and then wriggled free). I am not surprised to have been targeted in that situation (a foreigner in a crowd of people, all craning their necks to see what the oxen are doing = easy pickins), and am not all that bent out of shape about it. I’d probably be more annoyed if they had actually found something valuable.

I think that over the course of my life, I have been the target of pickpockets 5 times– twice at bus stands in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and three times here at the Royal Plowing ceremony (almost 10 years living in New York City, and nothing has happened there, yet). I try to plan for such events, and I have been lucky. So no one has ever gotten anything more valuable than my stash of toilet paper (which they always seem to discard immediately, for some reason). And, I sort of appreciate the chance to analyze their tactics.

In retrospect, it is always pretty clear how they did it– what distractions they used, whether they were working in a group of not, and stuff like that. Sometimes it is pretty ingenious (in a slight of hand sense), like the one guy that was part of the chaos of a pre-dawn bus loading who pointed up at the top of the bus with one hand, yelling to his friends (seemingly involved in lashing down cargo), while at the same time discretely reaching with his other hand beneath his pointing arm (his hand concealed by his armpit) to get into my breast pocket as we passed each other shoulder to shoulder. I, of course, was distracted– looking up to see what he was yelling about. Others are not that ingenious, like the first guy today. He took advantage of people moving from the front of the crowd to the rear, to push me forward. I just thought he was a big jerk trying to get closer to the front. And that is what I was supposed to think, as all his pushing on my upper back distracted me from my behind, which was signalling an intrusion attempt which ultimately went unheeded.

I was not the only one targeted at the event. One young woman was taken away by the police when a middle-aged Khmer man caught her stealing his cell phone. He seemed more amused about it than anything, though she certainly was not. I believe that she was part of the team who made the second attempt on my toilet paper. So I must confess to having some satisfaction in her capture. However, I have never confronted anyone or called in the police when this sort of thing happens. I am never 100% confindent in my assessment of exactly who did it. The sneaky nature of the crime, and the anonymity of the crowd, makes it difficult to be certain enough to get all serious about things. Things certainly could have been worse– some of the government employees I know who came in from the countryside to work at the event that had their hotel rooms broken into. They lost money, cell phones, keys. That really stinks. One vowed never to return to the city again. I can’t say I blame him for feeling that way. But I’ll still probably turn out for the Royal Plowing Ceremony next time I am in town for it. Maybe I’ll even jump on the chance to gather more data, and put toilet paper in both my back pockets.

Above: packing up after the ceremony, the mobile traditional percussion unit is returned to the palace.

Yesterday, I took a little ride up the main road to Siem Reap to see what I could see. We have had a couple of major rainstorms, which should have started to soften the soil enough for farmers to start plowing the fields which they will be planting to rain-fed rice. About 17km or so north of town, there is a large lake which spans both sides of the road. There is not a lot right around the lake, along the road there is a little place to buy snacks and lounge in a hammock lakeside.

However, I was interested in the farm across the road from the snack dealers.

They have a diverse little homegarden set up: coconuts, toddy palms, bananas, bamboo, cassava, and a bunch of other trees which I did not recognize. However, they also had a small irrigated plot of mung beans which you can see over on the far right of the image (it is tough to see, but look for the tree branches used for trellises).

Also grazing freely in this area along the lakeshore, near the farm, was a small herd of cows. I do not know who the owners were. I often see cows wandering freely, though herds grazing far from home will be tended by young boys. In this case, I think that they might have benefited from allocating someone to watch the cows. Clearly the forage around the lake is not in very good condition. However, mung beans are rich in nitrogen and likey pretty tasty (with forages, there is an inverse relationship between carbon and nitrogen content, which is mirrored in palatability– woody stuff does not taste as good, and has less protein). The cows are onto this.

There is a light fence protecting the bean plot, though I think that it was just constructed of bamboo and debris, and am certain that it was not particularly robust.

Breach it and they will come…

From another angle, you can see the end result. I did not stick around to see if the others joined their fellows in the bean plot. Note also the irrigation pump.

The farmers were no where to be seen. But I feel for them. Having hurled both stones and curses at cows and lazy herdboys in my maize/pigeon pea intercropping demonstration plots back in Tanzania, I can sympathize (believe me, more civil attempts at negotiation were totally ineffective). I am a strong advocate of live fencing, nice, dense thorny stuff. I have seen people use Pandanus to that effect here, but I do not yet know how well it would do when the floods are up. However, I think that there is a common farmstead rattan which would work on flooding areas. Though I have seen that managed more as clumps or thick hedgerows. I expect that I will have a better grip on the fencing situation, once I am out talking to farmers more often.

Fences and hedgerows are not just for keeping things in or out. They are pretty important ecologically too, potentially representing a substantial fraction of a landscape’s agrodiversity and contributing significantly to landscape heterogeneity. They are places to grow or manage useful plants (be they for medicines, food, fodder, mulch, firewood and more). Moreover, they can be crucial habitat for anything from beneficial predatory insects (as in, the kind that eats agricultural pests) to birds, herps and more.

Mind you, these are just my musings on fencing. I am not here to tell anyone what to do. My goal is a better understanding of what they are doing, how it is changing and why.

So while I have been poking around Kampong Thom, it looks like that first crop of Peace Corps volunteers went and got themselves sworn in. I guess that my invitation got lost in the mail. I just happen to hear about it through a friend. I had thought that something might be up, since the tv news reported that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter had meetings with both the King and the Prime Minister.

According to the U.S. embassy’s website…

In a recent ceremony attended by more than 300 Cambodian host family members, Cambodian government officials, and U.S. Embassy representatives, Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter swore in Cambodia’s first ever group of Peace Corps Volunteers. The 29 newly minted Volunteers arrived in Cambodia on February 2, 2007 to undergo an intensive training program in the Khmer language, cross-cultural awareness, and technical skills related to their community development responsibilities…

…Immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, the Volunteers began to fan out across Cambodia to the provinces of Kampong Cham, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Takeo, Kampot, Battambang and Siem Reap.

I was wondering if any would turn up in Kampong Thom. Not this go-round. And, weren’t there 30 when they got here?

When Mamamandevu and I were sworn-in in Tanzania, I was one of the lucky ones was selected to address the crowd. Public speaking is traumatic enough. However much to my dismay, I was the third to speak, following two others whose 3 months of intensive Kiswahili language training had served them much better than it had served me. The day before the event, I had asked one of our instructors for help me with my few, well chosen words. She, trusting my abilties more than I did, pushed me into the the deep end with sophisticated gramatical structures and a lot of college-level vocabulary words. It was hard even for me to follow, let alone my audience. To top it all off, one of a crew of particularly jaded and cynical currently-serving volunteers broke the silence of the attentive crowd by laughing at me just as I began my speech (thanks for the derailment, Kate!). It was pretty awful.

Later, my wife and I became good friends with those very same jaded and cynical volunteers, clustered in the back of the crowd and hailing from some pretty remote villages. We wound up as neighbors, within a few hours bike ride of each other, and working together pretty closely.

As for the crew here, none of the four PCVs keeping blogs about their stay have mentioned anything about swearing in and moving out to their new spots. Though there are a couple of excited anecdotes about their first visits to their future new homes, the “site visit” which comes near the end of training. I figure that by now, they ought to be about all moved-in and are busy working on getting settled-in and deconfused.

For more official coverage, a couple of other pictures and excerpts from the speeches at the event, check out the official Peace Corps press release.

Since I was not at the ceremony, I pulled the image above from the embassy’s website.

This is not a particularly gripping anecdote, but I feel obligated to provide closure to the previous posts about my experiences learning to drive my new moto… 

So the day before yesterday, I had plans to meet a friend of mine in order to replace the battery in my moto.  He never showed.  I phoned.  He suggested (to my dismay) that I just drive up to his house, and we would then go deal with the battery problem.  This was to be my first moto-powered mission– the first time that I had ridden the moto with an actual task in mind beyond just tooling around the neighborhood.  I was pretty nervous about it, as it was farther than I had ever ridden before.  Plus, the route involved a couple of very busy roads and a traffic circle.  Long story short– I made it, and we replaced the battery so now the electric starter works.  I took a wrong turn and added a second traffic circle to the route, but I still made it.  In fact sometime during that trip, some kind of confidence sprung up which prompted me to ask myself what the big deal had been all about.  So, now I am mobile.  Unimproved gravel roads will be the next project.  Hopefully, coming this weekend.

Pictured above is a mechanic who is set up across the road from the Moil Village Restaurant, outside of Phnom Penh somewhere past Steung Meanchey.  

So, I have been continuing with my daily moto driving practice, and have been focusing on specific skills.  Today I covered busy streets, controlled slowing-down and stopping (as for a red light) and slowly navigating crowded places.  I try to schedule my training rides for peak siesta time, like between 12:30 and 1:30 in the afternoon.  And, my trips seem to be self-limiting.  I aim for around 30 minutes of tooling around the neighborhood, and I plan to go home if I get bored or something scary happens.  As it happens, I do not yet find the activity boring.   The interesting thing is that the 30 Minute Point and the Scary Point seem to hit at about the same time.  After 20 minutes of practicing the mundane, like shifting at the right time, not pressing the brake pedal and twisting the accelerator at the same time, and not panicking when there is oncoming traffic in my lane (a common occurance), I start to think about pushing my boundaries.  So today after exploring  the neighborhood for a while, I decided to try some busy streets.  So I went up Monivong Boulevard, and over onto Sihanouk Boulevard.  Neither were that busy, but they were busier and faster than other roads I had driven on.  I was feeling pretty comfortable, though Sihanouk provided ample opportunities to practice my new-found controlled stopping skill.

The problem came when I hit the traffic circle (or round-about for some of you) at the Independence Monument.  Thankfully, traffic was light.  However, it was not light enough to keep me from missing two intended turn-offs (Plans A and B, respectively), being squeezed into the center of the circle by speeding cars,  and engulfed in a swarm of other motos which complicating any changes in course (Plans E and F, respectively).  As I approached the completion of my first revolution, I was sincerely concerned about being caught in the circle and never being able to get out.  Luckily, I found someone who was headed in the direction of the same road which I had planned to use for my escape (Plan B, again).  So, I stuck by him and stopped when he stopped and went when he went (pairs and groups are larger, easier to see and more likely to have oncoming traffic yield to them).  This strategy got me out of the circle without going more that 1 1/2 revolutions.  A close call.  I am going to wait until I get a little better at riding before I head back up there. 

Tomorrow is left turns, potentially including the turns into oncoming traffic via slowly merging into the other lane and against the flow of said oncoming traffic, then making your turn, thereby avoiding stopping in the middle of the street.  That might be the skill which sends me home at the 30 minute mark, though. 

Pictured bove is the Independence Monument, and the Traffic Circle of Doom which nearly entrapped me.  I took this image back in December of last year.  Not today.  Too busy not crashing for picture-taking.

So, I just bought myself a sweet, new ride.  I had been putting it off for months.  However, necessity has driven me to stop depending upon the public transportation system and get my own moto.  Once I actually get set up in the countryside, I will need to be able to hop around between villages and research sites easily.  This will make it much easier.

It is a Daelim Citi Plus, 100cc four-stroke, four-speed kind of thing.  I have not idea how old it is, and the odometer is frozen on “37.”  It is in decent shape (although, I am currently harboring concerns about the alternator), and came from a friend of mine.  So, he knew its history, and how dependable it was.  Dependability is important, so I went with his recomendation.  I like it because it is a pretty standard rig.  Not the cheapest moto out there, but far from the most stylish.  Not what the kids these days are looking for.  It is also a very practical choice.  They are cheap bikes, and so they are ubiquitous.  All repairmen can fix them, and parts are easy to find.  They have nice practical touches too, like tie-down pegs for securing cargo on the underside of the passenger seat.  I am very happy with it so far (though it has only been 2 days).

Though I have occasionally been bitten by the motorcycle bug, I have never actually driven one (my wife’s motorcycle crash in the early 90’s helped set the current family policy on such technology).  So for the last couple of days, I have been trying to figure out how to actually ride this thing.  You use all four appendages– 2 hands and 2 feet, all in synchrony (well actually, there is no clutch so the left hand sits idle until you have to signal a turn or beep the horn).  And, it is a little bit like trying to pat you head and rub your belly at the same time!  My largest current problem (aside from pressing the brake pedal with my right foot when I am trying to actually speed up– a carry over from driving a car), is downshifting.  The shifter is a little toggle: forward shifts up, backward shifts down.  Just ease off the gas and shift.  I have yet to find a place where I can leave my foot and be able to both shift up and down by pivoting on the fulcrum.  This slows down my downshifting a little.  Maybe that does not matter much.  At least I have stopped leaning over to look every time I had to shift!

Practice has become a priority.  Yesterday, I went up and down a quiet street a couple of times.  This morning, I made some loops around a parking lot.  After lunch, I ventured out to get gas and tool around the neighborhood.  I did not hit anyone, and no one hit me.  I finally got the mirrors adjusted correctly.  So far so good.  The other trick with this thing, is that if you give it a little too much gas when you just start moving, it really takes off.  Of course, this is surprising so you hang onto the grips really tight, so you don’t fly off the back of the bike.  As you might expect, a tight grip seasoned with a little panic keeps you from easing up on the gas like you are supposed to and actually regaining control of the bike.  Feedback loop.  Tricky.  That only happened a couple of times.  My friend suggested that I start off in second gear, rather than first, to prevent such things.  That was a useful suggestion.  

Mamamandevu was over here for an all too short 10-day visit.  She’s back home now.  But, it was a real treat to see her.  This half-a-world-away thing is for the birds.  While she was here, we hit the major tourist attractions, including Angkor Wat and a mess of the other temples up near there.  It was a lot of fun.  It also gave me a little reminder about just how much heights do not suit me.

I have never been keen on heights.  I always get a little woozy and shaky atop ladders and near edges.  I’m pretty sure that the base of the Paul Bunyan statue up in Bangor, Maine still has claw marks from my struggle to slowly lower myself into my father’s arms as a little kid (everybody thought that spot would make for a great picture– maybe so, but clearly not without lifelong trauma).  However, I never totally froze up.  Until now.  It was early in the first day of our three days of temple touring.  Our second stop, pictured here, was not particularly high.  It might have had a sandstone veneer in earlier times, I’m not sure, but now all that is left is laterite– a porous stone that reminds me a lot of lava, even though has its origins are in mud rather than melted rock. 

I was about halfway up, mid-conversation, when I realized that I was in imminent danger of falling backwards off of the building and that the stone seemed to be giving way beneath whatever part of me was in contact with the stairs (there was a lot, because as my panic grew, a crouched lower to make as much contact as I could– hands, feet, knees, whatever I could find).  My pace slowed, totally opposite to my breathing and heart rate.  MamaM later noted that I just sort of stopped speaking around that time.  Each step up took a whole lot of thinking, both to stem the rising panic (as in, to shout down the crowd of monkeys) and to make darn sure that I fit each of my fingers into every crag and hole possible.  Each foot I placed very carefully, checking before shifting my weight, to make sure I wasn’t stepping on a pebble or a sandy patch or anything would compromise my traction.  I wanted to not be up there, but if I stopped I would have had to spend the night on the stairs.  Not an attractive prospect.  Once I reached the tier just below the top, I gave up and sat down, trying to catch my breath and rein in my brain.  The others scampered on up, without problems.  I just held really still, and spread myself out so as to make as much contact with the stone as possible (I did not want to not blow off the building or tip over by mistake).  I tried to enjoy the view (we were in the back, so it was forest).  I did a lot of calculating of what my options were– as in, how I could get off the temple.  Of course, much to my dismay, helicopters and firemen with tall ladders or a bucket truck were out of the question.  I rationalized about how people have been climbing up and down these things for over 1000 years.  At the time, that particular fact mattered less than it seemed like it should have.  So, I just sat for a while and tried to get quiet.  Results were mixed.  MamaM and our friend finished exploring the top and made their descent, waiting patiently at the base discussing temple construction.  A few minutes later, I followed.  Very, very slowly.

It was pretty distressing to have had such an episode.  Over the next couple of days, it became sort of a project– to not be beaten by the stairs.  And, I did pretty good.  It never got easy though.  Mamamandevu took this other picture while I was making my way up the stairs to one of the towers of Angkor Wat (at a 70 degree angle, I might add).  I almost didn’t go up, but couldn’t just leave without a visit to the highest level of the temple.  The other picture is of the one stairwell which has a railing installed (a tiny, flimsy railing).  That makes it easier to get down, but not much easier.