Baby is on board

I am in the middle of writing about my various ex-pat angsts and thought, given that it is going to take me a while to get it all down (!), that I may as well post an article I wrote shortly after I arrived here, which was published in the Telegraph about 14 months ago. This way you have something to read and I can reflect on whether I have got any more used to this life since I wrote this!

Baby is on board
When my husband James announced he had been offered a four-year contract with Oxfam in Cambodia I should have been thrilled. He had spent the past year commuting three hours a day only to be stuck behind a desk in London too far away from the action to do his job properly. He was struggling to make ends meet so that I could enjoy domestic bliss with our 16-month old daughter Jemima and realise my dream of becoming a writer. This was the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to make a difference in a country in desperate need, not to mention the exotic travel and guaranteed sunshine. What was I waiting for? Why, having talked about this for years, was I suddenly so terrified to leave our family and friends? On becoming a mother, my adventurous spirit appears to have got lost deep within my comfort zone – somewhere between our vegetable patch and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. While friends who had grown up overseas reminisced about carefree childhoods, mango trees and bilingual barefooted bliss, I imagined every possible worse scenario.

Jemima would get malaria. The trauma of having no less than ten vaccinations would give her a life-long pathological terror of the doctor’s surgery. The humidity and mosquitoes would make her life a misery. How could she ever play outside? If she didn’t get skin cancer she would certainly be bitten by a poisonous snake, get knocked down by crazy drivers or tread on a landmine. She hates rice!

Jemima didn’t see what the fuss was about. Bubble wrap and parcel tape make great toys. She actually enjoyed her weekly visits to the travel clinic, appearing to thrive on the potent cocktail of viruses swimming around her body. She performed only one silent act of protest. Exhausted after a miserable week of flu, packing and emotional farewells, we woke up late on our last morning to find our daughter was already up and busy. She had decorated herself, the cream curtains, the white doors and the beige carpet with permanent black marker. Was she leaving her scent? We still have no tenants for the house.

Four months have passed since we said goodbye on that freezing day in January and stepped off the plane into the blinding sunshine of steamy Phnom Penh. My friends were right. My daughter is having the time of her life. From the moment she wakes (at dawn with the rest of Phnom Penh and their dogs, cats, and security guards’ morning ablutions) her boundless energy astonishes me. She does not seem to notice the stifling humidity, unlike her increasingly irritable mother. In fact, everything I struggle with here either doesn’t bother her, or worse, positively excites her. Take the cockroach party in the bath on our first night (you could have made a Disney film about them). I screamed; she pushed me aside in her attempt to clamber into the tub.

While I fear for our lives every time we try to dodge the four lanes of meandering traffic (here they drive in both directions up both sides of the street and pavement), Jemima squeals with delight at the motorbikes carrying five children sandwiched between dad at the front and a breastfeeding mum at the back. I feel embarrassingly expat as we travel around in the touristy Tuk Tuk - a sort of carriage towed by a motorbike - Jemima waves, like the Queen, to delighted onlookers.

Does she even notice the poverty? Although we live simply by western standards, in a modest bungalow, without a car, our lives here hardly resemble those of ordinary Cambodians. We can ignore or embrace the real Cambodia as we choose. Some days we help at the orphanage or feed the children at our gates, others we visit the pool, the International playgroup, or stay home under the mango trees.

I wonder when it will dawn on her that she lives a privileged life in a poor and traumatized country, where thousands of children her age live on the streets, vulnerable to unspeakable abuse. She plays with these children, still blissfully unaware of their misfortune (or my desire to bring them all home with us!) When she will start to ask where are their mothers are, or their clothes for that matter? Or why the AIDS orphans she sees every week are older than her but cannot yet walk or talk?

There is one passion Jemima and I both share. Her name is Srey Mach, nanny/cook/cleaner extraordinaire. My refusal to employ household staff (it stank of the worst elements of colonialism) lasted for one long sweaty week of battling with ants, rotting food, ants, dust, ants… I gave in and everybody wins. We can offer someone employment and help with studies and I have more time for Jemima and my work. We get to eat Cambodian fare - Jemima does eat rice after all, though only with hot curry - and the opportunity to practice our spoken Khmer. We also employed Srey Mach’s brother as a night-guard because James travels a lot. Visnar is half my size and sleeps like a log. I hope we never need him! Most importantly, they help us recreate a sense of family that I thought we had lost when we left England.

While to me this all feels like a strange fitful dream that will end any minute, it is Jemima’s home and she is happy. Let’s face it, life here is a lot more interesting than Hampshire, however much I long for some good old English grey sky.
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Ants in my pants

It is bucketing again in Phnom Penh. I can hardly hear myself think above the drumming of rain drops on the roof, water is seeping through the walls and I despair of anything ever drying out in this house. All our clothes smell of mildew and the beds and sofa feel damp and sticky. But! At least it means that I can leave the washing up ‘til tomorrow for a change. The ants won’t be coming in tonight.

At 2am this morning, as I was in the kitchen getting water for Jemima, (yes it does happen often. There is always something. A mosquito biting her; the fan making her cold; the monsters are out in force again, or a ‘sweet bunny’ is licking her toes), I noticed a dying cockroach, on the floor. It was being pulled this way and that by two opposing armies of ants. I was enjoying the spectacle actually, and my own calm air of disdain. For once I had the upper hand. It is a rare thing for me to be able to watch a cockroach suffer. Normally they have me screaming for James and jumping onto the nearest chair.

It was then that I had my brainwave: I will post a blog with a hot tip for protecting one’s children from ants. Yes. Believe it or not there are many places in the world where this piece of advice will be considered very useful to mothers. I have a friend who found ants hurrying into her baby’s mouth as he slept – they love the sweet smell of breast milk.

In our house we have five different kinds of ants. There are the tiny ‘crazy’ ants that wander aimlessly across the walls and floors, in a surprisingly disorganised fashion given that they are ants. More orderly are the big, fat, black ants that form perfect circles around dried up drops of juice on the floor. (Picture a child’s drawing of a very small sun, but with many more rays.) The smaller, thinner ants may look harmless but their bite can hurt for days, whereas the red ant’s sting only hurts for half an hour or so. But most painful of all is the bite of the huge, black, flying ants nesting in Jemima’s mosquito net. Now do you appreciate my obsession? Even as I have been writing this blog James has asked me: "Do you want the apricots sitting out in the kitchen because the ants do?".

I have to say I’m actually learning to live with the little buggers (excuse the pun) – the non-biting ones at least. It is amazing to watch their determined little bodies at work, and their cunning never ceases to amaze me. They have even found a way of getting into the sugar that lives in the shelf of the freezer door, without dying of hyperthermia in the process. They march up the outside wall when it rains, carrying their huge, white eggs away from their flooded, under-ground nests. I’ve given up trying to keep them out of the house. I’ve even got used to them running up and down my arm whenever I am anywhere near food. But when they bite one of my children? Well, that really makes me mad.

So here’s my tip. I have recently learned, thanks to the Phnom Penh playgroup, that ants cannot cross talcum powder or cayenne pepper. On the walls it doesn’t work as they just go higher and higher to avoid it, but on the floor it does the trick nicely. So now, when Bella sits in her bouncy chair, watching me cook, she is safe inside a circle of talcum powder. Jemima and I pour it all over our feet on entering the kitchen.

Be careful though. After letting rip at Jemima last night for scraping it off the floor and putting it inside her sister’s mouth, she responded, confused: “But you do it all the time, Mummy”. It was then that I realised that children do not know the difference between talcum powder and teething powder. But ants do, and that’s what matters.
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