Bump to baby on the beaten expat track
It was a long-overdue trip to escape the ambient noise of Phnom Penh rapidly industrializing. Check out this house!
Our friends moved back to Kampot from the US and built this house. It’s a modernized version of the traditional house, complete with the stilts and architectural elements that make this country so unique (even to the very closely related Thai constructions). [Read more…] about Desperately seeking peace and quiet in Kampot
I’m remembering the floods in 2009 when the cause was hush-hush (it wasn’t the rains)… The dam in Kampot begins operations today. From the comment stream, on Chinese-style development:
seems everything China does is bad and should be criticised by the west.lol it is same in my home country(Cameroon), however most of us Africans know this is just geopolitics and the fact that china threatens the west hegemony and power. Anyway I op the U.S will see reason and accommodate the rise of China, since there is nothing much they can do about this( as the bible says: Kingdom rise, kingdom fall) no matter what u do, u cant change this fact. the earlier the U, S understand this the better. I like and respect the U.S its one of my best countries(values culture and musics etc), but in less than 15years China have built and improve my home country unlike the west(mostly France:former coloniser”) hasn’t done in centuries, and for that I have a profound respect and love for the Chinese. since they treat Africans with dignity and equally, not like the whites who think they are superior. enough said, just hope we don’t witness a second cold war.
via VOA
Seemed like all restaurants we went to in Ratanakiri will serve any and all types of wild-caught meat. The more endangered it is, the greater the demand. But the most creative menu I found was at a restaurant in Kampot, where threatened species each had its own conservation poster hanging on the wall. Diners point at the posters to order that particular meat dish :-\
This 18 year old mother was taking her baby to the health centre. This facility, built just last year with funds from a German NGO (can you tell it’s new?), is relatively far from the primary and secondary roads and can’t be accessed by vehicle. 
This is the main transport option in rural areas. You can’t see the motorbike pulling this remorque (it’s basically a wagon that can hold up to 35 Khmer). It’s a horrible bumpy ride (I feel this way and I’m healthy, imagine a pregnant mother about to deliver riding this contraption up to 15km to get to a skilled birth attendant!).
Development efforts –ours and a host of others working in MCH (Maternal and Child Health)– sadly haven’t sufficiently implemented a continuum of care to respond to this access barrier.
Cambodia had the highest Maternal Mortality Rate (31st highest in the world) in 2000 at 450 deaths/100,000 live births. There was no progress by the Cambodian Demographic Health Survey 2005, when it peaked at 473/100,000. 
Here’s another form of transport, but only if there’s no rush!
