Siem Reap - first impressions

August 6, 2008
11:23pm ICT
Room 228, Salina Hotel
Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

Well, you might have noticed it’s been a few days since my last post… actually, I guess only 2… my god, I’ve been so incredibly busy it seems like ages. What I haven’t been busy with is posting, and actually saying anything about my time in Cambodia, so let’s fix that now. What I’ve mostly been up to, and this is going to sound really boring, is data entry and double-checking. Ok, it is boring. There’s a tremendous amount of data that gets collected here, and it’s difficult to get the actual raw data forms questionnaires, tapes, transcripts – out of Cambodia, for 2 main reasons (I explain this partially to give a bit of a sense of where Cambodia is today).

1. All planes flying into and out of Siem Reap are small, and so have relatively small baggage capacity (the plane I flew in on was a less-than-100%-sturdy propeller plane). This is done by law, because of profound fears that a big jet engine could do damage to the temples at Angkor Wat. The temples are from Cambodia’s golden days in the 12th century. They’re absolutely beautiful, the pride and joy of Cambodians, the main draw for tourists (besides sex), and also incredibly fragile. Any damage to them means damage to the tourism industry that keeps Siem Reap alive.
2. Cambodia does not have the ability to ship internationally. I want you to pause for a second and consider that. Cambodia cannot FedEx. There are offices for major international shipping companies, but because of the levels of corruption, disorganization, and simple lack of infrastructure, you cannot ship something and reliably expect it to get to where it’s going. (The Canadian embassy in Cambodia in fact does not allow people to ship things to them, because there’s no guarantee it will arrive.)

Anyway, the end result is, most of the data stays in Cambodia, and if it needs to be entered or double-checked, it’s easiest to do it while here.

Also, there’s currently a team of six of us here. There’s two main researchers in the team: Ian Lubek is a psych prof at Guelph, my thesis supervisor, and the head of SiRCHESI; and Mee Lian Wong is a public health researcher at the University of Singapore who’s done work all around, and is now working on the first ever study of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in Cambodia (hint: there seems to be a lot). She’s an amazing researcher with a wide body of great work to her name. A program she helped create (one of many) has essentially created 90-100% condom use among sex workers in Singapore. She’s also very cheery, very nice (she always offers ice cream after meals), slightly absent-minded-professor (has offered ice cream before meals), and always full of ideas and research opportunities (she tried to force at least one thesis topic on me at lunch today). Then there’s 4 students: me; Pauline Lim, Mee Lian’s daughter, who’s at Duke and here to help her mom; Wei Gan, Pauline’s boyfriend, also at Duke, also along to help; and Nathalie Lim, who just graduated from psych at University of Melbourne, and is now doing a bit of volunteering with SiRCHESI and other NGOs. Within my first ten minutes of meeting Nathalie, she expressed how she likes the SiRCHESI work, but her true passion is sex trafficking. When Ian suggested they go off somewhere and discuss the sex trafficking, her reaction, I believe, was "yesss!".

'I'm sure she doesn't love Saddam; she just finds him interesting.'

So, giant teams of data entry. It’s actually been weird. I’ve spent my hours mostly staring at a laptop, in an air conditioned hotel room in a pretty Western hotel (pretty Western is relative… we still don’t have drinkable drinking water… but we get 2 free bottles of water per day… but the bottles are a cheap brand that tastes funny, most likely because of chemicals from the cheap plastic seeping into the water.) I have been out a few times, for dinner, shopping, to the SiRCHESI office (more on that in another post), and I think the Western-ness of the hotel just makes the culture shock all the more powerful. There is poverty here like I’ve never imagined.

I want to talk about the poverty more, and I tried to write something coherent, but it really deserves its own, well-thought-out post, and I’m not in a mindset to do such things this late at night.

So I’ll leave for now, and write more tomorrow. Should be easing up a bit. First few days were intense, because Mee Lian, Pauline, and Wei are leaving tomorrow, so we wanted to get as much done as possible, but now it will be maybe a little quieter.