Chasing Amy-Lou

Takeo Province, Cambodia;

It’s only day two at Happyland but I feel drained and exhausted. I’ve not even been doing any real physical exercise and I feel I could sleep for days. If kids do this to you, if having children does this to you, if running a volunteer organisation where you eat, sleep and breathe childcare does this to you, then I take my hat off to anyone who works in this industry and to anyone who’s ever had children.

This morning, myself, the French chic, and the Aussie chic (we’ll call them Lille and Gold Coast) went to the site of the new Happyland, a few hundred metres down the road. The site that Happyland currently occupies is great, however there’s no running water and no way of getting or plumbing water to the house (aside from buying it or relying on rain water); the rooms aren’t big enough for the amount of volunteers that could potentially stay there; and there’s no grassy area for the kids to play freely outside on. The cost of rent for the current site totals more than $300 (USD) a month, bills are extra. On the surface it sounds cheap (I’d be amazed if I could find a place for $300 a month) but it’s not.

Happyland relies on volunteers. The money we pay ($5 a day for the first week and then $4 and $3 for the second and third weeks respectively; $3 a day continues for as long as the volunteer stays) goes on bills and rent for the land we are staying on; it goes on food for our bellies; pots, pans, materials for making makeshift benches and tools; it goes on resources for the kids such as computers chairs, books, paper, toner for the printer; it pays for first aid kit materials, and bottled water and tank water during dry season (and in dry season, when it doesn’t rain at all, and you need water for cooking, for cleaning, for washing, for showers, for flushing the drop toilets; water can become expensive); it pays for cat food and laundry powder and it also pays for everything else you can think of that sustaining a house and a makeshift school costs.

A lot of Happyland’s resources come from donations but donations only help so much. Especially when you need a lot of money to buy things that donations wouldn’t cover. Without consistent volunteers and without donations, Happyland would not be able to sustain itself and continue operating for much longer. And if that was the case and it had to close, the kids would have nothing. Swansea and his bosses therefore, had managed to find this new site which is not only heaps bigger (with a lot more land for the kids to play in, more space for classrooms, and bigger buildings for the volunteers), it is miles cheaper to rent too. The only catch being – it needs a lot of work. A hell of a lot of work.

The grass area has a lot of weeds and needs a of a lot of attention and gardening. As volunteers it’s our responsibility to clear the grass, to clean the house and to make the place liveable.

Gardening is arduous work. Especially in the Cambodian sun. And especially when you have little or basic equipment. And it transpires that we only had three hoes, and not even enough pairs of gloves to go round. We were using primitive rudimentary equipment for an area of land that most working class people could only dream of having attached to their houses – Christ, even most middle class people would kill for the space that this new site had.

Wielding the most basic hoe and cutting into the ground to pull up the weeds, I felt bad – bad and helpless as I thought how Happyland could do with newer equipment; how hoeing can only get you so far – progress was not speedy. I felt that with the slowness of our weeding, we were fighting a losing battle- pulling up weeds when we knew they were just going to grow back – a vicious circle where we’d forever be chasing our tails. And that’s even before we’d looked at the inside – I could see from looking through the window that termites had started to attack to beams – the integrity of the house was under threat. Swansea assured us that he and his bosses were onto that, and I suppose I was noticing faults after only a few days – I hadn’t formulated the plan to move sites and I wasn’t aware of the past or future situations of this site or the previous site, or of the current financial situation. All I wanted to think of were ways we could make work easier and quicker; ways in which future weeding or any future gardening wouldn’t require so much manual labour – like using a rotator blade mower or proper gardening equipment. I felt powerless, yet I knew it was people like me who held all the power when it came to initiatives like this. And it got me thinking about ways I could help once I’d left the centre. Paying for a lawnmower would be one…but would it really help, or would I just be throwing money at something, something that even some families didn’t use, when what they really needed was consistency, their own resources and man power, not a state of the art gardening tool?

After we’d done a couple of hours dredging up weeds, we made our way back to Happyland just in time to hear Bread Guy trundling along the road. Bread Guy is a guy who sells bread. Obviously. And he drives up and down the road between the villages near Takeo every morning on his motorbike; huge bread basket attached to his back, with more fresh bread than you could shake a stick at. So we bought some. And along with the fresh duck eggs we bought from the shop at the front of Happyland, we whipped up some breakfast – and it was bloody delicious.

After breakfast it was time for a shower – I’d never used a bucket shower before, not that I can remember anyway and definitely not in my adult life. And it was very interesting. Standing naked next to a drop/squat toilet, the smell of piss -not unlike that from the men’s urinals in a dirty nightclub – in my nostrils, mosquitos buzzing around my privates, pouring cold rainwater over my head with a plastic pan…was glorious. Well, I wouldn’t say it was glorious…it was bearable. I’d much rather have been taking a hot shower in the luxury of a bungalow somewhere in Bali, preferably with a view of rice paddies, the ocean, or a crystal clear pool, instead of the four decaying walls and a corner full of cobwebs I was actually faced with. But I wasn’t complaining. I’d chosen to volunteer and this is what came with the package.

I was trying to take every aspect of it in my stride…the basic way of living a humbling and stark insight into the lives of those less fortunate than me. The only thing I couldn’t quite get used to was the drop toilet. It was fine for a pee (if I could get passed the splashback and the fact I’d always have just a little bit of piss on my legs and feet) but when it came to matters of a more solid kind, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s as if my body froze in dreaded fear – stage fright had nothing on what my arse and insides were experiencing. It was a good job then that the boys dorm had a sit down toilet. I don’t know how I would’ve felt going a week without a poo – probably pretty shit.

By 10am the kids hadn’t even arrived but I felt like I’d done a days graft already. Chowing down on some bread and peanut butter for more energy I did some laundry and then tried to prepare myself a little more by attempting to learn some basic Khmer. I mastered ‘thank you’ (arkoun), ‘crazy’ (chhkout), ‘one two three’ (muoy, pir, bei), and ‘don’t touch’ (kom pah). What more could I possibly need?!

At 11am we prepared lunch – five of us sat round on the kitchen floor peeling onions and carrots, chopping pumpkins and courgettes, cucumbers and peppers, and preparing the rice. It was a team effort, and was really great to sit down as a group and chat – we chatted about music and home life, cleanliness and the art of pumpkin carving. It was all very fun. Lille told us that some of the kids liked to join in on the cooking and most are better than us – they can slice and chop, they know the dangers of knives, they can jump up onto the sideboards and start throwing all the veg in the pan and stirring and mixing – some of these children are less than ten years old, and they’re weilding knives and using hot water and can turn gas stoves on – these children it seems, grow up very fast, they have to learn these things in order to survive; some of them have extremely tough home lives, some have to more or less run their households; and for that reason, I already thought they were amazing.

After lunch we awaited the arrival of the children. And sure as clockwork, around 1pm, the first kids peeked their heads round the corner to see if we were there. Shy, cheeky grins on their faces. Like yesterday, it was the younger kids who came first. Now I’m not sure if the rain had anything to do with it, but today the kids were crazy. Crazy excited, crazy daft, crazy energetic, and crazy loud. It was insane. It was hard work chasing after them, trying to divide our attention between ten or more energetic and demanding kids of different ages; trying to understand what they wanted and what they didn’t want. But bloody hell was it fun.

The torrential rain this afternoon delayed the onset of the older kids arriving. But they did come eventually, soaked to the bone but still full of enthusiasm; and we carried on the conversations from yesterday, and tried new exercises and new subjects based on grammar and sentence structure.

It was only my second day at Happyland and I was still learning – learning about the initiative and how it was run, learning about the situations in Cambodia for families who lived in poor villages, learning about the culture, and most importantly, learning about the kids. These kids had stories – and not stories like you or I had; I mean real stories. Most of them not very nice, and a lot of them very hard to digest. I was only just scratching the surface and I was scared, scared that the deeper I scratched, the harder it would be for me to leave.