Will the cat come back?

Today Sopheap and Touch are on a Pussy Cat hunt (her name is 'Feisty' but amongst our staff she is 'Pussy Cat'. Amongst new patients, the question often is 'is it a dog or a cat'? 'cos she's a monster cat in Cambodian terms).

Puss went missing in Khmer New Year, when the Healing Home was closed for some days. Sopheap lovingly took her home. Puss, however, did not feel the love and did a runner. Now, she is lost in a big city that is more likely to eat her than to take her in.

There's a bounty on her rat-catching head; $10 alive. We don't do dead cats. The $10 should be sufficient to mobilise children in search parties. Here's trusting that someone has seen a heat-seeking, sleep-loving Siamese out on the town.

The Healing Home is missing a certain vibe since Puss went missing ...

... so I'm taking my comfort in a cuppa Twinings tea (thank you Andrew and Ruth for the Twinings!!) in the Dunoon mug (thank you, Trade Me!)

Bringing back a few essentials ..

OK, we are back, as of Wednesday evening. Our exactly two months away (a week in Toowoomba, nearly seven weeks in NZ, a weekend in Brisbane heading back plus a few nights) has been a brilliant time in so many ways. Now, we've returned, well prayed out from our home church in New Plymouth, and catapaulted out with a haka from the amazing CVT LinkNZ leadership training camp in Waikanae.

Every trip back is a valuable opportunity to load up on a few things for our life in Cambodia. Sue has enough vegemite to last us to the third grandchild ... so here's a few pics of what has been transported to 8c, Street 460:

With honey on top (thanks, Becs!) - books are very high on our 'bring back to Cambodia' list. Here are 9 of the 12 books squirrelled into our 20kg each airline allowance.

So few of the kids we see at the Healing Home have had childhood toys. We love to bring back toys that we can give away. Thank you Denise for most of these - the brown dog and the white teddy are already in the arms of two great kids who are at the Healing Home now.

Bringing back the family - Kara and Josh gave us this family pic for our mantle piece. Securely bubble-wrapped and boxed, this took up a third of my luggage space. A trusty Briscoes wok also travelled home (so hard to get a wok with a decent steel base here), plus a serious amount of chocolate (we made up bags of specialty choccies for our 8 staff to introduce them to a bit of culinary decadence). Unfortunately, my brie cheeses became pancakes in the journey home ... Oh, and there was a decent hand eggbeater too (pancakes are out Saturday morning ritual).

In good hands

It is 'goodbye' time today as we hand the Healing Home over to Sopheap and Sreymom for the next two months. Our staff are wonderful and the five patients currently at the home, plus (I think!) three family members will know great grace, we are sure.

Two of our patients are little ones. Here they are:

Sreyneth, who needs to get physically built up and get rid of her chesty cough before she can be operated on for the hair lip and cleft pallet. She is such a smiler!

Ping - full of beans and mischief, despite the growth behind his eye. This is his step-mum as his birth mum was, we understand, completely unable to care for him so this neighbour stepped in. She is desperate for work as her husband has run off on her, so little Ping has actually been accepted to go to a Christian orphanage soon.

17 Tick Day

We have just two more sleeps before heading down under once again. It has been over a year since we've been back to NZ and to say that we are looking forward to hugging our kids and connecting with friends would be an understatement. We arrive in Australia on Friday morning and a week later start our 6-week NZ time with four days in Christchurch.

So, today was a 'let's get everything done with a day to spare' day. For me, a '10 tick day' is extraordinarily successful. Today busted all records - I got to tick off stuff that had not even made it onto the 'to-do' list. Now, I've just got some shirts to iron (so that they can get scrunched up in the bag - why do we do this??), a bag to pack and just possibly, a Susie-list to knock over.

Can we help you ... not! Susie was buying supplies at a local chemist shop, but Tarzan was in full flight on the telly ....

Off to market - it is always interesting what you get to meet on the road while running around the city. Here, a motorbike is towing some happy pork to a local market. I pulled up behind these guys at a set of traffic lights.

Some changes we notice

We've been out here for three-and-a-half years plus now. Our city is changing. Here are a few outward things that I am observing:

1. Cleaner - a most excellent plus. Three years ago most of the city looked like a rubbish dump and many people treated the streets as one big garbage disposal centre. We are not pristine yet but there has been a quantum leap forward in city cleanliness.

2. Car dealers - not so long ago and you had to be in the know to track down a place to buy a car. Now, dealerships abound - as do home-grown street corners with a line-up of vehicles for sale. Toyota rules here. If it is not a Camry (hugely popular) it is a Corolla or a Lexus. Most vehicles are second hand imports from the USA. A very high percentage of them are accident write-offs or flood damaged. Chop shops abound. We have a dodgy place a block from here. Cars come in in pieces, and appear glued up and newly painted, opposite the chop shop a few weeks later!

A block from the Healing Home, this place is now functioning. If you can spit over the road, you would hit a new site for yet another petrol station, coming soon - and this is a minor connecting road!

3. Petrol stations - there are three 'levels' of acquiring petrol here. You can buy a litre at a time from pepsi bottles filled with 'interesting' petrol. You can buy from a guy who hand pumps from a 44 gallon drum. And you can go to a petrol station.

Up until very recently, I would mostly go five blocks from here to get real petrol. No longer. In the last three months, three petrol stations have opened in our home/Healing Home immediate vacinity, and one more is being built! Crazy crazy - but it speaks of the car ownership explosion happening right now. Phnom Penh is already in serious gridlock many places now - and it will be getting pretty horrible in the future as very little roading infrastructure is happening.

'Goldtower 42' - the big Korean project that has turned into 'concrete tower 29'. This monster towers over everything as very few buildings here are higher than 8-10 stories. All work abruptly stopped three months ago and the site is locked down.

4. Construction wobbles - there continues to be a huge amount of small-scale housing going up. Apartments are the building rage now - they are popping up like petrol stations. There is a large over-supply of this up-market accommodation but that does not stop the surge. It seems that is someone has an uncle that is gettng $1000 a month for an apartment, then 50 people with money to blow jump on that bandwagon.

However, big commercial ventures have taken a very big hit in Phnom Penh since the financial wobbles of two years ago. Much of the big development here is Korean-driven, and Korea has been pulling the pin on a lot of big projects that are already well under way. Office space is already in major over-supply too and the wild speculative days of yester-year have hit a major reality check.

More power so pics part 2

Off to work we go - it would be fun to just spend a day sometime to photograph the infinite variations and configurations of what a moto moves in Cambodia.

A local driving my future wagon. The humble Lexus 4wd is the essential mobile status symbol here. Don't be fooled that Cambodia is 'poor' - these machines abound by the mega hundreds. Cambodia is not so poor - but many, many of the people are.

'Open market' - fish, pork, beef, chicken - they are all sold in the open (and very often in the open sun, too!)

We've just been thru' Chinese New Year here. Phnom Penh is pretty well run by the Chinese, business-wise. We had a week of delightful quiet and calm in the city with the majority of businesses shut down - even tho' this is not a Cambodian holiday. These flowers are a part of the festivities.

Yeji lady weighing and collecting scrap metal in an area not far from us where mainly Vietnamese people run streets of wood milling and furniture shops. Directly above is where this young mum and her child live (below)

Not even trying - three adults, a babe and a child on one moto is reasonable but not head-turning-worthy. The best I have seen is six teenagers on a bike. That would be boys, of course!

Pics from our world to yours

Sorry sorry - the blog has been left lying like a winter lawn these last few weeks. We are still alive and healthy, but there has not been a whole lot of stuff happening to inspire a blog posting for a bit.

However, I've taken my trusty old film camera for a few walks recently and enjoyed handling a serious piece of photographic machinery instead of the baby Sony digital. There is something about the clunk of a real camera shutter on the old Canon EOS 1n that pulls me back to my old happy hobby.

Films and developing are incredibly cheap here (develop and print 2x 36exp rolls of film plus bought 10 rolls top quality fuji film just out of date - US$14 all up) and it takes nothing to scan across to digital - so here are a few pics. I would put up a bunch more shots but tonight the internet is hardly crawling and every pic is taking soooo long to download ...

In Cambodia, the family car is very often a moto

These old girls are usually ok on the road. It is the little ladies in their smart office get-up that you have to be wary of - so often they have the road-sense of a pickled lizard, cutting you off without a clue of what they have just done!

These little piggies went to market ...