Last Day in the Temples

I suspect from the lack of comments that you're all bored with my vacation slides now, so I'll wrap this up and go back to aviation posts. Thanks for putting up with my debriefing for so long. I'm almost done.

On the last day in Siem Riep I'm going out to the tuktuks at the agreed upon time and a driver I don't know approaches me. He tells me that Chan, the driver we've had for the other days can't come today, that he had to work at the soldier hospital. That's unfortunate, because while I'm sure the replacement that Chan has arranged is a competent driver who knows the temples, his English is not good enough for what I had planned. I was going to do a half day in the temples, then find a quiet café somewhere and take advantage of Cham's good English skills to work on my Khmer. I figured he'd agree: he gets the same rate as for driving and I buy him a meal, and he doesn't have to burn any gasoline. And it's nice to work with the same person. We go back to the temples.

Some of the temples are elaborately carved and some have quite rough decorations. Almost all of the temples are not quite finished, if you consider finished to mean that all the surfaces are evenly covered with a symmetrical, or at least logical density of decorations to a certain standard. One of the differences is that sandstone-faced temples can have very fine decorations, but that temple faces that are made of the red laterite stone pictured above cannot, because the laterite is coarse in texture and quickly eroded. It's easier to cut and work with for construction however. One compromise is to build with laterite and face with sandstone. I took this picture of an old staircase, because it shows the sandstone shipped away from a stair, revealing the underlying laterite construction.

At this same temple, a little quiet one, there was grass growing between the surprisingly complete outer walls and the inner structure with all the stairs and doorways. I was walking around trying to see if there was a way to get into what appeared to be a gallery between some of the walls, or if it was just a construction space, now accidentally visible because of the decay. I noticed some movement in the grass by my foot. It could have been an insect, but the plant there looked familiar. When I was a kid, someone showed me a mimosa plant that folded up when you touched the leaves. It looks a little like a fern, with delicate little leaves in pairs along the side of a stem, and now there's a plant like that by my foot. I poke it with my finger, and sure enough it folds up. I've probably poked hundreds of ferns that looked like that, but this is the first time that I've found one in the wild. It's the first time I've been in the right place to find one. The link says that it's native to Brazil but is now a "pantropical weed." I guess that means there weren't any here in the 10th century.

On the topic of things underfoot, I've been looking at the paving stones on the walkways around the temples. This one had writing on it, perhaps the signature of a builder. I forgot to ask any Khmer speaker what, if anything, it said. It would seem odd for someone to sign a paving stone. I imagine that stones that were partly broken or otherwise not appropriate for building might be repurposed for paving.

This one, with the feet, was in the walkway over the moat to Angkor Wat. Is it the 11th century equivalent of some junior stone cutter photocopying his foot? It's not like no one was going to notice that there were some feet in the stone, but it's not part of anything. It was a lot of work to make. Why did they do it? I don't know. I saw another stone that had a spiral shaped fossil in it.

The tall temple below was the most stereotypical temple. It was a simple pyramid and at the pinnacle was an open area with a Buddha and an altar for offerings. It was straightforward: you climb up the steep stairs, you pray, you leave your offering and you can go down another staircase. The tall temple was near the elephant terrace. I believe its restoration was sponsored by the Czech government. It was kind of cool how many countries had a little hand in research, preservation and restoration at the temple. Some had obvious connections of history and religion, but others seemed to be just helping to preserve something that is of interest to the world. National karma, as it were.

When I get back to the tuktuk, the driver is eating leaves from a tree. I try one. It tastes like a leaf. I hope it doesn't have some strange narcotic property that will be a problem for me. He's happily eating lots. I guess it's an acquired taste.

I'll skip now to my very favourite temple in the whole park, called East Mebor. I was there early in the morning, it was still cool, maybe only twenty-five degrees out, and it was so quiet that I could hear the whirring of the camera of the only other person there, perhaps seventy-five metres away from me. The main feature of this temple is the animal sculptures. You can see lions flanking the staircases up to this doorway, kind of different from the way western art traditionally portrays lions, sitting more upright with a more vertical mane, and with the tail more prominent, although most of the tails were broken off and gone.

There were also elephants on all the corners facing out, on the different levels, almost life-sized. It's hard to take a picture of oneself with an elephant, as I discovered last night. When you're on top of the elephant or right next to it, it's too big to get in frame, and get far enough away from it and then it's hard to get yourself in the picture and in focus. Elephants are big. You'd think I would have learned that in kindergarten, but there are lots of things one learns in school that you still need actual experience with to learn learn.

I had the driver park near Srah Srang, a water reservoir built in the 10th century. It is mostly just an artificial lake, with a viewing platform at one end, steps going down to the water and flanked by statues. I tell the driver I am going to walk around the lake. He is surprised, and I have to persuade him that this is not a problem for me. It's a good walk and I meet two kids searching for something in the water. I ask "dtrei?", which means fish and they tell me in English "frogs." I suspect that if they catch any they will end up as cornfrogs or other comestibles. There is a group of people in two old boats, wearing the uniforms of the park maintenance crew beached on the shore further down. They are resting on the shore eating lunch. I search my vocabulary for words that might help me to ask what they might be doing, and before I come up with something one of the men asks me, "Parlez vous français?" I respond in the affirmative, but that seems to startle him and I don't think he knows more than that phrase. Someone else asks if I speak English and I give him an affirmative answer, too, but neither French or English is enough for us to communicate what they are doing. I think they are gathering up loose lily pads and other floating debris, while leaving the groomed groups of lilies growing in designated places in the reservoir. I say goodbye and keep walking all the way around. The tuk tuk driver is asleep when I find him. I'm considering if there's something else I might do here rather than wake him up, when one of the other driver laughs and wakes him up for me.

We saw this scarecrow on the way home. That's what the driver called it when I asked him about it, but it's for scaring ghosts, not birds. It is a sentry to defend the house from evil spirits.

I have the driver take me downtown and then pay him for the day. Walking down the street, I often hear the word kromaa in my wake. It's the word for the red and white checked headscarf I'm wearing, a gift from the Tabitha people and a very useful garment to protect from sun, cold, dust, and bugs. I've used it to tie my hat on, too. Everyone got one, but most of the group don't wear theirs. Someone told me it made me look like a terrorist, I guess because it's a bit like the keffiyeh scarf that Arab men wear, but he was just teasing me, and it's an extremely convenient item. I imagine people are saying, "Check out that silly European in the kromaa." I would be concerned that it was associated with the Khmer Rouge, as they wore a kromaa like this as part of their uniforms, but the Tabitha project people gave us these: they wouldn't give us an oppressive political symbol and a lot of locals, male and female, wear them.

There's a street stall set up with a tank full of fish they call Doctor Fish. I've heard about this. You put your feet in the tank and the fish nibble on any dead skin, giving you a pedicure. I adore fish and I like foot massages, so I pay my three dollars and sit on the padded side to put my feet in. The price of admission allows you to stay as long as you like, and includes a cold local beer. The nibbling fish are awesome. It's like being poked gently with the tip of a chopstick. The only problem is that now I'm a sitting target for street vendors. I politely decline most of them, but then a one-legged landmine victim (he has a sign in English giving his story) holds up an English language cookbook. It's small enough to go in my luggage easily, has colour pictures and I love the food here. Sold. The fish nibble on my feet while I read about various ways to prepare their brethren.

I find cornfrogs pictured in the cookbook, called Kang-kep baob. Kang-kep means frog, I know from the pictionary session with the kids, so we should have called it a frog-kabob. According to the recipe, the frog is stuffed with chicken or pork. Now that I know it's not stuffed with frog guts, it seems much more appetizing. I set out to find one.

The first market I come to doesn't have food, but I get into a conversation with a vendor there. She speaks good English and tells me she is married with one two-month-old son. She proudly tells me that he has light skin and a "good nose." A good nose, according to her gestures is one that sticks out like mine, not one that is flat, like hers. How did my genotype get to be the definition of beauty in a land where almost everyone is light brown and flat-nosed? I have to admit to having paid no attention at all to skin colour variations here. When I arrived I did notice that people are of a darker hue than what I used to consider "Asian," but I haven't subsequently compared them to one another. Have the French, Russian and American elite redefined beauty over the last hundred and fifty years? Crazy. She directs me to another market that may have frog kebabs.

I don't find them, so lunch was a chicken coconut curry with sliced super hot peppers served on the side. I've learned how to use these now. You put a few slices in the dish, and you don't ever eat them, but their just being there heats up the flavour and leaves my lips tingling. There's French bread and good butter with the meal. I'll get my cornfrog in Phnom Penh.

Supper is a fancy affair at the hotel, apparently a freebee arranged by the travel agent in return for our business. The tables and chairs are set up outside on the lawn, where we are swarmed with insects and eat okay Khmer food. No frog-kebabs, though.

Back to Building

I'm happy to report that my arms aren't sore the next morning. I have a slight blister from a seam in the work gloves, but I put a bandaid on it yesterday as soon as I noticed the tender spot, and it is not a problem either. The group in general seems to have done as well. No one reports mosquito bites, dog bites, cow bites, chicken bites or landmine wounds from yesterday, either.

We load ourselves back in the punctual vans at seven a.m. and retrace the familiar route through the countryside to our village. I and one other member of the group who is making an effort to learn the language aimed to sit together but didn't jump fast enough and both ended up on less popular middle seats a couple of benches apart in the same van. We pass the phrasebook back and forth, not quite as productive as being able to share tips and pronunciations. There are more oxen hitched to carts piled cartoonishly high with goods. They stand placidly in their traces and appear to be free of sores and to have healthy hooves. But what do I know about oxen. They don't lead a life of leisure, but I don't think they work as hard as the people here do.

Once we reach the village, we know what we're doing this time, so bid some hellos and go straight to work. There are some floors left to do, but I know those go quickly and will be done in no time, so I go straight to building walls today. Under each house is a pile of green corrugated metal sheets. The first time I picked one out of the pile I didn't even realize that I had picked up three sheets together until we were lapping it under the previous sheet, and I realized how much thicker mine was. It's thicker than the stuff they built the Apollo moon lander out of, but just barely. There was no tutorial on wall-building, but there are local contractors working on the houses. We don't even share enough language to express up, down, left, and right. so it's kind of a matter of watching what he's doing, helping out where it's obvious and then watching to determine the process. We have to line each one up with the frame of the house and with the adjacent panel, giving it just the right amount of overlap, hold it straight and nail it on. I watch carefully while the contractor positions the sheet, and then he indicates where to drive each nail.

These nails are different from floor nails, as they have giant heads, the size of a nickel, but flimsy. If you don't hit the nail square in the centre of the head, straight on, with each blow of the hammer, the head either flies off to parts unknown or skitters down the shaft of the nail. And the head of the nail is necessary to retain the metal on the frame. When the nail head flies off, it's hard to pull the nail out, because normally you use the head of the hammer against a surface to get some leverage to remove a nail, but you can't push on the metal sheets at all. They're so thin that they would tear. Like any nail, you also have to drive it straight in so it doesn't bend

I start out standing on the ground, nailing the bottom edge of the sheets to the edge of the floor. This is simple enough, because I can always stand right in front of the nail I am hitting, with it just slightly over my head, and the edges of the floor are solid. So once I figure out the importance of getting these in straight, they are not too hard. The problem comes at the higher levels. The cross pieces for the walls are just little strips. I think they might be one-by-twos at a Canadian hardware store, except that these are rougher and not very even along their length. They are springy. Some of the time I spend working on walls, I'm just standing inside the house, bracing myself and holding a hammer against the strip of wood so that someone else can nail a sheet onto it without it springing away. Sometimes we stand inside the house and reach around to the outside to nail a sheet to the frame. This results in an awkward angle and bends a lot of nails. I notice most of the contractors, who do this all the time, bending nails from this angle, too. I really don't want to bend them, because when we do, getting them out will leave at least a hole, and probably a tear and a lot of ugly dents and flattening in the sheet metal. You don't want someone's home to look like that.

We do most of the wall nails from a ladder against the wall, which creates a bottleneck, because there are fewer ladders than people, and even if there weren't, there wouldn't be room to have enough ladders to reach every level at once. We have to put up the sheets one at a time so they overlap and line up properly. Some of the contractors direct us to put the nails in the convex part of the ridges, the sticky-outie part, which seems odd, because that flattens it, and it doesn't look as good. Others are okay with the nails going in the channels, which lay flat against the house, and I think look nicer that way. Another participant noticed that the contractor she was working with insisted that each new sheet of mental overlap the previously laid one, while having it underlap made it easier to get straight, because the friction helps hold the new sheet in place. Our theory is that these are habits that carried over from roofing for these guys. With roofing sheets it is obviously important that each lower sheet underlap the one above it, so rain can't trickle in the join, and similarly if you drive the nails into the channel, that creates a hole in the low spot. Much better to put the hole in the ridge, where water will never pool. I don't either consideration matters for walls, but at least it makes sense now.

While we build, kids are running around everywhere, just doing their normal things. A group of girls are playing what appears to be hopscotch. The grid they have scratched in the dirt is rectangular, and they play rock-paper-scissors to determine who goes first. It's almost disorienting to see this familiar game played here. When I was a kid you didn't learn any playground games from adults, you just learned them from kids, older kids teaching younger kids in a presumably unbroken succession back to the kids that invented the game. So how did hopscotch and rock-paper-scissors get to or from here? Our ancient common ancestors didn't invent them and bring them all the way from Africa through Mesopotamia, because that predates the invention of scissors and paper. Rock-rock-rock wouldn't have been a good game. I wanted to communicate, "We do this in Canada too!" I would have taken off my boots and joined them, but I probably would have communicated something more like "Canadian grown-ups are crazy." I tried to say, "Canada same!" while pointing at the game, and I tossed in a marker to show I knew how it worked, but I don't know that they understood.

At the house next to the kids playing hopscotch, one of the somehow cut himself on his upper arms, probably reaching around the thin sheets of metal. He didn't even notice, someone else had to point out the trickling blood. We've all had our tetanus shots, and he's not seriously wounded but I offer to go and get my disinfectant. As I'm walking away I suddenly remember the rule and come back and remind him to smile happily and come with me to the first aid supplies. I don't know that anyone cared, but apparently one year a housebuilding tool fell and struck a child, and after that they villagers wouldn't let work on that house continue, or even allow materials form it to be salvaged for another house. That one had become cursed.

Right on the road in the middle of the village there was a building where people congregated that we think was a store or a community centre of sorts. That's it above, and the kids at the top of this post are standing in front of it, too. It was a good place to get group shots of the local people just relaxing. At one point a little motorcycle with a big box on the back came up the road and stopped here. The driver opened up the box and it became a little mobile store. Here is where all the plastic came from: he was selling candy and snack food and other things in plastic wrappers. People who live in a society where everything is made of palm fronds and chickens don't learn not to throw wrappers on the ground. I watched some women admiring a selection of brightly-coloured combs. I think pretty much all the women in Cambodia have long hair. I didn't see if they bought any combs, but they definitely liked them.

The little boy on the bicycle with the girl was the subject of a lot of photographs. Photographers would take pictures and then always turn the digital camera so the people could see their image. Most people were interested or appreciative, but the little boy cried when he was shown his photo, until we spread the word not to show him.

At lunch I stuffed a bit of food into my mouth, then sat at the edge of our assigned stuff platform and took out an exercise notebook I had purchased in Phnom Penh. I drew a picture of a cow, one of their cows with a hump on its neck and long horns, and turned it so some kids could see it. I already knew the word, so I could tell if they got it or not. They did, and named it for me, "kō." I drew a chicken and let them name that, me echoing their word, trying to name it. More kids gathered and pretty soon I didn't have a hope of making out the consonants in the words, as they all came in a chorus. I would then point at one child to repeat the name so I could hear it, and then I'd try again. They would laugh and correct. When you're trying to distinguish between a voiced implosive dental and an aspirated alveolar, in a language for which you don't even have a complete inventory of consonants for, a group of laughing children is not the best source. But it was the best fun. I noticed in the back of my mind that the children I had been so carefully admonished not to touch were crowding around to press up against me.

After a while I ran out of things to draw that I imagined were in their experience, and tried to turn the pen over to one of the children. I've played this game before and found it an effective way both to learn vocabulary without having a common language, and to interact with people without having to learn any words. The kids were hesitant to take the pen. I drew some more things. I told them the English words for some of the things, and they would laugh at that, too. I kept offering the pen in various directions, and eventually one of the kids took it. At first I was disappointed, because he drew a car, a copy of the car that was the last thing I had drawn. They probably learn principally by rote here. It requires less teacher training and promotes classroom discipline, and of course it's better than no chance to learn at all. Another boy took the pen, and his car was a little different and more elaborate. Creativity emerges.

One little girl, picked up the pen and drew a princess. Not a Disney princess, but presumably a Khmer princess, with an elaborate hairstyle, earrings, some kind of beaded or fur gauntlets from wrist to elbow (she paid a lot of attention to adding texture and detail to them), and a dress that fell all the way to the bottom of the page. I wondered where she had seen such a thing. Other kids drew an ox cart and a scene of two people in a flat boat, one poling and the other I think fishing with a net.

Someone organized the kids to sing their national anthem, so we sang ours. One of the Canadians played the bagpipes. I'm not certain whether we had completed all the houses at that point, or whether some people finished up the remaining ones while most of us smiled at people and took pictures. We gathered the builders and the recipient families all together and our group leader made a little speech through a translator, then the other Khmer student in our group said a couple of sentences in Khmer, which I partly understood, because I had solicited coaching from my shopkeeper friend on how to say something similar. To make handing over the homes into a ceremony, and because apparently these folks somehow manage to be cold in this weather, we had a number of beautiful quilts from the Tabitha store to give to the new homeowners. I had the privilege of presenting one of the quilts to a woman standing with her family. I pronounced, with a crib sheet, the words I had learned for, "I hope you will be very happy in your new house." I think she understood. And I think there was a tear in her eye. Or maybe that was mine.

Our group leader asked through the interpreter if anyone had any questions. There was a lot of silence then someone dared to ask. The translated question was "Why are you doing this for us?" The leader tried to answer, addressing more "why are you doing this for us?" and detailing how the team chose Cambodia (past experience) than the reason we were doing it at all. I don't know if that was the answer that was wanted, but there were no more questions.

I think the plan was for more singing or something, but no one really wanted to make anyone stand around in the sun anymore, and the assembly kind of dissolved into wandering around, trying to meet people, and taking photos. I "met" one woman who was drying rice on mats in her yard. I was interested in how they harvested the rice, how long it took to dry, how much she had to turn it, how did they store it, that sort of thing, but all I could do was look.

When the Canadians gathered for a group photo in front of one of the buildings, most of the village gathered to watch. I would so much love to know what they said and thought about us.

We claim we came to build houses, but our real contribution is the one that you made, the funding for the houses. Our actually showing up and putting some together was more for us. Our presence makes us feel good, and certainly allows us to see that the money was well-used, not wasted, and went to people who needed it. The contractors probably could have built those houses in two days without our help. But they couldn't have done it without funding for the materials.

I think the whole structure of foreigners coming to build may be controversial in Tabitha. I suspect that there was quite a bit of politics in the organization--not ours, the Tabitha group--perhaps a power struggle starting as the founder is ill, and know that our group leaders insulated the group from most of that. They also had a stunningly dedicated commitment to making it a "no surprises" experience for the group, something obviously impossible where travel is involved. But just as in planning a flight, overplanning means that when something unexpected happens, it's as minor as possible.

I wish we could have spent longer, and many people I spoke to felt the same sense of disconnection as we just suddenly got back in the vans and drove away. The road winds through and around the village a little way and people waved as we left. We waved back, speeding away much too fast.

It is not encouraged for us to try to send letters or ever return to see the people in our village. I hope the houses hold up in the monsoons. I hope that boy's immune system is sufficient for his infected toe to get better on its own. I hope there is a good rice harvest. I hope that little girl someday gets to wear a beautiful dress, and that there are no landmines in any of their rice fields.

Starting the Build

We were given the option to choose what time the vehicles would come to take us to the build and chose the earlier option of seven a.m. I don't know if anyone else was biting their tongue against suggesting "four a.m." There's something about pilots and black humour. Our transport is a convoy of vans because the rural roads aren't suitable for a bus. Our drivers are here punctually and sort themselves out in the narrow street for boarding. They made a fuss about "our cars aren't like your cars" and "our roads aren't like your roads" in telling us how long it would take to get to the build site, but honestly I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if the same fleet of used but serviceable passenger vans came to take us to a Canadian farm. Most seats even had seatbelts. We have a further briefing reminding us not to touch the children, and don't compliment people's children either. They don't say why. Either it's more fear that we want to take them, or it's a society where so many children die young that it's bad luck to draw attention to their merits, lest the gods take them back for their own. I'm kind of lost for a way to make contact with a person with whom I share almost no language or culture. Can I admire their cows?

We drive off through some poorer areas of the city, and then through increasingly rural communities. It's really difficult to take pictures through the windows of a moving vehicle and impossible not to want to record some of the things we are seeing. All manner of goods are being transported by bicycle. There was a pair of yoked oxen pulling a large cart all hung with different sorts of reddish pottery. I recognized the same kind of platter we'd had our fish served on at the sitting-on-floor restaurant, for example. I can imagine that that identical scene, the oxen, the wooden yoke, the cart and the pottery being sold has repeated for a thousand, maybe two thousand years here. Could be more. Pottery has been made for millenia, and the skill probably came here with the initial human migration to the area? Domesticate the ox? Ditto. Manufacture wheeled vehicles? The same. I love doing things, even the simplest things like running barefoot, kneading bread, or seeing an ox cart laden with pottery, that have been done since before recorded history.

After an hour or so we turn off of paved roads onto a red dirt road. The clay won't need to come far. There's a busy and extremely interesting-looking market right at the corner of the paved road and the dirt one. It's the intersection of the things the people who come down the dirt road produce and the goods that they want to take home with them. We also pass a pony pulling a cart on which there is a dead cow. I wonder what the story is there. I would expect that you would walk a cow to slaughter, and that if a cow died in the field you would butcher it there, or burn or bury it there if the meat were considered unusable.

There are houses and people all along the dirt road. Some of the houses are very simple, at ground level and made of palm fronds and bamboo. Others are more elaborate than the ones we will be building, same style in that they are up on stilts, but larger and with fancy metal railings and painted shutters. I doubt anyone has plumbing. The road is crazy with potholes, but our driver is very skilled at going around them without excessive swerving or braking. In fact, Cambodians in general drive well. No road rage, sensible speeds, and excellent maneuvering in difficult conditions. I can't speak for their adherence to vehicle regulations, because I can't be sure there are any. Certainly there are no rules forbidding four people and a live chicken on the same motorbike.

We pass some flags in a field which someone says mark it as a minefield. There are chickens running around loose everywhere, chickens with longer legs and thinner breasts than the ones at home. The cows are quite a different breed, too. One person on the bus calls them water buffalo, but I know what a water buffalo looks like and these are Asian cows, they look like the ones that wander around India. Other people think the cows and dogs are abused because you can see their ribs, but they look healthy to me. The dead one back on the horse cart even had some meat on it. You can see my ribs and I'm not in any way starving. North Americans have become used to the shape of overfed animals, and of course these animals have much thinner coats than the ones that stand around in Canadian winters. These ones are all either yoked, tethered, or being tended by children with sticks, and the latter two sorts are all languidly eating what looks like lush vegetation. They don't have to get through a cold winter, either.

The van stops. We're here. We get out, surrounded by curious Khmer people, giving us just enough room to follow the Tabitha leader to our marshalling point, while they watch us. I give the "jum reap sur" greeting I've been taught and it is returned, but the experience is more like waving to the crowd than meeting a group of people. There are no introductions. Nari shows us where to put our belongings. It's a low platform made of strips of bamboo nailed to a wooden frame and covered with a mat. There is also a cooler full of water on he ground there, several more cases of water, plus there are hammers are on another table. By the time we can put down our bags and pick up hammers, we're being divided into subteams and led along the paths in the village to the homes that need completing. I say 'completing' because to ensure the project can be completed and for everyone's safety, local contractors have already poured the foundation, erected a frame, put on the roof and laid the floorboards in place. We climb up the wooden ladder and Nari tells us to put two nails in each floorboard at each point that it crosses a joist. She also tells us how to put the walls on, but I didn't do walls until later in the day, so I'll describe that later. Three or four of our six people put on our work gloves and start nailing floorboards down.

I wanted to take a picture of the frame when we began, and of all the building materials you bought, but I didn't want to lag behind and miss out on the instructions that were being given inside. Then once the instructions were given, it was just "go!" I'll take a "before" picture at the next house. We want to get this done and there have been warnings that the work is very difficult. I'm following one board across the house, driving two nails, shuffling backwards to the next joist, and driving two more. I put in about ten nails, straight and true, one after another. I'm setting them with a couple of taps, then using a goofy two handed hammer technique, because if I'm going to do this all day and all the next, a little girlishness is a cheap price to pay for a functional wrist tomorrow. I'm starting to think this will be pretty easy. The next nail bends. I pull it out and try again with a new nail. It goes in a little further, then also bends. I straighten it out and that works for a moment but now the head is bent and I can't hit it straight. I try a third, and bending that makes it three in a row. What the hell? Is my wrist worn out already? There's not a knot here, and the joist seems normal, too. I skip that joist and move on. The next nail goes in properly. The next one I notice before I start driving it has a manufacturing defect, a tail deformity. I knew in advance that the made in Cambodia nails were going to be a little less predictable that the ones I'm used to, but I consider these building materials to be something you have given me to accomplish a mission, and I want to use them well. I select a healthier-looking nail and drive it in. I try counting blows per nail, but I can only count to ten in Khmer, and sometimes it takes twenty hammer blows to get a nail in. Sometimes I hit the nail and it feels like I'm trying to drive it into an engine block. There's just no progress into the wood. I hold it with my pliers and bang and bang on it until it finally succumbs. Yeah, that seems pretty damned wimpy to me, too. I seem to remember that if I hold a hammer right, the nail should be flush in three or four blows. As I clean up my bent nails I realize that as a group we are producing a lot of bent nails. It's not just me. Others have hit the same almost-impossibly-hard spots, too. I had to wait until the the van ride back to figure out why it was so hard to drive a simple nail, but I'll let you in on it now. The boards are made of mahogany. Tropical hardwoods are hard.

I am being extra careful to get the nails all the way down. It's better to leave a hammer imprint around the head of the nail than to have any metal sticking up. Sure it seems like I'm building a tree house, but people's babies are going to be crawling around up here. Babies will probably be born in here. I don't want there to be anything poking up that could hurt someone, or even damage their carefully made bamboo mats.

It seems like a lot longer than twenty minutes before someone calls "water break." We've made good progress, though. The floor is at least half-nailed and the walls are up maybe a quarter of the way around. We guzzle some water and get back to work. There are a few really tough spots in the floor, like the one where I bent three nails, but we get two nails into every joist, and figure out ways to nail down the boards at the tricky corners, where the joist stops a little short of the concrete post or a nail has to go diagonally to hit wood. When the area that still needs nails is smaller than the hands and knees footprint of the number of people we have working on it, I go outside and see if the wall-nailing people need help. They have it under control and don't want to swap out, so I declare that I'm taking a photo break, and no one objects.

There are three mothers with children sitting in the shade of a palm-frond house quite close to the one we are building. I greet them in Khmer and receive the same greeting in return, then hold up my camera and say djaa?. That means "yes" said by a woman. The phrase for "may I please take your photograph?" was really long and I haven't memorized it. The women smile and have the children to look at me and smile. I photograph the first pair and then the mother urges the child to come up and look at the photo on the camera. Mom has seen this before. The first girl seems pleased with her picture, but the second child expresses discomfort when I raise the camera, so I don't take her picture, just lower the camera and say "okay, no picture." I try to talk to them, using the tiny number of useful words my guidebook has given me for this situation. I look at the construction of the existing house. It may not be as sturdy, but the construction has required far more skill. I try to ask if who made it, and only get across that I am interested in it. I understand from them that it is not so good when the rains come.

The wall-builders still don't want a substitute, so I nominate myself to go and get more water for the group. As I walk back with the water I notice a lot of plastic garbage on the ground, so I make that my next task. I find an extra plastic bag on our stuff-platform and start picking up trash around our house and around the village. Where did all this stuff come from? I don't think these people are using hair conditioner and contact lens solution, nor eating Chinese-branded junk food and candies in plastic and foil wrappers. My trash collection route passes by another house, in the same almost-completed condition as ours. The group leader is working on that one. I ask him if he knows where the plastic comes from and he doesn't. "Maybe they go through someone else's garbage looking for things they can use?" The villagers see me collecting the trash. I wonder if they think I'm taking it because I want to keep it, or if they appreciate that I am cleaning up. While I'm picking up the trash I step onto a grassy area between the road and the fence and then I realize what I haven't been doing. Mines! I told myself before I came that I would not step anywhere that was not obviously trodden. Obviously this area next to the fence had to have been stepped on when they were building the fence, and I'm sure people and cows step here all the time, it's just that I wasn't thinking about it. It's like when I land and realize that I didn't consciously do the short final check. I put the gear down, I checked it down, but I missed that last little check. No harm done, but if you can miss one check you can miss another. I think about what I'm doing and fill a bag with gum-wrapper-sized bits of plastic, then go to see if another group needs more hammer power.

Everyone has finished their floors by now and several people have splintered off to start floors on other houses. I find one of those houses and join them. As first there is a conflict, because while my original group was nailing all the way along one board, these people are nailing all the way along one joist. I switch to their way and we stop stepping on each other. I did some wall-nailing too, which I'll describe tomorrow. And then someone says it's time for a lunch break.

Lunch was actually the worst part of the trip. Not that there was anything wrong with the bread or with the food chosen by the committee. It was all excellent. It was turning our backs on all these people and eating baguettes and cheese and cured ham and bananas while they watch us. I have a choice between turning my back on them, looking at them and eating in their faces, or not meeting their gaze. They aren't starving. And yes, I understand that if people don't eat white bread and cheese and butter that they will get sick on eating it. But this makes me feel like an alien. The very least I can do to show you that I am a friend is to squat in the dirt next to you and share a meal. Couldn't we bring food we could share? How about if we bring a sack of brown rice and a basket of dried fish and the villagers cook a meal for everyone while we build. Sure it wouldn't be prepared to Canadian Food Safe guidelines but neither are the restaurant meals we get around here. If their water is so bad that it would irreparably harm us to eat rice that had been boiled in it for forty-five minutes, then we're working on the wrong project here. We may be different, but we are the same species. It would not be an impossible task to devise a way that we could all share a meal.

I eat rapidly and then leave the food behind to try to talk and take pictures. Someone has a better phrasebook and manages to ask a woman how many children she has. "Buan." No "braun." Five. That's nice. I guess. Having lots of children is good in this culture, right? Five is lots, right? We don't know. Maybe five is not enough. We all smile happily at having achieved some sort of communication, and the little conversation gets discussed down the line in Khmer for the people who couldn't hear or understand it the first time. I don't know if the hardest part of a conversation is knowing the words, or knowing what words you need. They probably feel the same way about us. And at least we have the context of being able to see pretty much their whole lives in front of us. They have no idea what our lives are like.

These kids were all sitting on a log next to the main track through the village. You can't see it in the picture, but the kid nearest me, has an infected toenail. Even though the living conditions are so different than home for these people, everything is so different that I'm having to consciously hammer it into my own head that this is the Third World. People in the Third World die of simple things like infections. Ergo, this kid sitting right here on this log might die because he kicked a jagged rock and then stepped in cow manure, or whatever kid-normal thing it is that he did. I have a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in my bag over there on that platform, not four metres away. But you don't touch people's kids, so you most certainly don't pour strange foaming stuff over their toes. And disinfectant isn't magic. It's just part of the whole medical apparatus that I have become so accustomed to, I still don't appreciate how much it is lacking here. It's going in about as slowly as those nails into mahogany.

Another floor done and it's only two o' clock. We move on again and have to synchronize nailing systems with another group of people. We're not quite done that on. There's a board that is too close to another one at one end, and partly nailed down, but we managed to work together and lever it away so the boards are not overlapping in the finished floor. That was a good bit of teamwork. By two-thirty they're declaring it time to get back in the bus. "But that wasn't a whole day!" The group leader doesn't want people to get tired and have accidents. We tidy up and get in the vans. Everyone shares the experience of ridiculously hard to hammer wood. Mahogany flooring. Wow. It may not be super straight and some of the nails are bent and then hammered in flat anyway, but do you know anyone with mahogany floors?

The van we're in has worse suspension than the one I rode out. I should have worn a sports bra. We pass a truck laden with women all in matching headscarves, probably coming home from a factory job. It's not so much a truck as a long wooden box with slats across, the women all sitting on the slats, like on the thwarts of a canoe, and the box pulled as a trailer by a motorcycle.

That evening I bought a Khmer phrasebook from a street vendor, and I'll tell you about that, later.

This is a lot of work putting these posts together and I have a lot of things to do, as I imagine many of you do. I'm probably going to take a break from heavy-duty trip-report posts until after Christmas. There will be a few intermediate ones on current affairs and my usual end-of-year topics, then I'll return to the rest of the build and the other parts of the Cambodia trip in the new year.