Arriving in Phnom Penh

Hello Friends and Family,

while I have been able to keep living in the dark ages up to now and have never created a blog in my life so far... these days are over. Here is my first-ever blog.
This year has been exceptional in many ways - one of which for sure is traveling. I spent 6 weeks in April/May in Munich with my parents. Christoph and Lena joined me for 3 of the 6 weeks and attended my old elementary school. After a week in Florida and 4 weeks in Vermont, I am now spending one month in Cambodia with IBM's Corporate Service Corps. The IBM Corporate Service Corps is a program within IBM, where participants travel as a team of roughly 10 people to a developing nation and try to help small businesses improve - well - whatever they need improved.

I arrived in Phnom Penh last Friday, July 8th after what seemed like endless flights through New York and Seoul. Quite amazing is the way visas are issued. You apply upon arrival... basically somebody in a uniform takes your passport away from you and motions you to move on. At the end of a fairly long counter you just wait a little while... and then the guy in uniform at that end starts holding up passports with visas. So you just wait until a passport comes up that you like and take that one. (I decided to stick with my original one.)

The small hotel where we are staying is actually very nice and located downtown, next to the royal palace.... it is called Bhoddi Tree Aram and caters mostly to tourists, but has a very local feel to it. It is also one the many socially responsible enterprises that pop up everywhere here. We had been warned originally that IBM's objective is to have us live "like locals"... which fortunately did not happen as the vast majority of people are still very poor and especially street vendors just lie down on their little sales cart, put up a mosquito net over them and get their rest right at their "work place".

Saturday, 7/9
I woke up early and went or a 6am run. Climate in Cambodia is pretty steady... 80% relative humidity and 30-35 degrees C. All day. Every day. So it does not really matter when you run... but mornings just works out better as there is less traffic. While there is less traffic in the morning, and despite the early hour, there was already a ton of activity in the park around the corner... with dance gymnastics (very popular), badminton, soccer-volleyball, karate, etc... all being played by tons of young and old people.

During the breakfast at the hotel, I got to meet a couple of the IBM team members. Particia from Spain was one of them, and as noone else was ready, we started exploring the city together. We soon discovered a local street market that seemed directly taken from a picture book... buzzing with activity, millions of colors and smells, and every cut of meat imaginable along with live fish hanging out in the open sun...

Mixed with the beauty of the colors, the friendliness of the people, and all the positive impressions, you can't but notice the complete lack of basic infrastructure in this part of the world. No garbage bins - so trash simply goes on the floor, no organized power or telephone system (why would you invest in a landline system, when every person in the country has a 3G mobile phone..). Here is a good example of what the electric system in this country looks like (more about that later):

oh... yes... and they are definitely learning that tourists have money... (at a small temple hill where there was really nothing to see...)

Later during the Saturday I got to meet all my IBM colleagues from around the world. Our team has members from Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Holland (but really French), USA (but really German), Germany (real), Austria and India. Our team at the welcome reception at our hotel:

Sunday, 7/10
Our local contact here (Bruce) organized a van for a morning city tour - to give us some basic directions. One of the places we visited was also the "Killing Fileds of Cheung Ek" - a sad memorial of the times during the Khmer Rouge regime in the 70's. Roughly 20,000 (out of a couple of million) Cambodians have been killed at this particular field - beaten to death with wooden sticks. The feeling there is very much the same as visiting a Nazi concentration camp.

The afternoon program was a little lighter with a visit to the royal palace.. which is really impressive and beautiful.

Dinner this evening provided a typical Cambodian appetizer delicacy... fried Tarantula spiders... they bring you a live one to the table first - which created a lot entertainment from the reaction of some of the female IBMers. If you add enough pepper sauce you kind of get over the spider thing....

The night ended (again) with a few extra beers with my new local best friends Patricia (Spain) and Sarah (Australia, working for the organization that coordinates our Teams activity and trip.)

Monday, 7/11 - Wednesday, 7/13
Well... I guess we did come here for a purpose... so we did have to take a break from sightseeing on Monday morning and start our work assignments. I got placed at a small 27-employee) fruit processing company called "Cambodian Harvest Dried Fruits Co.". They grow mango, and process the mango, we well as several other fruits into dried fruits and marmelade/jam. I have never been a dried fruit or marmelade fan... but have to say that their products are really excellent.... so now I am a fan. The founder of the company is Marion Fromm, an Australian lady, who started the business in order to help landmine victims find jobs and become part of society again. From what I can see - it is a tremendously successful project and I really have to bow my head to Marion's efforts and success.

I was able to accomplish my first work task already on the first day at the job... as the light bulb went out and noone else was tall enough to reach it.

Since then the work has been an exciting trip with surprises and changes at every corner. As one of the goals was to look at energy efficiency and reliability of the drying process, I had to start looking at the electrical system in the building... which was somewhere between shocking and completely insane. The picture below shows a burnt and exposed cable running 16 Amps at 220 Volts - which means only half of the equipment was running at that point in time.... All the things you can do if you just use higher current fuses is quite amazing...

Thursday 7/14
So we finally arrived at today... and I had to stay in the hotel as I am not able to get too far from a toilet bowl... but it is already getting a lot better...
Sorry - no pictures today - in your own interest...