NEWSLETTER JULY-AUGUST 2009

Hi Everyone, 

The last month has sped by for two reasons. Firstly, my friend's daughter, Lauren, has been visiting for most of the month of July. She was a lovely girl and we really enjoyed her company. I am sure she had a couple of once in a lifetime experiences that she'll never forget. We spent about 10 days of her visit in Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Battambang before returning to Kep Gardens where she spent the remainder of her time.

Secondly, we have been working with the Deputy Governor of Kep who is responsible for education, development and anything else you'd like to think of in Kep Province. She happens to be a lady which is quite unusual in this male dominated society and we get on quite well together, even though we have the language barrier. She also happens to own land next door to us so she is interested in the development of this area. We have actually known her for about 2 years as she also runs the port where the boat has been moored for ages, so we weren't meeting her cold for the first time when we started all these negotiations. We are doing all the paperwork for Kep Gardens to become an Association. In this country, this is the same as becoming a Foundation, they just call it a different name. Once we start all the different aspects to Kep Gardens, we will not have to go through all the red tape for each individual section, it will all come under the Kep Gardens umbrella. Included in this will be approval for all our boxes to go through customs with no hassles; building approval for the school and bungalows on our property; approval for the boat to operate in Kep; and also acknowledgement of the English classes, with the Government issuing certificates of achievement. This Foundation is a huge step, one which we have been working towards for several months as it means we have been officially recognized by the government and have their support in all we do. Nearly there. Will be signing all the paperwork requests on Friday and she has said she will push it through fairly quickly as she is fully supportive of our programme. Mind you, not entirely sure yet how much this will cost us, but by the sound of it, it won't break the bank. Let's hope so anyway or we may have to rethink how we proceed. We also gained the hard title to the land in March. Once again, it cost us, but was a vital first step in ensuring Kep Gardens could proceed. We couldn't have achieved all this at a fair price without the help of Yun Samean, a friend of ours, who has a committed interest in seeing Kep Gardens succeed and has lead all negotiations. Also Sothea, my right hand man and future general manager of the Association, translates for me and teaches me daily about the Cambodian culture and ways has also been a great help.

Once this has been achieved, the next couple of months will be spent with me working out the curriculums for the 3 different levels of English classes we will hold before the new classes start in October, the beginning of the school year here in Cambodia. The Education Department needs these as they set and oversee examinations on what we are teaching in order for them to issue certificates with their seal of approval and signatures. Huge job and will be a great challenge for me but I have a couple of teacher friends I can email for help to make sure I get it right. This all came about because we had huge numbers attending the classes with new kids coming everyday. It was getting out of hand as the abilities and ages in the classes were so diverse. I had to make a decision on whether we just continued the way we were and everyone had fun and maybe learnt something along the way or we did it properly to ensure that the students definitely learnt something and were recognized for it in some way and hence they benefited by attending. Because Kep Gardens will be focusing on education and training for employment with the English school, the hospitality school, the boat, help for the farmers in learning microorganism compost, fertilizers etc and the scholarship fund, I really had no choice but to follow along more formal lines for the English school. Letters will be going out to parents and put on trees in the local market for locals to know about the changes and asking for enrolments by the end of September. Lessons will be free, of course, but we will need to restrict numbers. It will be interesting to see what response we have. It's so difficult to arrange times and lengths of courses because you have to take into account all the holidays, the rice planting season, the rainy season and the government school times. Anyway, we'll give it a year with this new system and see towards the end whether more changes need to be made.

I have a young girl from the fishing village staying with us for the next two months while she is on the long school holiday break (like our Christmas school break but longer). I have known her almost from the first day we arrived on our first trip here. She is very smart and I want to help her family keep her at school. We are having English lessons together for a couple of hours every day. One hour in the morning and one in the afternoon and then she sits in on the lesson with the younger class. Also I am speaking English to her all the time. We'll see how it goes. She may well stay here indefinitely if she is happy enough and attend the local school here as well as keep on with English lessons. Her father and sister rolled up yesterday to check out where she is living and sleeping and today we had her mum, 2 sisters, her best friend and a little girl they look after come to visit. Six females all together talking away and laughing, pity I couldn't join in.

The road that runs alongside our property is apparently going to be widened and fixed up a bit in two weeks time. At the moment it is just a track. We will have to move our fence along that side which just happens to be the longest side, so looks like a big job is looming. Need a bit of help from the locals I would say so there will be jobs available shortly, if only for a short time at present. Probably have to destroy all the concrete compost bins we built and rebuild them. Never mind.

Also been planning for the hospitality school and have decided to send some students to Siem Reap for training in a very high class French hospitality school. The scholarship fund will not only pay for their training but we will also have to pay for their accommodation and food while in Siem Reap. The aim of this is that when they return they will not only work in our bungalows but will be involved in the training of the students at our own hospitality school. They will have a permanent job to come back to and will be living in their home village with their family still close by. This is very important to the Cambodian people and so we are fairly sure they will want to come back and stay working with Kep Gardens. While in Siem Reap I checked out the 2 schools there and had long talks with the Directors which really helped to clear my mind and sort my ideas of how ours would work. The various courses they will attend start in September for 11 months. Works out well really, as I don't think we will be ready to open for the upcoming tourist season as we don't want to rush things just for the sake of it. We want to make sure everything is right the first time and these students will be due to arrive back all trained around the time we will be starting our hospitality school and opening up the bungalows to tourists. We will have plenty of room if people want to visit though before we open up as once Andrew arrives we will commence building even if the whole complex is not complete until mid 2010.

I can't believe this. It has been bucketing down with rain all day. Quite cool and miserable really. I didn't expect that any students would come for classes but a big heap have just arrived, sopping wet and I mean absolutely drenched and they are laughing away together and getting their book out ready to go. They are only an hour early today. If not raining they come up to 2 hours early, even more if it is hot and they go for a swim in the dam or play games near the shed.

We finally got rid of all the puppies after about 5 months and had just the mum and one puppy to keep. Not long after they all left, our puppy died. We think he ate a toad that is poisonous. We called the "vet" who gave him 3 injections but it was obviously too late to save him. He must have eaten it during the night and we didn't see him until the morning. Must admit though, that after having 12 animals around it is quite nice just with 2 cats and one dog, much quieter, less fights, less chasing of cats. Was bedlam there for awhile and the tick and flea problem was uncontrollable with 8 dogs running over the paddocks and then sleeping together and passing them back and forth. What a nightmare!

Before our visitor arrived, I was busy making resources for the school. Not easy with limited stuff you can buy but it took me back to the old days of photocopying, cutting out pictures, pasting onto paper, and then photocopying again. Quite enjoyed it really. Amazing what you can do with nothing.

I have just been called to look at the dam. Because of the heavy rain and because our dam is part of the waterway from the mountains it has totally flooded. Trees we planted not long ago a short way up the mountain are just sticking their heads out of the water. The mesh across the cement pipes to let the water get out are broken because of the force of the water. You should hear the noise. I reckon we could start our own hydroelectricity plant! The reason for the mesh was to keep the fish in the dam, the big ones anyway, although we knew the smaller ones would be flushed through the pipes. That is OK because they end up in the rice fields and provide food for the village people but we were hoping to keep some of the big ones to use for food ourselves. Looks like that was a good idea that hasn't worked! It is gushing over the top of the pipes anyway so a certain amount of the bigger ones would have escaped. There is absolutely water everywhere. The road here is all flooded apparently but the kids still managed to get through. If you step off the cement floor of the shed you are splashing through water. Big problem with snakes though. Sunday night there was a brown cobra in the toilet. I am now taking a bucket into the bedroom of a night as I don't fancy walking around by torchlight and coming face to face with a cobra or any snake for that matter. When it rains heavily, their houses get full of water (according to the local people, I have never bothered to find out about the habits of snakes) and they head for a drier place to sleep. As we are surrounded by 3 mountains they head for our shed as it's the only place nearby that's dry. Fortunately, the word hasn't spread too far because it doesn't happen very often and if we see them, they don't live to tell the tale. Snakes don't like the smell of citrus apparently, so when I went to the toilet last night the smell of citrus was so strong it nearly knocked me over. Borith has bought heaps of limes and is keeping the toilet drenched in the juice and lime peel is everywhere. Smells good and let's hope the snakes realize they don't like the smell and keep away.

Talking about snakes, a very sad incident happened last week. A small boy (someone said 6 but I am not sure) has recently started to learn to be a cowboy ie look after the cows while they eat away from home. I am not sure how long he and his father have been coming to Kep Gardens with their cows. Last Sunday or Monday (all quite vague) they were at Kep Gardens and then moved from here higher up the track into the mountain. At some stage the young boy was bitten by a snake but didn't tell his father, if he realized it at all. His father now seems to think it was while they were in the mountains. At some stage he became sleepy. His parents took him to a doctor in Kep and then to Kampot hospital but nobody seemed to realize he was bitten by a snake. They went to a local Khmer doctor but it was too late. Apparently, not long before he died he said he had a problem with his leg and then they saw the puncture marks and it was all black. I would have thought at this time of year with the snakes on the move, the hospital would have checked out his whole body for any signs of bites. Anyway, the poor little fellow died. On Lauren's last day at Kep Gardens we went for a walk through the village to Choun's house to visit her mother and a couple of other houses and finally arrived at a house that seemed to have a lot of people hanging around. To our horror, the little boy was laid out on a table and people were coming to show respect to the family and give their condolences. We knew nothing about what had happened and it was quite a shock to be confronted with this. Lauren is only 19. Many people in their lifetime do not see a dead body, particularly not a child's, so as I said earlier she has gone home with an experience she will never forget. Luckily, Lauren had wandered around Kep Gardens on the Friday taking pictures of the children, cowboys and things in general. She had 2 lovely photos of the boy with his father sitting under a banana tree watching their cows. When in Phnom Penh we had one blown up and framed and the other printed off normal size. The day after I arrived back, the mother came to collect them. I was going to take them to her but Choun had told her we had them. At 7 days, 100 days and 3 years after a death, the monks go to their home and perform like a memorial service. I went with Choun on Monday to the 7 day service. On the floor in front of the monks with all the other stuff they use like incense, food, flowers etc was this framed photo. Now I know why she came and collected it as she wanted it for the service.   Lauren should feel happy because his mum and dad will cherish this photo forever. His dad is here everyday with the cows and we've been sitting having a coffee together just now. I feel he wants to say something as he came over to me especially, but with Sothea not here at the moment it's impossible. Maybe tomorrow when Sothea is back.

Talking about cows. Until we have decided what to do with the paddocks I said to Sothea to let the grass grow to stop erosion which is just as well as with this heavy rain, all the soil would have floated down the road. I said to ask the villagers if they wanted to graze their cows here to help us keep the grass down as well as give them a break from walking a long way to find suitable grazing spots. At one stage we had up to 20 cows here a day, a lot of them bulls. Most of them are quite docile but there is one dark brown guy that is quite small compared to the others but wants to fight them all. One day the cowboy that looks after this bull and a couple of others left them here to go and play volleyball (something they shouldn't do as their job is to keep an eye on them all day and he would get into trouble if his father found out). They put a stake in the ground and have a long rope for the cows to move around but they are far enough apart from each other not to cause trouble. This particular day the bully cow got off his lead and took on the others. I have never seen a real live bull paw the ground before and charge, only on TV, but this one did and locked horns with another bull until the other bull ran away into the banana trees, and then he took on another one. He had a go at 5 of them altogether. It was quite scary as they were getting closer and closer to the shed and I was envisaging the damage 2 big bulls fighting could cause to the shed, not to mention the trees and bushes knocked down. No one was game to go near them and Borith ran into the village to get help. Eventually it all calmed down and I noticed the brown bull wasn't around for awhile but he's back again now so we have to keep an eye on him. Some of the cows have been getting too close to the bushes and trees we have planted so I asked Sothea to tell them that if their cows eat our plants, I'd eat their cow. Seems to have worked. I notice they take a wise berth around the area that is planted out.

Gambling is illegal in Cambodia because the Cambodians would bet on a fly crawling up a wall so eventually the Government said no more. It is illegal in Thailand and Vietnam too. What a boring job a cowboy must be so to amuse themselves they started hiding among the banana trees and gambling on cards. We had to put a stop to this straight away as we didn't want the news to pass around that you could go to Kep Gardens and hide amongst the trees and gamble all day. I have playing cards in the boxes to use for educational type games but Sothea has advised against using them as the kids will take the games home and the family will gamble on the outcome. It will be seen as if we are encouraging card playing, even though we have the best of intentions. I learn something everyday as something quite innocent to me could cause a big problem.

So, what we are doing now, on the farm side of things, to pass the time in the rainy season and also to keep occupied until Andrew arrives is plant lots of trees and flowers some of which we have grown from seed ourselves and some we have bought or gathered from around the place. The students bring us seeds and plants as well. We have planted lots of fruit trees of various types, lots of flower type bushes and other smaller plants. We still have lots to plant yet. The idea is that the driveway into Kep Gardens will look lush and colourful and welcoming and the fruit trees are to supply us with food for ourselves and the bungalows. When we grow our own vegetables and have chickens and eggs, there is not a lot we will have to buy. Planting them now will give them a good start with lots of water, although I wonder if it is too much! We are also growing in pots or black plastic bags, lots of plants which will eventually go around the bungalow area but we can't put them in yet in case we have to dig them up when the building starts. We have lots of large shade trees which we dug up from the old King's palace in Kep to plant out. The caretaker there lets us take what we want and he is also grafting a few things for us. We also steal cuttings from the Government building gardens if we see something we like but can't get locally.

We have to start selecting students soon to attend Siem Reap as the course starts in September but first have to finalize the criteria we will use to choose them. We will meet and talk with the families as well and then accompany them to Siem Reap where they have an entrance exam they need to pass. After that we will need to find accommodation for them in Siem Reap and get them set up for their 11 month stay. Apart from this I need to work on the curriculums for the English school before October, although I am hoping the Education Department doesn't need them by then to give me a bit of leeway. And the accounts for 2009 are way behind. So, I have plenty to do in the next few months to keep me busy.

Hope you are all well and happy and I look forward to receiving an email from you with all your news.

Go the Crows.

Cheers, Janine