Bokor National Park

On Sunday we travelled to Bokor National Park. I won't have a chance to post our pictures for a while but there are already some pretty dramatic pictures of the ghost town already on the web here.

The Bokor Hill Station was a French resort and casino until 1970 and the Khmer Rouge take over. Now it at the top of an area of incredible jungle vegetation. The real challenge is getting there. The two hour drive to the top is incredibly rugged. The French had built a good road back in the day, but it is almost entirely washed away. We joined a tour group that packed 10 people into the back of a pick-up truck fitted with crude benches along each side. We only had a rope tied along the middle to hold onto. Believe me, I was holding on to that rope! We were getting bounced around so much it is a miracle nobody went flying off the back.

Today, my back, arms and particularly my backside are extremely sore from all the thrashing around. Seeing the spooky history of Bokor is definately worth it but if I was to go again I might consider bringing my own seat cushion!

Busy, busy

We've been very busy visiting different communities over the last few days. Crystal and Euson have been conducting interviews with some people that the health centers or village leaders have identified as having disabilities. The most dominant trend so far is that these people are having difficulty finding work. They have all reported that it is hard for them to harvest enough food to feed their families and can't travel very far to do any other kind of work.

One example is the family we spoke to today. The father of the family had broken his leg years ago but did not receive proper medical care. The bone did not set correctly and now his leg below the knee is very bowed, making it hard for him to walk or work. The family is very poor so the father is using their only bicycle so that he can move around and get to the salt fields to work for about $1/day. Since the father is using the only bicycle the son can no longer get to school so he has stopped attending. We've been told that a used bike costs about $30 so we would like to see if we can help out that way.

We have encountered many situations where early care would have reduced or eliminated the troubles people have here. It seems that the distance to health centers and the cost of care prevents people from seeking help when they need it. It is impossible not to feel compassion for families struggling to make a living in these conditions. However, everybody we have encountered appears to be very resourceful and they do seem to be finding ways to cope and adapt to any dissability.

We have also benefitted from the warmth and generosity of the families we have spoken with. Our host at one home climbed a tree in their yard and harvested some coconuts so that we could have a refreshing drink of coconut water while we visited. I think it would be hard to beat that kind of hospitality!

Staying in style

If you can afford to spend a bit of time off the beaten path, Kep is a beautiful quiet spot where the local children haven't yet been trained to beg. The seafood is fantastic at the "crab market" restaurants. I don't think it is possible to get any fresher crab-meat anywhere.

Spending time in a tropical paradise provided by the "Veranda Nature Resort" has exceeded my expectations of doing volunteer work in Cambodia. The place is friendly and professionally run. I have only good things to say and would recommend it to anybody planning a trip to the Kep area of Cambodia. We have become particularly fond of their banana flambe! It has become a frequent temptation at meal times. Euson made our server Dallah laugh as he mused "to flambe or not to flambe".

The Mission Day 1

Today was the first official day of business for the CambodiaCAN fact finding mission. Our itinerary was to have a morning meeting with the regional health authority and then spend the afternoon planning our activities for the next few weeks. When we arrived at the offices we discovered that a ceremony had pulled the representatives we were supposed to meet away from the office. So, back to home base at the Kep guest house "Veranda".

Buntheon, has been fantastic giving us lots of background on the area and the people and organizations that make sense for us to visit. The missed meeting in the morning gave us the chance to have a planning session before going back to the health offices for a second try at a meeting. We had a very productive meeting with Buntheon, Kunthy (Centre for Internation Health) and our translators Rot and San (I'm sure I've got the spelling wrong but I'll work on that for another post). We worked out our schedule for the next few weeks and plan to visit a few of the 16 villages that make up the Kep district. Our plans include visiting Village elders, schools, hospitals and a local NGO.

After our meeting we headed out for the health offices for our meeting and.... strike two. It seems a meeting wasn't in the cards today, so we've decided to press on with the visits to Kep villages before we meet with the health authority. I think we will be doing a lot of improvising since it will be hard for us to know everybody's schedules here.

This afternoon Crystal and Euson sat down with Rot and San and discussed how they would present the goals of the project to village elders and other stakeholders. It was important to come up with a clear picture of what rehab can do in the community. We got the impression that rehab is not widely understood or available here.

On the more personal side of things we've had some fantastic meals! We certainly won't be losing any weight over here. The seafood in the beach restaurants at Kep is fantastic! The sightseeing has been great too. I've posted a few pictures to my flickr photostream.

Here at Last

Whew what a long time to spend in the cramped interior of an airplane! Essentially 24 hours of travel later we are in Phnom Penh. Groggy, but exceptionally well fed. Bhuntoon, our contact here picked us up at the airport and delivered us to our guest house. He has been fantastic help already and we've barely even started.

We decided to try and stay up despite our fatigue and have been wandering around the city near the National Museum. We had a fantastic lunch at Friends "The Restaurant". Then turned down something like 1000 offers for cyclo taxi rides to who knows where. Know at four oclock in the afternoon it just might be bedtime.

Tomorrow sounds like it will be a big day since we will be taking the 3 hour journey into Kep and will find out who our interpreters and drivers will be for the next week. I'm not sure how I'm going to like riding on the back of a motorcycle. I'll have to work on my ability to release control. On the other hand it is probably much safer to have somebody driving who is familiar with the total lack of comprehensible traffic rules.

Packing Flurry

Only one more sleep until we leave for Cambodia and the pre-departure planning and packing panic is setting in. I don't think I've got time to get everything done so I may as well start my first blog post!

I'm getting ready to accompany Crystal (my wife) on a vacation / volunteer trip to Kep Cambodia. We're heading over to do some fact finding for what we hope will be an ongoing program to help provide rehab care for those with disabilities in Cambodia. The project is going to focus on the Kep area which is south west of Phnom Pen. Crys and our friend Euson will be travelling as volunteer physiotherapists for CambodiaCan. I'm going as a tourist slash odd-job helper outer.

Well, I've got to get back to packing, but the preview I was able to get through other peoples pictures sure looks interesting: