fried frog with lemongrass stuffing: C+

Something I definitely need to do more of here is to try the street food! In between surveys today, we stopped at a roadside stand because the fried frogs caught my coworkers' attention. Above, Cha'riya, a member of the survey team, displays her street food. Below is the full stall. You can see pig's ears, fried frogs with lemongrass stuffing on skewers, assorted fish and pickled things. I tried the frogs, and they weren't bad, but the stuffing was definitely the highlight. Earlier that day, I did get what looked and tasted like small waffles from a street vendor - all they needed was some blueberries or strawberries and I would've been in heaven! And three small waffles only cost about 12 cents. I think the frogs cost a bit more, something like a whole quarter!

bai: kind of a big deal

Worldwide, rice is the most important crop for human consumption. It seems as though calling rice ("bai" in Khmer) the staple food here in Cambodia is an understatement. As in many countries where it has been cultivated for centuries, rice has invaded the culture and the language here. The word for kitchen literally translates to "rice house;" breakfast, lunch and dinner are morning, noon and night rice. More than half of Cambodians are farmers; almost all of them grow primarily rice. Rice is grown by flooding the plot during planting, and below are some photos of harvesting. It's a muddy job, requiring strong arms for pulling the plant and a knife to chop off the stalks, which I believe are used to feed livestock during the hot season. As the workers pulled up the rice plants, flying insects crowded the air in search of new swampy homes.

The point of the last picture is just that woman's smile, and the mesh tank top her baby is wearing - not just for 80s pop singers anymore! She's definitely a rice farmer though, so it's kind of related.

women's work

The photo above is taken from "Women and Work in the Garment Industry," 2006, available here.

According to the World Bank, the garment industry is the main export industry here in Cambodia, representing more than 80% of total exports in 2006. The workers are mostly women from the rural areas, more than 330,000 of them, who send most of their $60-$70/month to their extended families in the provinces. The document "Women and Work in the Garment Industry," published by the World Bank, discusses findings from a study on the situation of garment workers in 2006. Garment work affects health and nutrition, breastfeeding and childcare, personal safety, and creates an environment where sexual harassment is accepted. In order to make more money, many women will work overtime, meaning that they must leave the factory in the evening to walk back to the dormitory, where the women stay because they are away from their families. The study included focus groups of women workers, 9.3% of whom had a close personal friend who had been raped in the previous year. As one woman recounts:

"One worker was raped by 3 men after she left the factory at 8:30pm. She was killed. When this problem occurred, we complained to police, but we have to spend money. Sometimes they release the doer because doer has much money. The factory took no responsibility. One more thing is that we dare not complain because we are shy/feel embarrassed." (Women & Work in the Garment Industry, p. 15)

The document also discusses how such gang rapes are usually committed against sex workers, implying that garment workers are considered low in social standing. Existing labor laws don't seem to be effective or enforced in the garment factories, for example, labor laws state that factories should provide space and one hour of paid breastfeeding time per day, yet only 30% have a nursing room.

Especially after the recent financial crisis, the Cambodian garment industry, as everywhere, has felt pressure to keep prices down, described in the Phnom Penh Post on Wednesday. Unfortunately, there is very little motivation for factory owners, mostly Chinese and Korean businessmen, to enact policies to protect these women on their own. In the Huffington Post yesterday, Jonathan Tasini (Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat from New York) reflected on the growing dissatisfaction with poor treatment of low-paid workers globally. It's clearly a complicated issue, without a clear single solution. However, as Tasini ends his article:

Where this leads is not easy to tell. It is easy to talk about worldwide solidarity - and a whole lot harder to make it happen, because of cultural and language differences, the massive physical distances between one slave-wage haven and another, the inability of the poorest to have enough resources to organize on a daily basis...a whole host of reasons.

But, it is clear-the people have had it. They cannot, and should not, put up with the siphoning of the world's wealth and resources into the hands of a few.

more field notes

While waiting for the surveys to be conducted on Wednesday, the other American intern and I walked around the village in Kampong Chhnang province, in central Cambodia. Pictured, taken with my co-intern's camera: (1) big-footed chicken; (2) how one mother gets two babies to sleep simultaneously, so that she can weave palm baskets in the third hammock; (3) buckethead.

getting out of the office

For the past couple of weeks, I have been designing a set of surveys to be given to the participants in the combined rural agriculture and nutrition program run by the NGO I am with. There are five survey tools: a focus group with women farmers, an interview with village health volunteers who are in charge of nutrition education, an interview with the model farmer in the community, an interview with a community council member, and an interview with half of the women who participate in the focus groups. Even though yesterday was just the field test, and the actual data collection will take a week, it still felt pretty cool to see the participants actually responding to the questions and providing the information that we're looking for. (I know I'm lame!) The interviews and focus groups were conducted simultaneously in Khmer with pen and paper, so I just wandered around and observed. Pictured below: (1) focus group; (2) interview with village health volunteer; (3) a warm cat nap (just for fun!).