Shopping Our Way Through Chaos
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We’ve spent the past two days gathering supplies around Phnom Penh city to sustain 7 people for 3 weeks, and the materials to construct 10 briquette presses and 40 cook stoves.
The shopping itself smacks us in the face with the challenges of accomplishing anything in the chaotic urban squalor of the developing world. It took two days of discussion just to decide what we would buy and where we would buy it. Communication is a challenge, as we have 2 men speaking Nepalese-accented English discussing metric conversions with native Cambodian speakers. We find ourselves translating for the translators. The pickup truck driver we hired to load metal materials from the hardware store and transport to the mechanical shop for cutting got sick of waiting and decided to take another job instead. Thus a rickshaw driver was commandeered to transport the goods a block and a half for processing, and the negotiation over payment for his service ended in his dismissal, which left George sitting on a street corner for 2 hours with a pile of hardware until another truck could be commissioned. All together, it took 3 hours to get 3 meters of PVC pipe cut into 4 pieces. And that was just one item on a long list. You get the picture: patience is a survival skill here.
It would all be much easier there wasn’t a time deadline. But since my family is with me, our school director has planned a big ceremony for Wednesday to present us with a certificate of appreciation. My kids are excited to see the school they’ve heard so much about; they’ve been doing a lot of hotel time. We finally found an English-speaking nanny to assist them, a delightful young woman named Chakriya, so I hope it will be easier for them to make friends now. When the workshop is over and we return to the city on January 23, we hope to have time for sightseeing and a visit to the orphanage where we met our son, the starting-point of this entire journey.
A short post to say we are off to the village today. New Year’s Day seems auspicious for the introduction of a new way of cooking not only to our school, but to all of Cambodia. We have a 6 hour drive on a bone-jarring road ahead of us, so we will write more and send pictures later. Hopefully our new GPRS cell phone modem works the way it should in Aural. Mobitel (the phone company) assured us it will, but in this country you just never know.
Wishing everyone peace and prosperity in 2008 and beyond.
Keep your fingers crossed…we are breaking new ground here, and it will certainly be a learning experience for all.
