YouTube DirektLink

And the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPlYTx8wb2I

By way of background, in August of this year there was heavy rainfall in the mountains of eastern Kampong Thom and adjacent Preah Vihear Provinces. This flowed downhill and out onto the floodplain, flooding many of the rice fields around the village where I work. Such flooding is a normal part of annual ecosystem processes– flood waters from the uplands flow downhill while floodwaters from the Tonle Sap rise. They usually meet and mix on the floodplains south of the village. This flood pulse is a major factor in driving such a productive system. Land use systems in the village depend upon it. However in this case, the floods arrived about a month early. The water rose very quickly, over just a few days. As a result, rice plants were not yet tall enough to survive the flooding. Even other floodplain grasses such as Oryza rufipogon, important as sources of fodder for livestock, were affected. That first pulse has since receded, and was followed by another pulse of floodwater. Though this second pulse of flooding was on-time, the damage had already been done.

Farmers were, and still are, in a difficult position. Next year is likely to be a difficult one. In response to this flooding, I have seen a few strategies which they are using to mitigate loss. Some farmers have borrowed unflooded, uncultivated land from extended family members and planted another crop. Some are preparing to plant dry season rice in a few months. Others lack seed or resources to buy/borrow seed for another crop, and are waiting for the floods to recede to see how bad their situation is. Signs of coming foreign aid are starting to appear, though I do not yet know how much, who will receive it or who is sending it . A few farmers are using the technique of flood recession rice production. In this technique, as floodwaters recede, the newly revealed land is planted to a rapidly maturing rice variety. The farmer in this video had transplanted his fields 3 days before the early floods. Little of the crop survived, though the few individual plants which did survive were transplanted elsewhere (another crop recovery technique!). As the water drained, he traded seed with another farmer for a more rapidly maturing variety (maturing in about 70 days, as opposed to the 90 or so of the previous variety) and re-established a nursery. Since this video was made, we planted out the seedlings at 3 different sites. He and is family also have rice fields further out on the floodplain which remain flooded even today, and have not recovered. Though this technique may help to buffer his family in the coming year.

The steps illustrated in the video are: plowing, harrowing, baling water from the field with a snaich (water shovel), final seedbed preparation by hand and lastly, sowing of the rice seed. They are pretty typical of the farming techniques which I have seen used by other farmers in the area. What is novel about them is their timing with respect to the flooding and other ecological and agricultural processes. His brief commentary at the end of the clip describes these steps (I ask those more fluent in Khmer than I to forgive any mistakes in my translation)…

Farmer: Today I started by building a snaich (water shovel), an old-style snaich. When I finished with the snaich, I plowed and I harrowed [the field] in order to sow flood recession rice. This flood recession rice, I traded with someone [for the seed], the name [of the variety] is Srauv Chhlong Ndaing. So today, I started a crop of flood recession rice.

Me: Yes, and why did you change rice varieties?

Farmer: The reason that I changed rice varieties…last month I had already sown [a rice crop] and it had grown tall, I had pulled the seedlings from the seedbed and transplanted them already, then when the river water arrived everything was flooded. The variety that was flooded was called Srauv Romdoul. All of my property has been flooded.

This is the first video which I have ever put together. I am hopeful to include a few more, and am especially keen to teach some farmers how to use the camera. I think that their movies would be more interesting than mine!

Lastly, massive thanks to Beth Kanter and Jinja for technical support and encouragement in this new video stuff!

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.

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.

I have been looking for software to help me get my work organized. My own system is pretty unsophisticated– in the field I take notes in my locally-procured exercise books. When I first got started a few years back, I was keen on the Rite-in-the-Rain line of field books. However, after a chiding from a committee-member when I included water-proof notebooks as a line item in a proposal budget (at something like $14 each, they just looked fishy in the budget), I shifted to whatever notebooks I could find when I landed wherever I was going. Luckily for me, most of my note-taking currently takes place under houses rather than out in the rain.

I write up notes and brainstorm using a text editor, either Kate on Linux or NoteTabLight on Windows. I am neither a Kate nor a NoteTab advocate– I remain open to other programs. But they are both free, and I just like the cross-platform flexibility of text files.

One of my serious organizational problems right now is my PDF files. After 6 years of study, I have accumulated quite a mess of scientific literature in PDF format. It is, of course, scattered across several locations and with file names spanning several different conventions (as my naming system has changed over the years, I have not retroactively updated the names of older files). Searching for particular articles by title or author is often tricky, and by subject or key-word is nigh on impossible. So now I am looking for a program which will let me tag my PDFs so that I can keep them all in one place, and search by tag. A library manager, if you will. My cursory search has turned up little so far. If I come up with a program I like, I will post about it. If you know of one, I’d appreciate the tip so share it in the comments.

Sadly, my hard copy files suffer from the same problem; though, several moves between apartments and offices have probably left them in even worse condition. But, they are back home. So I cannot worry about them right now.

The article inspired a little venting on my part, but nothing overtly constructive.

Well, as proof that procrastination really can be constructive, Maytel has revisited the problem and prepared some suggestions for writing about Cambodia. Check it out.

These resources are primarily based on the two very different editions of the Cambodian-English Dictionary: Cambodian-English Dictionary by Robert K. Headley, Kylin Chhor, Lam Kheng Lim, Lim Hak Kheang, and Chen Chun (1977, Catholic University Press), and Cambodian-English Dictionary by Robert K. Headley, Rath Chim, and Ok Soeum (1997, Dunwoody Press, ISBN 0-931745-78-0)

The 1977 edition draws heavily on traditional Cambodian lexicography; in particular, on the monumental Chuon Nath dictionary (see below). With some 20,000 headwords and almost 25,000 subentries, it is notable for its phonemic and grammatical analyses. Headley ‘77 also provides extensive etymological references, with nearly 10,000 Pali and Sanskrit citations, and hundreds more from Thai, Cham, French, Vietnamese, and a dozen other languages.

The 1997 edition contains more than 50,000 entries. It was compiled with an emphasis on the modern languge, particularly modern words, and expressions used in both written and spoken Cambodian. However, it also contains many entries for literary and poetic forms, and can be used to help in reading classic Cambodian texts. It has less etymological information than the ‘77 edition, but include far more usage (e.g. social level) tagging, and more than two thousand example sentences.

Searches in Khmer orthography will also return entries from the Chuon Nath Khmer Dictionary (1966, Buddhist Institute, Phnom Penh). This classic work represents the high point of pre-war Cambodian lexicography.

Khmer language input uses the Khmer Unicode font system. If you have not installed it yet, Windows users should see the KhmerOS site for download and installation instructions. Linux users can track down the language packages in the repositories. In addition to Khmer Unicode font use in particular programs, Khmer translations are maintained for the Kubuntu and openSUSE Linux distributions (maybe others?).

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Why is this pertinent? As with Africa, journalists covering Cambodia seem to suffer from the same need to trade in stereotypes, and fascination with timeless peasants (either caught in primordial rice-farming village purity or, struggling in the present day unable to escape the trauma of the Pol Pot Regime). While these certainly do represent certain facets of the country, they overlook a lot.

Doubtless there are plenty of exceptions to this criticism. I try to cast a wide net, but likely miss a lot. I just had to vent a little bit. I am also a little late to the table in this discussion, as the links in Maytel’s post reveal. Check it out for broader coverage of the issue.