2008-14-10 - In the Provinces

The day after getting back from Vietnam was a Monday, and a trip to the provinces to visit some of CARE’s provincial offices was on the cards. I toddled off to work with a bag packed for a week, both work clothes and comfortable clothes, not really knowing what was going on. Socheat, the new CARE IT officer and previously IT contractor to CARE, was also starting today, and was coming out with me.

We ended up heading off at about 9am, and after getting through the ever-clogged main roads of Phnom Penh, got out into the surrounding semi-rural areas, which were also still fairly busy with light industry, combined with the odd large factory, mainly for garment making.

Once in the country proper, the change is remarkable – no more motos everywhere, just the odd car and truck, and very few structures along the sides of the road. The road is in quite good condition too, smooth and level, although the odd wheel-sized pothole is still around. There are also other hazards – the odd moto still putting along at 50km/h, cows, dogs and water buffalo on the road, and some quite sharp corners. The roads would be great for motorcycles (say over 250cc) – lots of hills and corners.

Arrived at Sre Ambel, where the driver dropped us off and headed back to Phnom Penh. The office here is in a simple concrete building where they are building a new regional hospital / medical centre, and as we had arrived at lunchtime (between noon and 2pm), everyone had gone home and the generator was off, so not much to do. When the power was back on, it was getting to work fixing computers – mainly removing viruses and other non-work-related programs like Skype. This was to be the pattern for the week – all the users have administrative-level access to their PCs, so viruses and the likes get on easily. Being the Khmer speaker, Socheat did most of the PC fixing, while I went back to working on CARE’s MIS.

The only other highlight of Sre Ambel was falling off the moto while going to the restaurant for dinner, along a very potholed dirt track (Socheat was driving, I blame him, and not the fact that I weigh almost twice as much as him and had 2 bags hanging off me).

On Wednesday the driver came back, dropping 2 other Phnom Penh staff at Sre Ambel, and taking us to Koh Kong, near the Thai border. That trip was even better, lots of mountains, rivers and bridges. Koh Kong itself is on a river, and has much nicer hotels than the Sre Ambel guesthouse. The road that goes to the border crosses the river just next to the hotel, and a walk across revealed a water snake and lots of jumping little shiny fish in the shallow water below.

The town gets its power from Thailand, and it was off for all of Wednesday and Thursday between 8am and 5pm, so the office was a dark and sweaty place. Generators are plugged directly into an office powerpoint, which runs a few select computers and lights. All the computers run off their own small UPS, and they all beep every time something else gets turned on. Most of them still have CRT screens, and if you turn one of those one the UPS overloads and the computer restarts.

Koh Kong’s office is made up of 2 adjacent houses with a bit of roof between them, and the network cabling was a disaster, so in the absence of power to run computers we ran extension cords to the network switches and re-set all the cabling. Once that was done, it was a case of running one or 2 PCs at a time while de-virusing them.

On Friday the power did come back on, and it was more of the same, albeit in greater quantities. We ended up staying an extra day, returning to Phnom Penh by Taxi on Saturday, a 400km trip for a little more than what it costs to get to the Airport in Canberra.