“If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know who you are”. This is an old saying that I suppose has been coined by travellers long time ago. The need to keep a link with one own place, to feel roots and identity is in human nature. For some more than others, but it is there. I am thinking about this while in Bangkok, waiting for the taxi to pick us up and […]
So we left Cambodia. In these four years I have often thought about an article I red while I was in the preparation course with DED in Berlin in the summer of 2001. The article was written by an Italian doctor who had worked in Battambang at the hospital of Emergency, an Italian NGO. He wrote about his feeling while sitting at the departure hall of Phnom Penh airport: relief. Relief after the hard work […]
My dear Olga, I am writing this email from Shanghai, in China. Sorry for writing to you in English but I want to post this also in my blog and therefore it must be in a language that also other people can read. Our friends from abroad for example. So this is Shanghai. Someone at the conference I am attending described it as the gateway of China and maybe it is so. This large town […]
Every morning, when I cycle to the office, I cycle along the laterite road on the Stung Sen riverbank. I pass the village; see the women working in the garden and watering the vegetable and plants, pass the kids in school uniform (white shirt and blue shorts) walk to the local elementary school. At the end of the road, just before turning left to pass the bridge on the national road that cuts through Kampong […]
It is nice to be back in Cambodia. Heavy monsoon clouds have greeted us here in Kampong Thom. Warm rain is falling this afternoon, trees are shaking with the wind and the fields have become finally green now that farmers are planting the new rice. At the exit from Pochentong airport yesterday evening the dump warm air filled me its tropical-Asia-flavour. I kind feel at home as here is where we have the house and […]
30 years have passed since the day the North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon marking the end of the America war, as it is called in this part of the world. That event has been remembered in these days with speeches and concerts in Ho Chim Min City (today’s Saigon) and Hanoi. However I believe that with three millions Vietnamese together with fifty-eight thousands Americans who died in that war, there aren’t winners, in a war […]
An Italian journalist who lived for more than twenty years in Asia once wrote that traveling and living abroad makes you tired, it makes you older. After three and half years in Cambodia I start to believe that this is true. I feel a bit tired, though I am not sure I feel older yet. Signs of this tiredness are more evident after a trip to another country, having the opportunity to observe another way […]
Dear all,After a long break,here you are.Again the hot time, it is never cold though, but now it is hot and it is only the end of February the two next months are the real hot season, it is now the fourth hot season for us in Cambodia and maybe the last. Thermometer reached 37 degrees inside the house yesterday. It is a bit like holiday feeling on Saturday afternoon going around in your […]
Today I received an email from a friend from Finland. It was a forwarded message that found its way until my PC here in Kampong Thom, Cambodia click after click, along a strange and unforeseeable sequence of connections. It had an attachment a picture of a young child, of two year of age who has lost his parents in the Tsunami that hit Thailand almost two weeks ago. He has a Scandinavian face, blond hairs, […]
As every year, the beginning of December has brought the International Half Marathon of Angkor here in Cambodia. I decided last year to prepare myself and join for the first time such a run. The concerns were many: the distance, the humidity, getting enough stamina with training, and the early departure time of the run. About three months ago I googled the web searching for sites that helped me to make up a training schedule. Eventually I found one […]