Name: Portia Bailey
Location: Cambodia
Report Title: I'm Going to Miss it All, Even the Bad Things
Report Date: 05/08/2010
I have now been at my project for 9 months, I can’t believe it has gone so quickly. I have finally realised how much I love it here and how perfect the project is to then come to the shocking discovery that I only have 4weeks left before the Cambodia Babes head off around Vietnam and Laos before coming home. Where exactly did time go? I’m pretty confused about how I’m feeling at the moment, as part of me is so excited about going travelling around Vietnam and Laos, another part can’t wait to go home and see my family and friends, but then there’s that part of my heart that doesn’t even want to comprehend leaving my children, because that’s what they’ve become ‘mine’. Ok, so this year has been far from a bed of roses and there’s been more times than I care to remember that I’ve wanted to give up and come home, but luckily due to having two parents that basically told me to stop being so silly and just get on with it, I’m still here! Its not what I expected from my Gap Year; I naively came away with the idea that everything would be perfect from the very beginning and that I’d love every minute of it. But that’s not life, I’ve learnt that being happy is not about everything being perfect but about learning to look beyond the imperfections! And as a perfection that’s pretty hard to admit. I am proud of myself though, that I did stick it through, because I now know there’s nothing I couldn’t do. It’s been a busy few months and it doesn’t seem like yesterday since Christmas, I have been to four traditional Khmer weddings, which really are something. They are vibrant, lively and start at a ridiculous time in the morning! The best one we went to was Khy’s, the manager of MAGNA’s Group Homes. We were treated as part of the family so got to experience the full day! This involved getting up at 4am so we can arrive at her house by five, as my mother rightly pointed out, as a teenager I should be coming home at 4am, not getting up! They were great fun though, spending time with the teachers and other people I work with. I was chatting away to the headmaster in Khmer, and tried to impress him by saying that I was eating ‘beef’. He said ‘no, no, no you are eating goat’! Slightly shocking but it was very delicious. One of the social workers mission of the evening was to get Yasmin and me drunk, so we ended up drinking an awful lot of whiskey and orange/pineapple/lychee etc. flavoured Fanta, very strange. Things here spend a lot of time going wrong and working with kids is never straight- forward nor easy. But Cambodia truly has become my home and 4 hour power cuts, no running water from 11am until 10pm, rats in my room, cockroaches on the floor, huge spiders on the ceiling and monks singing at 3 am in the morning are all just normal. Cambodians can be very strange at times, while recently talking to the orphanage manager she managed to go from one of the girls, Seavlang, falling over a lot to the result that she (Seavlang) would murder her girlfriend’s lover! Basically Seavlang falls over a lot because she plays with the boys running around, this supposedly indicates that when she is older she will become ‘a gay’ (the managers words, not mine). She will then get a girlfriend who will cheat on her and supposedly lesbians are very jealous people so she will murder her girlfriend’s lover. I somehow was able to keep a straight-ish face through most of this very amusing conversation! But Cambodia really is different and I’m pretty sure the care-givers at our home find Yasmin and me very strange! I have a solar panelled shower, that I will be eternally grateful to my grandmother for, but they are very amused and slightly confused as to why I leave a bag of water outside for a couple of hours a day before dragging it all the way upstairs again! So I’ve been pretty busy this week, we had a deadline today to update all our orphanage children and Home Base Care children’s files. Typing up their histories and putting in what has changed, like their favourite colour, food, toy, what they want to be when they grow up etc. This all gets sent out to the children’s sponsors, as the children are supported through Magna’s sponsor scheme, see www.magna-charity.org I now have one month of work left and a few projects in the pipe line, along with a few weekend trips, buying presents and souvenirs and trying to work out how on earth I’m going to get it all back to England (I originally typed ‘home’ here but Cambodia has become my home, so I guess back to my other home)! Yasmin and I have organised several trips in the last few months including taking the older children to Cambodia’s National Museum in Phnom Penh, where Lin, the second oldest girl, tried to convince us to let her get on a moto and spend the morning shopping on her own rather than coming to the museum. Needless to say she didn’t succeed. However, I did take the five oldest children shopping a few weeks later. Once a year each child gets a new set of clothes and a few second hand outfits. This year the oldest children were allowed to choose themselves and I had the delightful job of taking them! This required one hell of a lot of patience which was lucky supplied by my mother who was in Cambodia at the time! We took the smaller children to local inside play area, a smaller version of a British ‘wacky warehouse’. This was thoroughly enjoyed by all, although the highlight of the trip was when Yasmin took one of the boys, Sopheak, who is ten, to the toilet. He took one look inside and run out screaming “Ma! Ma!” Yasmin went in to investigate to discover that the reason for his shock was a urinal. He had no idea what it was or how to use it and Yasmin wasn’t really sure how to explain. Luckily at that moment a man was just about to enter the toilet and she gestured for Sopheak to follow what he does! When they returned to the play area and Sopheak told the story of his adventure to his friends they all suddenly needed the toilet. So most of the times the kids are adorable and I’m thinking of ways to smuggle them home, however, at times they can be little terrors. I was on my way to bed one night when I stumbled upon a 3inch grasshopper on the landing. Sreynoch, 11, saw my reaction to it and found it hilarious. About 10minutes later I went into my bathroom to find that Sreynoch had pushed the grasshopper through the brickwork. The house was reduced to silence when I screamed “Sreynoch!” and went marching out to find her. She barricaded herself in the children’s bathroom and when I finally got her to open the door she claimed that the grasshopper had magically hopped up and through the brick work, which is about 6 foot up the wall! Unsurprisingly I didn’t believe her. However, when Sreynoch isn’t terrorizing me her and her friend Sreyngeng, 9, are usually attempting to kidnap me to try and get me to sleep in their room The most fun trip so far was the weekend at the beach with all 50 of the children, 10 caregivers, a few of their kids, the group home manager, her husband, Yasmin and I. out of which about 4 of us could actually swim! I’d had an interesting night sleep the night before we headed off, waking at 4am because I could feel something crawling up and down my back. I jumped onto to Yasmin’s bed, woke her up and switched on the light. I didn’t have my glasses on so didn’t see what exactly had been trapped inside my mosquito net when Yasmin shooed it out. I assumed it was a very large lizard and managed to drift back off to sleep. However, the next morning Yasmin informed me that she hadn’t wanted to tell me the night before in case I couldn’t then go back to sleep but actually I had been sharing my bed with a RAT!!! So after a painful 5 hour bus journey, with a restless baby on my lap, toddlers running up and down the aisle, endless hours of bad Khmer karaoke DVDs and countless toilet stops we arrived at the seaside. After lunch it didn’t take long for the children to end up in the sea and the rest of the day was spent attempting to teach the older children to swim, building sandcastles, lounging on rubber rings and taking the youngest children out swimming with them clinging to me for dear life. On the Sunday for some unknown reason, we were at the beach for 6.30am and unsurprisingly the beach was deserted so the children spent hours frolicking in the water before it was time to head back home. It seemed to take even longer to get home, with the bus driver refusing to put aircon on because the kids wouldn’t close the windows, so we were all slowly boiling to death. However, by the time we arrived back in Takhmao it was clear everyone had had an amazing time, although we were shattered and soon in bed. In March my mum and sister came over for a fabulous 16days, we spent just under a week in Angkor Wat, THE place to visit in Cambodia. It’s an area in the north of Cambodia filled with traditional Khmer temples that are hundreds years old. They were truly beautiful, some of them were huge, grand and generally breath taking, others were small, intricate and are being reclaimed by the forest. If you fancy looking at them but without the trip to Cambodia, they star in the first tomb raider movie! And yes when Angelina Jolie speaks Cambodian she actually is correctly asking to borrow the telephone! We then headed down to Phnom Penh, where mum and Olivia got a taste of my life here. After experiencing the traffic on the first night mum was determined that she was taking me home there and then, but she soon warmed to the country and the friendly people that live here. They spent a week with me at my project and fell in love, as I already had, with my wonderful children and it took a lot of convincing to stop mum trying to take my deaf and blind child Sothy home! Saying goodbye to them wasn’t as hard as I imagined as a few days late I headed to the seaside to spend Khmer New Year having talcum powder fights and joining in street parties! At the beginning of May I then headed to Malaysia to spend a few days at a beach resort and then in Kuala Lumpa with my dad and step mum. It was good to see yet another different country, but it was too westernised for my liking. You’d be hard pressed to find much of a difference between the capital there and a large city in England. Back in Phnom Penh, dad and Tina joined me for a few days at work before heading home. So in 2 months time I will be home and after the initial excitement of being home, seeing my friends and family and eating western food I’m pretty sure I’m going to miss this place like crazy, especially my children. The way their faces light up when I walk through the door, how they all run to me yelling ‘Ma!Ma!’ wanting a hug or just to tell me about their day, them saying ‘night night Mummy’ when I’m tucking them in bed, the way Thereak climbs on my knee in the tuktuk without me even realising, the way Rachana clings to me when she’s scared, how excited my Grade 2 and 3 classes get when it’s time for an English lesson, counting to 10 at least 20 times a day, continuously telling the children what colour the clothes are they’re wearing, hanging them upside down, tickling them so much I actually think they’re close to wetting themselves, showering by candlelight, delicious Khmer snacks and the not so nice food, sharing the teachers food – even when it’s grasshoppers, when Sothy – the deaf and blind child realises its me and heads straight to his shoes so he can go out for a walk, dancing in the rain with the preschoolers butt naked (them not me), the care givers laughing at me because I’m doing something crazy with the kids, living with Lancelot and Llewellyn the lizards, the millions of mice (I think we’ve killed at least 12 this year), and even Seyha weeing on my foot! I’m going to miss it all, even the bad things.
