NEWSLETTER DECEMBER 2010

Hi Everyone,

Only about 3 months late with the newsletter but better late than never I suppose!! The days just fly by and before I know it another month has passed and I haven’t put “pen to paper”.   Where to start is the hard part. 

I’ll start with the new school year. Over 160 students came to enrol. It ended up that we now have 6 classes: 1 real beginner, quite young and cute; 2 normal beginners; 2 intermediate; 1 upper. Now that we have settled down into our routine, numbers have stabilized at 149. From about 1.00 pm onwards there are kids everywhere and people visiting or volunteering often comment on the happy feel of the place. Just what we wanted so we must be doing something right.

Chicken Palace

The chook house is finished and furnished with perches and nesting boxes. We had 11 chooks, now 8 (Rascal ate 3), all given to us by the local people. I’d be teaching in the morning and someone would roll up and hand me a chook. Some of the people I didn’t even know but I am guessing their kids come to the school. Neighbours donated others. Most of them are still young and not ready to lay eggs yet but one of them does so we get one egg a day at the moment. A couple of them are roosters but we just want to concentrate on getting the eggs organized at present as we need quite a few for the boat buffets. We are thinking of moving into the chook house and sharing with them as their accommodation is better than ours! Andrew loves his chooks: lets them out every morning, locks them away at night, mixes up special feed for them, has names for them all, cleans their house, makes their nesting boxes soft and cozy with rice straw, talks to them and obviously was upset when Rascal chased and killed the ones that got out. Have this problem solved now.

A couple of more kittens running around the place and I suspect another batch is on the way. A Cambodian trainee vet has taken up residence in Kep so I need to have a chat about desexing I think.

The boat has been occupying our time for the last few months. The hospitality students have been organizing the bar list, stock lists, training each other in serving tables (a couple of them did different courses) while we have been organizing uniforms, buffet menu, building a kitchen, training 2 staff to cook the buffet food, and a 101 other things that need to be taken into account like advertising, tickets, fitting out the kitchen, cutlery and crockery for the boat, serving dishes, you name it, we’ve thought about it and organized it. We are just waiting on the renovations to the boat to be finished. We were hoping to start running the cruises in the middle of December but this has been put back a week or so. We were going to have a Christmas Day cruise and lunch followed by Water Festival cruises but I don’t think we will be ready. January 1^st is the starting date. We will run island lunch cruises and sunset dinner cruises over the tourist season to hopefully make some much needed income to run the schools and also to continue building.

Our Kitchen

Chan and Dear, our cooks

We had a local rotisserie made in Phnom Penh and we cook the chickens and pork and beef on this for the cold meat platters. Had to practise getting this right too. It runs on a battery to turn the rods and we use charcoal for cooking. The beauty of it is that we can move it around like the street vendors in Phnom Penh. If we have an end of year school function for instance we can move it, put a pig on it for the students and their families with potatoes wrapped in alfoil in the coals. A bit like a mu mu in Papua New Guinea but not cooked in a hole in the ground.

Over the last month we have had a very nice couple from Canada commuting from Kampot every day to give us a helping hand. They visited last year to look around and I hadn’t heard from them since. Out of the blue I received an email saying they were coming over and could they do anything to help. Graham has spent the month getting our computers up to scratch. We shouldn’t have problems now and be offline for weeks on end. This was a tremendous help to us and we thank him very much. Jan had done a catering course and she was a tremendous help training the 2 cooks, helping with the menu, organizing order lists etc. I think I would have ended up in the nut house without her help as I have time restraints due to the 71/2 hours of English classes a day. As it was I lost my cool a few times but we got through it and I can’t thank Jan enough. She also got the new library books I had bought onto cards and covered books which I hadn’t had time to do since our Librarian left to study in Phnom Penh. We can start up the library again after the Christmas break. I know the kids are looking forward to this. So, thank you very much Jan and Graham. We sincerely appreciate your input into Kep Gardens - you helped us through a very busy, stressful time. Come back, we miss you!! 

Our hospitality students are working at a couple of places in Kep at the moment while the boat is being prepared. They are not only working but giving the seminars they prepared to the places’ staff and doing on the job training as well. This is giving them a chance to use their skills they learnt in Siem Reap and also keeping them occupied until we need them. Good PR for Kep Gardens too in the Kep community as they are working at places run by Cambodians who needed help with their staff. We are doing it free of charge as we have to pay them anyway, even if they were sitting around doing nothing. This way, we are also free to take them back when we need them ourselves on the boat.

We harvested our rice on the weekend. Got 41/2 bags off the small area we planted. Andrew and Sothea have to work out if the dry planting method yielded more rice than the traditional method used by the village people (planting area vs yield etc). 41/2 50kg bags will only last us just over 2 months so I don’t know if it is worth it really. Have to wait and see and maybe plant a much bigger area next year. Would be good if we could supply all our needs, it would save us quite a bit of money. I’m not a lover of rice but the Cambodian people pass out in front of you if they don’t get a few servings of rice a day.

Threshing

Some of the neighbours’ kids came and helped which was nice of them. I was going to go and learn how to cut it properly but by the time I finished classes it was all over. Maybe next year. well and she is fit and healthy. She is now waiting until plastic surgeons come over to pretty up her face. Thank goodness it all turned out OK.

Sothea’s sister is doing well after her operation. She went back recently for a check up. The drainage from her brain appears to be working

Choun, our housekeeper helping with the rice

I just happened to be in Phnom Penh over the weekend that the AFL grand final was played. A bar across the road had it on so I sat there all afternoon. Good to see some footy again. The next weekend I went into Kampot where an Australian guy has a bar and an Aussie sports channel. Bit of a let down the second game! I had a shopping spree that weekend. Bought a gas stove for the kitchen, utensils and bits and pieces to get the kitchen up and running. How exciting, considering I don’t really like cooking on a regular basis all that much!!

Our tractor came in handy one night. A chap was staying here and it was his birthday. He had already gone into Kep so the 11 of us decided to go and have a drink with him for his birthday. How do we all get there? We hitched up the wagon to the tractor and we all piled into it for a very slow journey into Kep. Parked in front of the hotel and had a Kep Gardens’ staff outing. Good night but it took ages to get home and it was way past our bedtime.

Don’t know who these children are?? But the kids love playing on the tractor and
wagon before class. These are ring ins from somewhere.

The big holiday time of Chum Ben occurred at the beginning of October. It is a religious time for Buddhists and very important to Cambodian people. It’s a bit like Easter, different dates every year and a time for all people to visit pagodas. Our community was divided into groups. We were in group 6 and had a set night to go to the local pagoda for prayers at night and then back again in the morning to feed the monks. We also had a set night and morning to go to the bigger pagoda further away. All the immediate neighbours were there, lots of the kids from school, so they turned out to be great social occasions. 

The Water Festival is fast approaching. The boat we sponsor is kept at the larger pagoda, not our close local one. After last year’s fiasco of sinking etc it needed a bit of work done on it. Andrew and the local authorities met at the pagoda and the boat was sent to a local Islam community who are the small boat builders in the community.   The pagoda is paying for the wood and we are paying for the labour. Good community team work. It had to be inspected yesterday and Andrew says it has higher sides so they won’t get swamped and looks great. It will be painted green and gold. We have the uniforms all prepared and the rowers are all ready and raring to have a go. As last year was their first year, they learnt a lot, so are quite excited and looking forward to the 26^th. 

Andrew’s cousin and his family will be in Kep for Christmas and the Water Festival. We are going to have Christmas dinner on the boat, asking a few other people we have met along the way as well as all the staff and boarders at Kep Gardens. For the Water Festival we will probably anchor just off shore and watch the races from there. Closing the school for 10 days over Christmas/New Year so 3 days spent on the boat will be relaxing. Should be an enjoyable time for all.

The staff quarters are all but finished. Only just the tiling on the floor to be done. We kept putting this off as if it rained there was nowhere for them to sleep but outside. Hoping to get this done in the next week or so as we want all these little jobs finished before the boat is mobile as it will be full on for the next 3 months to take advantage of the remainder of the tourist season.

Staff quarters. Where the guys are sitting is the bathroom.
This is the way they do it over here!

Believe it or not, the Association approval is almost complete. Apparently when they were sent to Phnom Penh almost 2 years ago, the guy they went to left his job and they have sat on his desk ever since, nothing done at all. As we kept asking, they finally decided to check into it and they were found. We got our seal made and have signed a new form they’ve got now so it is supposed to only take a week before we get formal approval. Halleluiah! This approval will change many things for us. Can get the container organized and sent without fear of an exorbitant sum being charged to clear it through customs, visas cheaper, can apply for grants, all sorts of things that will help. 

Andrew is now the President of the Kep Business Committee. I went to a couple of meetings before but now they hold them when I am teaching so Andrew goes. They were not organized at all and decided to get themselves together officially. We used to go just to meet the other foreigners in Kep and to keep abreast of all the local news and gossip. We are a bit isolated where we are and never know what is going on. He was not interested in becoming involved in a committee or anything but they elected him because we are neutral, do not run a business for profit (the boat is a business of course but the proceeds go back into Kep Gardens, not into our pocket) so he wouldn’t have any personal agenda for things they wanted done. We also have a good relationship with the Deputy Governor and she attends most of these meetings and is the government official the committee would have to go through for approval of various requests. Andrew is much more sociable than me. He knows more foreigners in Kep after 6 months than I ever met in 2 years!

Apart from Jan and Graham, volunteers I mentioned earlier, we had a young couple from Australia (one brought up in Adelaide) doing conversation classes with the Upper class two nights a week for about 6 weeks. They left last week and then today another couple from England and Scotland arrived and they will be doing drama type classes with the younger children incorporating a lot of the words we have learnt so far and then conversation classes with the older students. A Russian couple (Ukraine actually), probably in their 30’s are living in Kep but can’t speak English so they come and join one of the beginners’ classes with the younger children every day. Lovely people and they will join us on the boat on Christmas Day too. They love fishing so even though we can only exchange a few words, him and Andrew get on well with body language about bait, sizes of fish etc. Probably lots of tall tales being told! Because it is the tourist season we have quite a few visitors popping in to check out the place. One of the things I really like about living here is the number of interesting people you meet from all over the world, all sorts of occupations, a lot of students taking a few months break and travelling all over South East Asia, some travelling for over a year. The off season can become a bit boring as there are not many visitors!

Couple of kids fishing in the dam. They are ring ins too. Don’t know them!

Before this turns into a book, I’ll give Andrew a turn to add his two bobs worth. He is in Phnom Penh at the moment getting last minute bits and pieces for the boat but he assures me he will write his bit on the bus. Footnote: I made it in time but Andrew didn’t.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL. I hope you enjoy Christmas with your families and friends and that 2011 is a healthy and happy year for you all.

Cheers,

Janine and Andrew