Cambodia was hit by typhoon Ketsana this week. While this sounds pretty dramatic, the most that I experienced was a lot of rain. The final two months of monsoon bring a lot of rain already to this region, and the typhoon really dropped a lot of water on an already saturated landscape. The result is flooding, and lots of it. My location in Siem Reap caught the edge of it, but Kampong Thom got the brunt of it. A volunteer told me over the phone yesterday that a tree fell on a house near her village and killed nine people. I read in the Phnom Penh Post how a man fell into a hole on the street in Siem Reap town, where they are doing a lot of repair work, and got sucked into a sewage current. He drowned, and now it is my number one fear when I walk down the street there.
When the rains started on Tuesday night, a lot of water suddenly started coming down at around eleven o’clock at night. The tin roof made a dreadful noise from the water pounding on it, and I had to put in earplugs just to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, it was still raining just as hard. No one was on the road, and I could see that my high school was severely flooded. The rain kept coming all day, which was odd. Normally, the monsoon rains come every afternoon and last for maybe an hour. This was different. The radio was dead, and I did not even know that a typhoon had hit us until my parents called me on the cellphone that night worried about the damage it was causing. When the rain was at its lightest, I rode around the main road and surveyed the damage. The rice fields were all flooded, and children were jumping into gushing streams and currents coming from bubbling culverts. The whole atmosphere rather felt like a snowstorm. People mostly stayed indoors, venturing out under raincoats and umbrellas to the market. I went myself and got soaked buying some eggs, tomatoes, onions, an apple and an orange at the market. The ladies working there seemed to be in good spirits about the turn of events, and no one I met seemed to be in an utter state of despair. I went back to my house, cooked the eggs, toasted some bread over the gas stove, and made myself a sandwich. It was certainly a day for staying inside, making tea, and reading.
The next day was supposed to be the first day of school. While classes certainly did not start, a ceremony was held at the primary school under a light drizzle. At the beginning, the students and teachers walked out and paraded down the street carrying blue and white banners. The students had to walk down past the market and back again, but the teachers and I decided to them do that on their own. We ducked into a nearby restaurant and ordered coffee. When the students came back, we assembled and listened to the district chief give a speech about student behavior, studies, and some other things of which I was vaguely aware of.
Nothing much happened for the rest of week. I came to Siem Reap today to use the Internet and get my bicycle repaired, only to find that the Siem Reap river had burst from its banks and was down flowing swiftly down most of the main streets. In some parts, the water is maybe three feet high I just talked to one of the staff at Common Grounds Café, and apparently the dam that is supposed to be holding back all the water is breaking. If it breaks completely, there could be as much as three meters of water that could come into the town. The rice fields I saw on the way in were completely inundated. I even saw from the national road a boat full of people making their across the fields to their houses. I am even drawing up plans myself to lash my laundry bins together into some kind of makeshift raft so I can visit the school office.
We'll see how this plays out.
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