Cambodia is compelling & confounding in equal measure. Before I went back to the UK for a short visit I had listed 20 things that frustrate me about the place. I'd been apprehensive about going back to the UK so this exercise had helped the transition. I was then blind sided by the reverse culture shock that manifested itself in a permanent & unshakeable feeling of anxiety whilst in the UK but I was also pleasantly surprised to discovered things, other than friends & family, which are very good about my mother country, being a Wilson I listed those as well.
Now I am back in Cambodia I thought it would only be fair to reciprocate. So in no particular order here are the things I know I will always miss when not here.
1) Heat - 24/7, 365 days a year - lovely, joint soothing, skin moisturising, muscle relaxing, all pervading heat.
2) Rice - it is just not the same anywhere else. First day back at work I had fried rice with beef, basil & chilli at the hospital canteen - I was complete.
3) Nothing is ever straight forward or simple - I know that I often complain about this, but in truth it means that life is never dull or boring. There is beauty in the over complicated mess that is life here, nothing is easy & every day throws up new challenges & tests. As an emergency physician I am not adverse to a little bit of chaos.
4) My Khmer lessons - which are a lot more than just learning to read a new script. S is my Cambodian mother, confidant, cultural advisor, friend, comforter, counsellor, Buddhism converter, coining therapist & is much, much more than just my language teacher. There isn't a scale to measure how much I will miss her.
5) My lovely assistant L - when she arrived one hour early for the interview for VSO volunteer's assistant I already knew I was on to a good thing. She is strong, clever, compassionate, patient, kind, has boundless potential & vision, she is my lion. I will miss her when we don't work together anymore but know she is destined for much greater things.
6) The village people - are my adopted extended family of brothers & sisters, nieces & nephews and in laws. They are joyful & fun. Sb & I can talk for hours in a language I have barely the most basic grasp of & yet we understand each other completely. Our topics of discussion far extend my limited vocabulary from language training & often deal with issues not even broached by my closest friends in English.
7) English lessons with P - most weekends P comes to my house for "English lessons", generally this involves a little bit of phonics, reading & writing and more of her mum (Sb) & I chatting whilst P plays on my iPhone or watches TV & eats barang food whilst A, her 3 year old sister, has a tantrum.
8) Being frugal - Save, re-use, recycle, repair is my motto here. I like cycling everywhere, spending very little on necessities, making everything last as long as possible & generally not having very many possessions. I found the huge mass of wealth & 'things' in the UK incredibly overwhelming - especially supermarkets & all my junk in my parents loft. I have grown used to the frequent power cuts, always when I am fully soaped up in the shower, in the middle of a good trashy TV programme or when all my appliances need charging. I now always have a large bucket of water on stand by for when the water supply abruptly dries up - sometimes for days at a time.
9) Children - there are children like P & A, from the village people, who I know very well and consider part of my extended family. There are also other Cambodian children like my Landlady's nieces, the adopted baby from the noodle shop & the little girl from the bike shed at work who I see very day & have watched grow. From heavily pregnant mothers to nursing babies to toddlers. They have blown kisses, sam peah, waved, taken their first steps, called "bye bye" & with every developmental milestone wormed their way deeper into my heart. Nothing marks the passing of time better than a child - I will miss them & not knowing what they will grow up to be.
10) Eating out every day - cheap, delicious, affordable & sociable.
11) The outside lifestyle - in doors in the tropics without AC can be hot & oppressive, outside is much better. This often includes patients on the verandas of wards, as well as my house with no glass in the windows and little wooden huts on stilts for picnics in the rain.
12) Rural Cambodia - paddy fields, spiky lime stone 'mountains', awesome sunsets, coconut palms, red earth, flooded villages - all beautiful images that are burnt into my memory.
13) Having clothes made to measure & repaired for tuppence - although occasionally you get what you pay for.
14) Unregulated pharmaceuticals - in work it drives me crazy & fuels the huge problem with antibiotic resistance but personally you can bypass the middle man & self prescribe to your hearts content for much less than the NHS prescription fee. I am not talking controlled drugs here mind just more de-worming tablets & anti-protazoal medication.
15) Spontaneity - forward planning is not really practiced here at all & spontaneous decisions are easily accommodated. You can pretty much do anything at the very last minute - even board a plane.
16) Righteous anger - in the UK there seems to be an epidemic of over inflated sense of entitlement. People get outraged about things such as parking & mobile phone contracts. Here you can really let rip about a child being left to die uncared for by health workers or any number of other social injustices, its hard for anyone to argue that it is a first world problem.
17) Venting but no one being able to understand what I am saying - theres's nothing like a good rant with lots of swearing when no one else can understand the details but gets the general idea that you are not happy. See point 16)
18) The close proximity to many tropical beaches & islands - overland in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam & further afield by just a cheap air asia flight to Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines.
19) Bambu - my spiritual home. The Hotel staff, P & his wife C are very simply the best.
20) Scabby dog - she stinks to high heaven but I love that mutt.
21) Proper rain - not this pathetic UK drizzle or 'Liverpool rain' as one Cambodian who had studied there called it. Tropical rain is torrential, unforgiving & dumps several inches in a short space of time filling rivers until their banks are swollen & flooding your house if your roof happens to have a leak.
22) Tuk Tuk AC - there is no finer way to say cool than sat in a tuk tuk travelling through the countryside whilst silently sweating.
23) Cambodian food - 'dirty meat', Chinese soup, dumplings from the Chinese noodle shop, Chinese breakfast noodle soup, tropical fruit, deep fried 'snacks', Bor Bor, Tukraluk (fruit shake) - over shadowed by its neighbours cuisine it is harder to find a Cambodian restaurant than Thai, Chinese or Vietnamese outside of Cambodia which is a shame.
24) My old VSO bicycle with its brand new shiny bell - it cost me $13 to buy from VSO, it has a constant slow puncture despite numerous repairs & the brakes are really squeaky. After HUI its my most treasured transport related possession.
25) Kramas - I love Cambodian scarfs. It has become a small obsession.
26) Star world & HBO TV - the former is utter trash but what would we do with Beauty & the Geek? & the latter is worth the $2.50 I pay for cable TV a month.
And the list goes on & on & on.......
Now I am back in Cambodia I thought it would only be fair to reciprocate. So in no particular order here are the things I know I will always miss when not here.
1) Heat - 24/7, 365 days a year - lovely, joint soothing, skin moisturising, muscle relaxing, all pervading heat.
2) Rice - it is just not the same anywhere else. First day back at work I had fried rice with beef, basil & chilli at the hospital canteen - I was complete.
3) Nothing is ever straight forward or simple - I know that I often complain about this, but in truth it means that life is never dull or boring. There is beauty in the over complicated mess that is life here, nothing is easy & every day throws up new challenges & tests. As an emergency physician I am not adverse to a little bit of chaos.
4) My Khmer lessons - which are a lot more than just learning to read a new script. S is my Cambodian mother, confidant, cultural advisor, friend, comforter, counsellor, Buddhism converter, coining therapist & is much, much more than just my language teacher. There isn't a scale to measure how much I will miss her.
5) My lovely assistant L - when she arrived one hour early for the interview for VSO volunteer's assistant I already knew I was on to a good thing. She is strong, clever, compassionate, patient, kind, has boundless potential & vision, she is my lion. I will miss her when we don't work together anymore but know she is destined for much greater things.
6) The village people - are my adopted extended family of brothers & sisters, nieces & nephews and in laws. They are joyful & fun. Sb & I can talk for hours in a language I have barely the most basic grasp of & yet we understand each other completely. Our topics of discussion far extend my limited vocabulary from language training & often deal with issues not even broached by my closest friends in English.
7) English lessons with P - most weekends P comes to my house for "English lessons", generally this involves a little bit of phonics, reading & writing and more of her mum (Sb) & I chatting whilst P plays on my iPhone or watches TV & eats barang food whilst A, her 3 year old sister, has a tantrum.
8) Being frugal - Save, re-use, recycle, repair is my motto here. I like cycling everywhere, spending very little on necessities, making everything last as long as possible & generally not having very many possessions. I found the huge mass of wealth & 'things' in the UK incredibly overwhelming - especially supermarkets & all my junk in my parents loft. I have grown used to the frequent power cuts, always when I am fully soaped up in the shower, in the middle of a good trashy TV programme or when all my appliances need charging. I now always have a large bucket of water on stand by for when the water supply abruptly dries up - sometimes for days at a time.
9) Children - there are children like P & A, from the village people, who I know very well and consider part of my extended family. There are also other Cambodian children like my Landlady's nieces, the adopted baby from the noodle shop & the little girl from the bike shed at work who I see very day & have watched grow. From heavily pregnant mothers to nursing babies to toddlers. They have blown kisses, sam peah, waved, taken their first steps, called "bye bye" & with every developmental milestone wormed their way deeper into my heart. Nothing marks the passing of time better than a child - I will miss them & not knowing what they will grow up to be.
10) Eating out every day - cheap, delicious, affordable & sociable.
11) The outside lifestyle - in doors in the tropics without AC can be hot & oppressive, outside is much better. This often includes patients on the verandas of wards, as well as my house with no glass in the windows and little wooden huts on stilts for picnics in the rain.
12) Rural Cambodia - paddy fields, spiky lime stone 'mountains', awesome sunsets, coconut palms, red earth, flooded villages - all beautiful images that are burnt into my memory.
13) Having clothes made to measure & repaired for tuppence - although occasionally you get what you pay for.
14) Unregulated pharmaceuticals - in work it drives me crazy & fuels the huge problem with antibiotic resistance but personally you can bypass the middle man & self prescribe to your hearts content for much less than the NHS prescription fee. I am not talking controlled drugs here mind just more de-worming tablets & anti-protazoal medication.
15) Spontaneity - forward planning is not really practiced here at all & spontaneous decisions are easily accommodated. You can pretty much do anything at the very last minute - even board a plane.
16) Righteous anger - in the UK there seems to be an epidemic of over inflated sense of entitlement. People get outraged about things such as parking & mobile phone contracts. Here you can really let rip about a child being left to die uncared for by health workers or any number of other social injustices, its hard for anyone to argue that it is a first world problem.
17) Venting but no one being able to understand what I am saying - theres's nothing like a good rant with lots of swearing when no one else can understand the details but gets the general idea that you are not happy. See point 16)
18) The close proximity to many tropical beaches & islands - overland in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam & further afield by just a cheap air asia flight to Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines.
19) Bambu - my spiritual home. The Hotel staff, P & his wife C are very simply the best.
20) Scabby dog - she stinks to high heaven but I love that mutt.
21) Proper rain - not this pathetic UK drizzle or 'Liverpool rain' as one Cambodian who had studied there called it. Tropical rain is torrential, unforgiving & dumps several inches in a short space of time filling rivers until their banks are swollen & flooding your house if your roof happens to have a leak.
22) Tuk Tuk AC - there is no finer way to say cool than sat in a tuk tuk travelling through the countryside whilst silently sweating.
23) Cambodian food - 'dirty meat', Chinese soup, dumplings from the Chinese noodle shop, Chinese breakfast noodle soup, tropical fruit, deep fried 'snacks', Bor Bor, Tukraluk (fruit shake) - over shadowed by its neighbours cuisine it is harder to find a Cambodian restaurant than Thai, Chinese or Vietnamese outside of Cambodia which is a shame.
24) My old VSO bicycle with its brand new shiny bell - it cost me $13 to buy from VSO, it has a constant slow puncture despite numerous repairs & the brakes are really squeaky. After HUI its my most treasured transport related possession.
25) Kramas - I love Cambodian scarfs. It has become a small obsession.
26) Star world & HBO TV - the former is utter trash but what would we do with Beauty & the Geek? & the latter is worth the $2.50 I pay for cable TV a month.
And the list goes on & on & on.......
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