Jen's trip to Western Cambodia

At the beginning of the month, I took a work trip to the western Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Banteay Meanchey. Battambang province is home to Cambodia's second largest city, also named Battambang, and seems like a lovely town from my quick stop there. This old and stately building housed the provincial state capital.



Poipet, which is the largest town in Banteay Meanchey province, and has been described as "the armpit of Cambodia" is a more interesting if less attractive city. Poipet sits right on the Thai-Cambodian border, and ten years ago was nothing more than a dusty border crossing. Today, however, it's a quickly growing casino town, boasting nine places where Thai visitors can lose their money to the house. (With few exceptions, gambling is illegal in Thailand, so Poipet is very popular with Thais who make the 2 1/2 hour trip from Bangkok.) There's a 3 or 4 block area where the glitzy casinos with their manicured lawns look like something out of suburban America.


This quickly gives way to a more middle-class Cambodian sort of feel...



and within blocks from the casinos the city has transformed itself into a large slum.

I met with the governor of Banteay Meanchey during my visit, and he described Poipet as "heaven for the rich and hell for the poor". It certainly seems like an apt description to me. Poipet attracts tons of economic migrants, many hoping to land well-paying jobs in the casinos. Most, however, end up barely eking by. These two work as porters, ferrying goods across the border to the market just on the Thai side of the border.

Poipet is home to many poor and vulnerable children. Part of my portfolio is looking after US-funded programs to end child labor, so I did a bit of checking into the situation of working children in Poipet. Local government officials took us under the bridge spanning the Thai-Cambodian border, where we found these homeless children.



We also saw many children, like this boy, who work as child porters--smuggling clothing and other goods across the Thai border so sellers in Thailand can avoid paying customs duties on the clothes. A typical child porter might walk 12 miles a day just to earn $1.50, and if he is caught and fined by the police, he will be forced to pay many days' wages as a punishment for his illegal activity. Despite the risk of fines, child porters operate openly and we saw many children ferrying clothing back and forth along the banks of the river separating the two countries.


Perhaps saddest of all are the children who have been trafficked into Thailand to work as street beggars or street vendors of gum, candy, and flowers. Some are knowingly sold by desperate parents who can not feed their families, others are turned over to traffickers after parents are tricked into thinking that they will be given a better life by a good Samaritan. And some are kidnapped. In Thailand, they sleep on the streets of Bangkok and are controlled by organized gangs, who take their earnings.

This girl was trafficked into Thailand to work as a street beggar, but was deported by the Thai police and taken in by a local shelter for trafficked children called Damnoek Toek, which is partially funded by the US Deparment of Labor. Unfortunately, there are far more children who are repatriated to Cambodia than Damnoek Toek can accomodate. Few social services are available to repatriated children, and many end up living under the bridge or being re-trafficked into Thailand.

Uncle Larry comes for a visit

One of the great things about the Foreign Service is that you just keep running into people, sometimes in the most seemingly random and out-of-the-way posts. Some of you may have met Larry Blackburn, a good friend of ours who was with us in Mexico. He and I did language training together in DC, and arrived within a few months of each other in Mexico. We then proceeded to have lunch three or four times a week, go to movies together, and just generally hang out a lot. When Ellie was born, he just very naturally became Uncle Larry.

He has been in a bit longer than Jen, and wound up retiring out of Mexico. Despite that, he then went on to get a job with State in DC, working in the section that manages all of the overseas properties of State. He's now the DC guy in charge of things in much of SE Asia, and as part of that he gets to travel here on your nickels. He did just that, arriving Feb 13th, and spending both the evenings of the 13th and 14th with us. It was great to see him again, and the kids just loved him. Well, at least on the 14th they did. We had a bit of a Daddy error on the 13th, which wound up meaning that both kids were not adequately napped on the 13th, which of course is never, ever, ever a good thing. So Ellie had a 20 minute fit, and Ben was just a bit sleepy and grumpy. But Larry is such a good friend, he came back the next night. Or maybe he just didn't have any better offers...

Enough chatter - here's the photo.

Ben's Belated Birthday

On Saturday, Feb. 11--three days after the actual event--we finally celebrated Ben's first birthday. Ben's birthday fell in the middle of everyone being sick, and Ben himself was on a water-only diet on Feb. 8, so delaying the celebration wasn't a decision we had to think too hard about.

We had originally talked about hosting a play date with some of the other one year olds, but given that we were all just getting over being sick and Ben's expectations around his birthday were pretty low, we decided to skip it and just keep this a family celebration. We had cake Saturday night, which Ben enjoyed immensely.


And, just as you're supposed to do on your birthday, Ben managed to get frosting and cake in his hair and all over his hands and got an unscheduled bath.


We opened gifts on Sunday morning, and opened a few more during the week as they arrived. Thanks to everyone for the nice gifts! We'll send thank yous individually.

Ben keeps getting closer and closer to walking. Now instead of relying on tables and other horizontal objects, he can put both hands on a wall and follow it around. He can also walk just holding one hand with mommy or daddy, but this is still quite shaky. And he now has three teeth. He also loves putting small items into a container and taking them out again, and clearing surfaces (eg dumping all the papers on the coffeetable to the floor, pulling all the books off the shelf). We're hoping that soon he develops a real passion for dusting, vacuuming, and doing our taxes.

Opiods for Elena

One of the great things about toddlers is that they learn to repeat exactly what you say. When she was sick, Nathan and I would discuss whether Ellie needed ibuprofen. She quickly learned to say "I-bee-pro-fen" because she loves the taste of the children's version so much she learned to ask for it by name.

In some ways toddlers serve as your mirror--showing you what you're really doing instead of what your intentions are. I knew we had given up on the absolutely no TV rule, for example, when a few months ago Ellie started asking, "Watch lilbit TV?" That's clearly adult rationalization speak for "A little TV won't hurt you if it keeps me from going crazy!" She's also very good at "No, Ben!" and "That's your big sister's water". (Ben likes to grab Ellie's sippy cup.)

Similarly, Ellie has started adapting the sympathetic parental language we use on her when she has trouble sleeping. When she woke up in the middle of the night, we'd sometimes say, "Do you need some cuddles?" Now when she wakes up, she'll sometimes tell us that she needs cuddles. A few weeks ago she also started waking up and asking for morphine, which was pretty darn puzzling. We were really quite certain that wasn't a word we had ever used around her. It's just not something that comes up in every day family conversation. A few nights later we figured out that she was just copying us again, and what she was actually saying was that she needed "more luvin'", just with a two-year-old's accent.

Job update

It has been a while since I've mentioned anything about this whole job thing, and I've gotten several queries, so here's an update for you all.

The company/NGO I was talking to initially seems to have lost interest, since I never was able to get anything from them more than a "we're interested, but haven't had time to do anything about it". I've more or less written them off.

The place I've been doing my Cisco exams, a private university here, has expressed some interest in having me teach said Cisco stuff for them, but at the moment it seems like they don't actually have specific plans for a course, so I'm not going to hold my breath. They asked if they could call me if they get a course together, so I said sure, but again, I'm not counting on it.

I am actually doing some somewhat interesting odd jobs for the embassy now. I did a short article for the State Department's magazine, which should be published in the Feb. issue. I also am redesigning the internal website, which has turned into a project that allows me to develop some web skills. Not my main interest, but not a bad set of skills to have. I'm also coordinating the revision of our emergency action plan, which is the document describing what we do if various Really Bad Things happen. That lets me put my natural tendency to think about the worst possible scenario to use, in a way that is useful to others rather than a frustration to them. So that's not too shabby. This deal with the embassy is pretty good, actually. I get to accept any project I want, decline anything I don't want, and I get paid an American hourly wage. With the exception of some parts of the emergency action plan, I even get to work at home if I want to.

Which brings me to the final bit of job news. I worked one morning at the embassy a while ago, and hated it. I felt awful the whole time I was there, since I was missing out on my Ben time. I went while Ellie was in school, which is the only time I have to be really totally engaged with Ben. I just couldn't help feeling that the work I was doing was not nearly as good as being with Ben. So I've decided to just not look for work right now. I have as much as I want from the embassy, perhaps more, and I think spending time with Ellie and Ben is just what I need to do now.

Plague house

Daddy is at the very end of his rope today. This is my third week of dealing with sick family and staff, and I am exhausted. It all started with a cold, which Ellie probably picked up from somebody at school. Runny nose, a bit of a cough, no big deal. Ellie started it, Ben got it, I got it, and somehow Jen seemed to be avoiding it. That wasn't so hard, I just napped when they did, which isn't a real hardship, and life went on. Then at some point, it got really nasty, and Ellie stayed home from school, since she was running a bit of a fever, and we didn't want it to spread any more. Then Jen went on a trip, during the worst of the colds for the three of us, and Somany got the darn thing also. She was going home early for a few days, then she stayed home for a few days, while Jen was away. Talk about timing, huh?

Jen returned, and of course immediately started coming down with the worst of the cold as well. Ellie at least had gotten over the thing by then, and I was well on my way out of it. Ben was still sniffly, but he didn't seem to mind so much. Then... we went out to eat on Saturday, and when we came home Jen had an upset stomach. That night she and I both had really unpleasant stomach issues, lasting well into Sunday for her. We attributed it to something at the restaurant, until we learned that friends of ours were all getting something similar. Jen stayed home on Monday, and at 3AM Tuesday Ellie called loudly "my tummy hurts". Sure enough, within a half hour we were comforting her and cleaning up. Around 8AM it got Ben, although he seemed more or less over it by around 11AM. Jen had mercy on me and stayed home to help care for the munchkins, Ellie recovered pretty well, and today (Wednesday) she is seeming perfectly healthy. Ben is another story. Since today is his birthday (little guy turned one!) he decided to develop a fever and maintain nasty stomach issues. He celebrated by sleeping nearly all day, sometimes on Daddy and sometimes in the crib. We also watched the Muppets a bit, which may have helped him out. That's unclear. Tonight he seems to be on the mend, at least a bit, but birthday celebrations have been postponed until cake is kind rather than cruel.

At the moment the status of all family and staff is:
Mommy - sick, on the mend, back at work
Daddy - physically healthy, mentally exhausted
Ellie - healthy, back to school tomorrow
Ben - sick, to the doctor tomorrow if he's not significantly better
Sinen - sick, stomach bug, didn't work today
Somany - sick, cold bug, left early today

I'm actually looking forward to doing our taxes, as a bit of a stress reliever. Sad, huh?