Deep fried banana fritters, Scooter repairs, and Cambodian Kings

It is hot. Outrageously hot. I arrived in Phnom Penh on the Saturday before I was due to start my 1 month volunteering placement with All Ears Cambodia the following Monday, leaving just enough time to familiarise myself with the city a bit and find a place to stay for the next few weeks.

 

As we drove through the city on the bus, it’s definitely a really beautiful place, much more than I was expecting; and, although there is obviously a lot of poverty here, I was also surprised by the contrast of seeing so many 4 x 4s with more chrome than Snoop Dogg’s Cadillac driving past people living in shacks on the street.

 

Upon my arrival at AEC on Monday morning, I was greeted by a very warm and enthusiastic Glyn Vaughan, the Director of the organisation. We sat down and chatted about AEC, the important work they do, the need for such a charity in a country like Cambodia and the difficulties they face. It sounds like a cliché, but it was pretty inspirational to hear how they were the first people trained to help deaf people since the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and also how far they have come and how they’ve grown since.



Glyn showed me around the office, which seems like it will be a cool place to work. The team are really friendly and it’s pretty laid back. Even the waiting room and ​​clinic downstairs seem more like someone’s living room – no men in white coats here. Thankfully.

 

Glyn explained to me how they had to effectively devise their own process for making ear moulds, using plaster of Paris, and the stuff dentists use to make impressions of people’s teeth, so they can now make the moulds for a matter of dollars, rather than the hundreds of pounds this would cost in the UK. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that.

 

Mondays the clinic sees street kids who have been orphaned or otherwise affected by HIV/AIDS, so there were a load of kids being seen in the clinic, or waiting around outside. They were really cute, and very well behaved. There was no crying or whinging as you might expect given the scary-looking equipment being poked in their ears.

 

 

For such a small charity with limited resources, I was impressed by the record-keeping at AEC. I know it’s probably just ignorance, but I sort of assumed that I’d be confronted with a big box full of receipts, and the mission to get the year-end accounts done within a week. That couldn’t be further from the truth, in part thanks to the organisation and thoroughness here at AEC, and also thanks to the really good work of the previous AfID volunteers, Steven and Cynthia.

 

We talked through the objectives of my time here at AEC. These are, in no particular order:

 

·         to assist in the preparation of the financial statements for the year ending 30th November 2010

·         to help Glyn to be able to prepare these unaided in the future

·         to provide further training to AEC staff in basic accounting (as Cynthia has already given them a very thorough crash course!)

·         to answer any accounting-related queries

·         to provide training to Glyn in budgeting and forecasting

 

We also discussed the possibility of spending some time at the new clinic in Siem Reap, to give some tutorials to the accounting staff there too. It will be a good opportunity to have a look at the other clinic, and to see another part of Cambodia.

 

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been looking to get the year-end accounts prepared. The thing is, to do this I’ve had to go back and get the quarterly accounts updated. I’ve also experienced some of the limitations in terms of human resources, as many of the initiatives suggested or put in place by previous volunteers haven’t been progressed. I have to stress that this is through no fault on the part of AEC, it’s simply that if there’s a decision to be made between treating a child with hearing problems or updating the cashbook, it’s not really a tough decision to make!

 

I have also managed to find a few good food options in the area of the office…. Almost every day this week I have bought deep fried banana fritters for breakfast, for the princely sum of 500 riels, or 12.5 US cents. For lunch, I’ve found an all you can eat Indian restaurant. Now I know that’s not exactly culturally integrating myself in Cambodian cuisine, but for $2.50, you get rice, 3 different curries, naan, a drink and dessert. You just can’t argue with that. I’m pretty sure I’m going to double in weight over the next few weeks…

 

Last Friday was the last day for one of the volunteer audiologists at AEC, from the UK, so the whole team went out to dinner, which was a lot of fun. It was really good to spend some time with the team outside of work, and the food at the restaurant was probably the best I had tried in Cambodia so far.

 

 

 

This weekend was the annual Water Festival here in Phnom Penh, which many of you may have heard of for unfortunate, tragic reasons.

 

In Cambodia, this is celebrated by an enormous festival in Phnom Penh, and smaller festivals elsewhere in the country. The focus of the celebrations is around boat races along the river, fireworks every day of the festival and a number of other musical and cultural events.

 

The following day was the start of the Water Festival, and I spent some time wandering around the riverside area with a few friends. Given that Phnom Penh is, by South East Asian capital city standards, pretty slow-paced generally, it was a real change to see the millions of people crowded throughout the streets. Apparently there were 4 million visitors from elsewhere in Cambodia and overseas, in addition to the couple of million that already live in the capital. It was busy indeed.

 

As I was just caught up in a crowd, everyone started moving in one direction and, even though I only speak 2 words of Khmer, it was obvious that there was something to look at, so I followed the crowd. There was an old Cambodian man leaning out of one of the cars and waving at the crowd, who I was later reliably informed was the Cambodian king. One of the main advantages of being a westerner in South East Asia is that you can almost always see over the heads of practically everyone. This would also come in handy when it came to watching fireworks later on. It didn’t work out so well for the small Cambodians standing behind me unfortunately…

 

 

For some strange reason that I’m struggling to remember now, I decided to rent a scooter in Phnom Penh for the week, and ride it to Siem Reap.... I left PP at about midday on Sunday and didn’t get to Siem Reap until almost 7... saddle sore doesn’t even describe it!

 

It was really good to see the Cambodian countryside though, as I’ve spent most of my time in the city since I’ve been over here. I was in a bit of a rush, trying (and failing) to get here before the sun went down, as riding a bike at night basically means getting a face full of insects, not nice. And some of them are pretty big over here; it’s like being punched in the face. On the way back I’ll hopefully leave earlier in the morning so I can enjoy the journey a bit more and stop off at a few places on the way.

 

So now I’ve been at the Siem Reap clinic for a couple of days. The team consists of Lo and Sopheak, and they tend to see patients in the mornings, much like at the PP clinic, then the afternoons are less busy, and this is when I’ve been giving the tutorials.

 

Lo has some experience of working in accounts for another NGO, so he already knows what he is doing, which makes my job much easier! I ran tutorials on the basics of accounting, then onto the specifics of recording receipts and payments in the bank book, and performing monthly bank reconciliations.

 

Lo seemed to pick everything up quickly, but we spent the following afternoon running through further examples just to be sure, and we ran through any questions that he had. At the same time, I’m working on the AEC year-end accounts, inputting the Q4 information in order to pull together the figures for the year.

 

Functioning fuel gauge and speedometer? Who needs them I say?