For various reasons, today I am especially grateful for the invention of electronic communication. I am able to send emails to people I love with an unrestricted length, can be in touch with news from home, can hear people's voices over the internet and even call mobiles through my computer. For some people, I am in more contact now than I was at home. We can be instantly in contact with someone, can express ourselves unreservedly and the majority of these miracles are absolutely free. The internet is blamed for encouraging bad behaviour and it may indeed be guilty of this, but there are times when it is a Godsend, allowing us contact with the people in our lives who we love and who are also Godsends.
The highlight of today is dinner with N. We plan a trip for Thursday, when we will go with her to the floating village on Tonle Sap lake circumventing the various scams usually involved in such a trip in which tourists buy rice or school supplies for the village - which are instantly returned and re-sold, with the people who need it seeing neither the supplies or the money. We will go out on a boat with a local boatman, paying our money direct to him. At the village, N knows the village Chief and we will get to meet him and eat lunch prepared for us by his wife, who we will also pay directly.
On the way back we are hoping to see some of the rice harvest, and potentially stop to help! (Though I rather suspect 'help' in this instance is going to be a bit of a loose concept).
N chats with us over dinner. She has done various work in the past to help set up organisations for ethical and ecotourism, and has worked with people to make documentaries about life on Cambodia. She tells us about some of the jungle tribes in Cambodia, and their belief in the jungle spirits. When they want to set up a new settlement they dig a small square of ground then go back and sleep. If the dream they have is good, they go back and dig the ground out further and settle, if a bad dream - they abandon the site and move on. Another tribe uses elephants a lot to work for them, sharing the elephant between three or more families. The process they use to train the elephant involves starving it for weeks in the jungle. A traveller managed to settle there and to pay a fee to the families to 'rent' the elephants in order to give them a happier home. He aimed to allow the elephants to breed, but the tribe believe that if the elephant has a baby, the jungle spirit will afflict their children. If a harvest is poor, or there is a storm, the tribe believe that the jungle spirit is passing judgement on them because somebody in the village has angered it. That person, once discovered, must make an animal sacrifice to the spirit to atone.
It is fascinating, and the food fantastic but as I said, for various reasons, today our minds are on the people back home and so we make our excuses relatively early.
We head home, nestled together on N's motorbike. I still have a little thrill of fear getting on motorbikes, but it doesn't take long to die down and really, travelling along with the wind in your hair is much better than climbing into a taxi.
But don't worry Mum, I won't do it at home.
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