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 ...

Dr Sue

I was approached by one of our church pastor's recently. He told me the story of his sister-in-law, who for over two years had been sick. Like the lady in the Bible, she too had seen many provincial doctors and spent all available money - with no improvement. Hopelessness now pervaded the family home. Please, could we help?

The sweet lady had a fever, a cough and significant weight loss. In Cambodia, that is as plain as a Kiwi kid who is covered in red spots. Yet, in two years, there had been no chest xray; no TB test. It gets a little disheartening - talk about 'take the money and run'!

TB was confirmed within a few days. It means a 6-month course on some pretty mean medications, but there is light again.

Inseperable - Kamein and Srey became best buddies when they met at the Healing Home. They were inseperable from both one another and from the little fluffy toys that Sue gave them - to keep. Kamein's mum had the 'mystery illness' that was plain as day to Sue. Srey came with her mum and brother; her brother is also a TB sufferer.

Abandon house!

Left, right and centre - top pic, we have the wedding in progress; 'kitchen' is in the foreground. Middle pic is party 2 - and right outside our front door is the chuka-chuka-chuka generator!

Weather-wise, the last couple of months have been mostly wonderful. Global warming which buried Europe under snow and shut down a hunk of eastern USA has also blessed us with wonderfully cooler temperatures. It makes such a difference, not living in a private, sweaty bath day after day.

However - and there is a however - this is also wedding season, housewarming season and generally 'let's roll out the tent on the street and have a party' season. There are plenty of businesses here that do just that - raise up a tent outside the hirer's house (they do it in sections, so it can be 5 metres long; it can be 45 metres long), fill the tent with chairs and tables; then raise up a second tent that operates as kitchen central. No street-party is complete without a generator and a sound system that is amped to shake the moon.

On Wednesday we saw that a double-blessing was coming our way. We were sandwiched in, with parties happening left and right - and generator outside the front door. I think there was a wedding to the left and a business-blessing party to the right. That was a serious party - a good 30 metres of tent there. I had to walk my little spider scooter through the middle of that gathering to get to work, as that's just not good form to do in a wedding tent!

Thursday started bright and early - 4.46am to be reasonably exact. Party 1 sound sytem kicked in with a yodelling monk. The amplifier was set at a modest 110 decibels. A couple of minutes later and Party 2 fired up their system. Party 1 still had plenty of knob-wind on their decibel dial. The competition was on. Sue was less than delighted.

We survived that night ok. Parties must not be hurried. Friday night, and the speakers were getting tested for maximum bass output. Sue had this hunted, haunted look in her eyes, like a lady not to be messed with. We abandoned house - off to friends who live just far enough away to be safe. Ahh, the serenity!

The fight for Saroun

These last 10 days hav been very difficult for a sweet young lady, Saroun. She is just 35 years old and suffering from serious heart failure. Sue's guess is that she has had high blood pressure for a couple of years at least, leading to heart enlargement and her present condition.

Saroun came to us with her sweet, poor village mum. Eight nights ago Saroun went into unconsciousness, resulting in a mid-night dash to an ICU. We got her back the next day and have continued to care for her. However, today Sue rightly judged that she was too sick to continue with us as we continue to live under the 'no dying permitted' ultimatum.

We succeeded in having her transferred thru' to CSI, a most excellent Christian clinic here in Phnon Penh. Now, CSI believe that her heart is so weak, it is unlikely she can continue to live. Late this afternoon Saroun has been taken by ambulance back to her home, about four hours from here. It is tough.

Sue with Saroun last night. We moved her into the front room so that our other patients did not get too disturbed.