Sylvia's Journal

I had my last breakfast in the Chinese Le President restaurant and tried a rice dish with chicken, sweet and sour sauce on the side and a small bowl of vegetable and beef broth. Naomi ordered scrambled eggs and toast which they produced as fast as the Chinese dishes. She says she is not as adventuresome but for me it is not about adventure but about taken advantage of being in a place that has one of the most wonderful cuisines in the world.

After breakfast we checked out of our hotel and drove to ADRA for our departure to the province. We put our luggage in the back of the truck, squeezed all six of us into the truck cabin designed for five, and left for Kampong Chams about 250 kilometers upstream on the Mekong River. This will be our home for the next 10 days.

On our way out of the city we stopped at a trustworthy pharmacy to get me some malaria pills which I had forgotten to bring along. The mefloquine pills that sell for 8 dollars a piece in the US cost only a quarter of that here. Leonard served as my private physician and verified the source on the bottle to make sure the pills were not adulterated or fake.

The team here is bent on getting me to try as many new and unusual foods as is possible during my short stay in this country. I have myself to blame for this because I am always looking for things I haven’t tried yet. The chicken or duck fetus is on the list but I am not quite ready for that yet. Yesterday I added several new foods to my list. First there were the lotus seeds, sold by the side of the road by an old woman with a deeply grooved face. She held the lotus stems and seedpods like a bouquet. I only knew them in their dried form as used in flower arrangements with the seeds missing. These were green, just picked and the olive sized seeds still firmly in place.

I liked the seeds. They tasted slightly like fresh coconut. I was reminded of Odysseus’ lotus eaters. I had always assumed they ate the flowers, never having seen the seeds. My fellow travelers told me not to eat too many of the seeds because I’d get sleepy, just as Odysseus and his men. Since we had to work in the afternoon I restrained myself.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. I was offered another new food as appetizer, spiders. Prateek had told me about them. A young woman offered grilled ones on a tray while live spiders were wriggling in a bucket by her feet. They were rather large with bodies the size of a bottle cap and about 3 inches in diameter. They tasted very much like soft shell crab, a delicacy for me, so I had another one while Naomi and Leonard were busy documenting what they considered either an act of courage or lunacy. And there was more. As soon as I had finished eating the spiders the cricket lady showed up. This time I had only one, which was also tasty, although these three little snacks left me thirsty because of all the salt.

After these appetizers Krisna, our IT manager and rookie facilitator ordered my lunch. I had given him carte blanche. He ordered for me what he had ordered for himself, something with an unpronounceable name and all sorts of mystery things floating in a noodle broth. I learned that it included banana flowers, a chicken foot and something that Leonard thought was congealed blood but turned out to be chicken liver. It tasted good but I left some of the unrecognizable chicken parts uneaten since I had had enough new stuff for a day. There was one more new food waiting outside the restaurant, fresh palm hearts which were nothing like Naomi remembered or I expected. They looked like small white bladders filled with a transparent jelly like substance and a liquid which I spilled. Eating palm hearts seems like an art that will take some practice. I bought a plastic bag with five more to try. Only the fresh pineapple was a tried and true food – we had them peeled right there and ate them immediately.

We arrived at our hotel, a huge Chinese affair, and sorted out our rooms which turned out to be rather complicated. As a result we arrived a little late at the ADRA office. It has stunning views over the Mekong River and is surrounded by brothels. The office staff had walked out to greet us. Some 20 ADRA staff had been waiting for us in a large hall at the top of an immensely steep and long stone staircase. They were waiting expectantly for our arrival, seated on blue plastic chairs arranged in theatre style.

I had assumed we would be working in our small team to do some more practice for our next alignment meeting for the provincial Excellencies that starts the 22nd but it was show time now: the ADRA staff had been told there was a management and leadership workshop. To my enormous delight the team moved right into gear, changed the room set up and within minutes had everyone busily engaged first in developing a shared vision for the youth project and then discovering what managing and leading actually meant in practice.

Although I did not understand a word of what was going on, the energy was right and everyone was involved in the thinking and talking. We have some natural talent on the team and they experienced some of the challenges of facilitating in pairs. They were able to squeeze in several exercises in abbreviated form before the end of ADRA’s work day. We had all made a leap of faith and so far the leap was going well.

The snacks served here in the afternoon stand in sharp contrast to what we got at ADRA Cambodia’s HQ: instead of four kinds of fruits, cakes and rice cakes, staff gets slices of French bread and water. A water and bread diet in between meals may help me take off some of the weight I gained from all the eating I have been doing here.