Cambodia Day 1: Phnom Penh

So post-Cambodian holiday, things are still as sucky. I hate going for interviews, having to explain my ideals to people, and being exasperated their feeble minds are so firmly entrenched in the now and the I that it thoroughly sickens me. But on to happyer things: my trip to Cambodia:

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So the trip started off with a early morning flight to Phnom Penh. I think perhaps the redundancy of army and reservist must be addictive: the first day is always some exceedingly meaningless [relative to the other days, which is also meaningless] series of events collectively known as in-processing, which mostly consists of waiting in bunk in various positions of rest. But when you reach Phnom Penh at 9 am, there's alot of day ahead of you, and I don't think it's wise, or worthwhile, to lull the whole day in the hotel, which, is not the one in the picture above. Our hotel was opposite, and while now quite as big, it looks quite nice. The exterior is not much, but interior is very ethnic + rustic + advant garde. And our room is the deluxe superior room, or as KM puts it, 'the most bottom option'.

So it's almost quite regrettable to leave the cool comfort of the room for the harsh Cambodian sun, and the even harsher tuk tuk touts. The first tuk tuk we hailed quoted 10USD, before we finally whittled it down to 4USD. At our destination, which was quite away from Phnom Penh, no other tuk tuk driver would take us, so we ended up paying the same guy 6USD to get us back [So he got his 10USD in the end]. It's almost blackmail. Going back to the hotel cost another 2USD [from another guy], relatively cheap, but haggling took like almost 15 minutes [tks to KM] and we promised to book the guy the whole of tomorrow.

The couple of places we went to on the first day included the Killing Fields and the S-21 Genocide Museum.

Actually I still cannot make heads or tails on what happened during the Khmer Rouge. In fact, the first time I was here, my friends who showed me around mentioned that many of the younger generation of Cambodians don't believe the genocide ever happened. The Killing Fields is where they supposedly ship people from the S-21 prison to execute them, and it's now open to the public for 2USD per person.


There's a nice nice memorial there now, but I heard long ago, it was just a series of wooden shacks, and a big field where they buried the people in after they killed them. Lonely Planet seems to have a beef with outsourcing, and made several rather derogatory comments about the fact the the Killing Fields have been outsourced to a Japanese company. I'm neutral about outsourcing; afterall, a certain government has proven that you can don't outsource a memorial but they are still not above turning it into a carnival area for commercial convenience and gain.


If you're into a career in forensics, the Killing Field/Cambodia is a good place to start. The Cambodians will not fail to stress how each person died, by looking at the damage done to the skulls. Cracks, holes, dents all have a story of their own to tell, and these stories usually involve clubbing, bashing, a gun, or any combination of them.


This is the tree where they supposedly hung a loudhailer to drown out the sounds of the dying so people around wouldn't know what's going on. I don't really get this part: if you're in absolute power, why the need to hide whatever you are doing.


And here is one of several holes littering the area where they buried their victims after killing them. The holes have all been supposedly exhumed, but the holes remain.


The poster tree of the revolution. So the most famous killing method the Khmer Rouge had was when they smashed the head of a child or baby on the tree, like a baseball bat, and this is the tree where they did it on. Master Sang. 6th Dan Tae Kwan Do has this training protocol where he teaches us to practise kicking by kicking the tree. He advises 'not to harm the tree'. I think he worries unduly.

Next it's off to where it all begun: the S21 prison, entry at 2USD per person where you get to check out the place where prisoners were tortured and interrogated there for about 3 months on average before being sent off to be killed. In many ways, I think the Killing Fields is alot more humane than the prison; you go there and you die, rather than a protracted process of pain and suffering. I didn't take much pictures there, because I think this place has alot more baggage than the Killing Fields, and you never know what you can accidentally capture. So the place used to be a school before being converted to a prison. The first floor was mainly the administrative offices and torture chambers; the prisoners, when not being tortured, were held in either makeshift wooden cells barely a shoulder wide and only almost as long as an average person, or chained up on the floor where they laid side by side with others. Tortures included this gymnastic bar which they used to hang prisoners upside down from, to dunk into this big jar of putrid water, and lots of not so nice things with spikes and sharp edges.

There was a screening of a documentary on the S21 prison at one of the rooms. Not sure if they wanted us to relieve the S21 experience, but the room was dark and sealed up, with only one small fan blowing in the corner. I fell asleep halfway; I awoke to find that half the room was empty.


A word of caution: generally asiarooms.com is a good place for your hotelling needs, but there is a good reason why a hotel is labelled 'hot deal'. Not that our hotel was just beside the S-21, or had bloody gloves in the room, but it was rather far from everything, especially food, and Phnom Penh tuk tuk drivers are persistent blood suckers, although the good thing is we got to see extra extra things, like Cambodia's rendition of Gayworld, as above.


First real meal in Cambodia, and it was not bad. From top, some Cambodian pad thai-y dish, sour soup, and the dish I had: Khmer curry, which was more savory than spicy, because I think their focus seems to be more on the coconut milk.

Cambodia Day 0 and bleeding $$

The S21 prison, now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, was at the center of Khmer Rouge brutality during that dark period. At least 17,000 people went through there, where they were interrogated and tortured over about 2-3 months in very very horrible ways, to get the answers that they were supposed to give, before they were sent off to be executed. The man in charge of this prison, Comrade Duch, is currently on trial for 'crimes against humanity', which is weird because all Duch did was follow the orders given by his superiors [i.e the people who pay him], and he did a damn fine job about it. 17,000 confessions gotten, and corresponding punishment meted out. How more competent can you get. In addition, during his trial, Duch also mentioned that he came up with alot of the tortures that were used in S-21. Wah, the guy also has initiative. Competent, resourceful and obedient. Everything I am not. What more can an employer ask for?

The guy deserves a glowing testimonial.

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Sarcasm aside, not that I don't like Cambodia or travelling, or am not grateful that I get to make the time to travel, this really is quite an awkward time for me. It's like I'm no longer playing on my own terms in too many ways and I always hate that. So I'm still gonna come back unemployed, and half the time I'm there, I'm constantly conscious of my phone, in case any perspective employers call. Makes it worst that I'm on prepaid [because I don't see postpaid making sense when I don't use my phone much and I'm already paying my telco way too much even for the bits that I do use]. and prepaid really sucks when roaming: $6 per call per minute, even if the call is made by some idiotic people, like the 2 idiots from MDIS who called; one to ask about something about my enrollment application which I had already told him face to face to, and the other some bitch probably trying to do her own survey with her own ulterior agenda.

Took Jetstar to Cambodia. I'm quite sure I haven't put on much weight these past months and I swear that the amount of leg space seems to have shrunk. Not sure if it's also a coincidence, but they are offering front row and emergency door seats at an additonal $20, payable on the spot if you so can't tahan. KM suggests next, they'll charge you $5 per every 10 degrees you want your seat to incline by.

Phnom Penh is so not a tourist-friendly or cheap place. The basic demoninator is the USD dollar, so everything is at least SGD$1.50. There's no taxi there, so we have to take the tuk tuk, and agree on a price beforehand. We spent like 13USD on travelling on the first day, and another 16 today. Food costs at least 2-3 USD a meal, and there's like 2-6 USD of admission fees per place we went to, even the temple.

Tomorrow we head to Siem Reap, where already 36 USD for to and fro bus ride, 45 USD for tour guide and admission tickets to the temples there, is already foregone.

miscarried

My friend so nicely put it: it's almost like I suffered a miscarriage.

To put things in perspective on how stuck SGH's HR policy is: it's like I joined Al Quaeda and Osama doesn't think I'm a very good terrorist, and therefore I'm not suitable. Not that Moral = Al Quaeda; my main point is management people aren't necessary there because they deserve it. My take is, from one management to another, you can't start questioning another organization's capability to manage because... Let's just say Moral's management most probably isn't the only unfit one around.

So it's said that I don't 'take my work seriously' so I guess we have to start from the start on what is it exactly I didn't take seriously.

Home Help Service West is a service providing services to elderly who are home-bound, so we send people down to the elderly's house to do stuff for them, which primarily consists five components: daily meal delivery, personal hygiene [2x a week], housekeeping [4x a month], laundry [ad hoc basis; clothes usually collected during meal delivery rounds] and to and fro escort for medical appointments. Of course, Moral doesn't provide such services for free; Moral is able to claim for each service rendered to each client from NCSS, i.e. NCSS subsidizes each client to an amount based on the subsidy they are entitled to, either 75% or 50% of the charge. So Moral graciously absorbs the remaining 25% or 50%, or so my manager led me to believe for the greater part I was there with her incessant whining that the clients need to be grateful because we're making a loss for them blah blah blah; turns out that MCYS foots the portion that NCSS doesn't, this little tidbit coming from my manager's mouth [hope people seeing are seeing a trend now?].

So my job essentially is to decide that someone is crippled enough to be placed on the service, and to assess their financial situation, in what we call 'means-testing', through collecting relevant financial documents like payslips and CPF thingies and then getting the Client's signature [thumbprint more often than not] on both a contract and the means-testing application form. NCSS requires both forms duly signed and filled up, approved by the social worker and the manager, with relevant supporting documents, before it can honour the payment for each client. For some reason, NCSS thinks that only a social worker is qualified enough to do the assessment and means-test.

How do I decide that someone is eligible for the service? Till today, I have no idea. There is simply no clear set of criteria I can work from. NCSS hasn't been that helpful either. My manager? Not social work trained, only notion of assessment is to sound sympathetic when talking about the clients, but dropping them at the slightest excuse. I did do my own research, consulted some journals and textbooks and came up with some forms and criteria, but it's a mixed bag; homebound-ness has a psychological component; the slightest wound can fell some people, while there are those determined few that refuse to let death or disability get in their way of living their lives, which gets tricky because people do make noise when clients are not at home and all.

'People' make noise when some clients are not deservedly 'homebound' by their books. They make noise when clients are feeding our food to the birds and demand I go check it out [like what am I supposed to do? ask the client? stake out?]. They make noise when I reject clients they referred on very valid grounds. Cutting a long story short, no fixed set of criteria, people thinking they know best, manager who doesn't know best.

Essentially, I'm just a glorified signature collector, so that Moral can claim the subsidies from NCSS. It doesn't really make a difference if I'm at the job or not; there can always be someone else more willing to get the signatures everyone seems to want to orgase over.

Intermittently, NCSS asks for statistics, beyond the ones they require every 6 monthly. So the stats are to prove whether the service is working or not. For Home Help, 4 sets of figures are required for every service, and a fifth set where all the services are combined. An example:

For the Meal Delivery Service
1. N [number of people] were referred for the quarter.
2. Of N, N1 were deemed eligible.
3, Of N1, N2 received the service.
4. Of N2, N3 stayed in the community at the end of the quarter.
Therefore, the N3 people are still in the community thanks to Home Help Service.

There was a meeting where NCSS got an expert to come along to discuss about service KPIs. At the table, I mentioned that between [3] and [4] required a considerable leap of faith, which everyone just laughed off. The expert came along, practically mentioned the same thing, albeit less dramatically, and everyone started groveling. So I hope this just goes to shows how meaningless the things NCSS ask for are.

They are even more meaningless considering you have a manager who doesn't know how to produce them, and the reluctant social worker who makes them up.

Towards the end, there was the issue with some old accounts: apparently our auditors [KS Chan] had to audit some collated figures for 2006 [when I wasn't there yet] and the only reference was like reams of reams of paper. Manager got into her usual high-panick-nothing-to-be-done-mode. KS Chan who probably thinks that accountants are god's gift to the world, and that he's god's gift to accountants, decided that the only way was to transfer everything to soft copy [that's like 400 clients x 30 days x 5-6 mths x 5 services] and 'can't we just get more social workers to do it' because god forbid, the accountant actually has to pore through paper work to verify stuff. I think the issue was resolved several temp staff later and some very, ahem, creative accounting.

So can I be forgiven for not taking a job that doesn't take me seriously seriously? A job where I have to learn whatever that needs learning on my own, and make up the rest?

But I do take the job seriously. I take my clients very seriously. And it's very disappointing when I don't seem to see the same seriousness around. I seriously think the service is severely understaffed; we service an area from Redhill/Commonwealth all the way through Chinatown to the Beach Road area. Lunch delivery starts at about 1030 and ends at 1, which is an awfully long time to wait for your food. There was, and still is, abit of an issue with clients living in some areas having to receive both lunch and dinner in one delivery. There's no fruits, or when there is, usually rarely, or when NCSS or some VIP is making a tour, it's usually only bananas. I personally find the food edible, so do most of the clients because they don't have a choice, but it's definitely not worth the $3.50/meal that NCSS subsidizes for each client, and that's the whole shady deal of outsourcing the food to this department called Moral Enterprise, which is very enterprising to say the least. The staff were not trained to escort clients, and quite frequently late for appointments; resulting in some clients actually missing their appointments. There was even the issue of getting clients to fix appointments at nearer hospitals so we didn't have to travel so far. Internal communications was archaic and involved many layers. Housekeeping sessions were random, and the default offered to the clients was 2x/mth [because if you offer 4x a mth and fail to meet that quota, you don't claim a cent at all, unless the client stipulated he/she wanted a lesser frequency].

It's almost like doing Home Help and biting off such a big pie so that you can tell people because we are doing it, like the same way my forms are properly needed so that my manager can sign them because there's really the only bit of managing she manages to do.

fart hard, queef proud

Disclaimer: I've taken to whining here because people just can't seem to get me, or they're more engrossed in their own crummy interests, which is nothing wrong lah, but it would be nice to have had someone who did cared.
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So for those that don't know: my latest attempt at getting gainfully employed has been botched, thanks to my conniving, scummy, petty ex-management [i use the word loosely; they are, in fact the furtherest you can get from management].

Not sure what was in the letter they wrote, but the bits I garnered include 'not taking my work seriously', 'no sense of hierarchy' and also about my reports, or the lack of them.

I'm quite grateful to the MSW head [now ex-head] for doing all that she could, trying to fight for me and all, even calling up my ex-manager to get more details [and I was told that slimy bitch had the cheek to appear all gracious and big-hearted].

I don't regret whatever I did at Moral. It's not difficult to get a good/satisfactory testimonial. But there is nothing respectable about getting a good testimonial from such an organization. I just feel indignant that HR is stuck up enough to disregard the disrepute of Moral, that haggy ex-boss can disregard all the good things I've done or tried to do, and disregard the fact all the obstacles I faced, one of which was herself. If I do regret anything, it's that I stayed too long, probably in hopes that change could come, and I did not demand to be sacked when they told me to go.

Contrary to the common perception, I do have a sense of hierarchy. Top of my hierarchy are the clients, and unlike NCSS or Moral, does not include the need to showboat, the need for the bottomline at considerable client expense, the need for personal comfort and luxury.

There is a notion of hierarchy delineated by someone's seniority, experience and accomplishments, none of which I had first hand encounter with at Moral. The person who hired me was the director for the Tanjong Pagar Family Service Center and he seemed alot more interested in the bottomline of his centre; quite possibly only hiring me so that he could second me out to Home Help, I was told he charged alot more than what I was being paid and classified it as training fee but I only ever saw him like once on a consultancy basis, and I was the one who requested for it because I needed to whine about the job. My own executive director I've heard and personally experienced for myself, is the archetypal model of NATO, more interested in the colour of his hair, and the number of cronies he surrounds himself with. The Chairman and CEO I've heard from at least 3 sources, one of which is the aforementioned ED, are computer idiots who have their emails printed out to them where they probably make their vermilion comments. The fat one is a doctor. I wondering if he's still practicing [Lalala]. My own manager is hardly social work trained and barely competent enough to make managerial decisions; in fact, all the time I was there, I can't seem to recall any decision she has made. I have heard rather good things about the EIPIC centre's executive director and the ED for the Bukit Panjang FSC, who is kinda estranged from Moral because he refuses to 'play' along to the whole culture of pandering which the EDs seem to gleefully indulge in.

I also vaguely realize, there is the notion of hierarchy as delineated by the person who pays you. Considering that the person who pays me doesn't really get the money by productive means, but rather through donations and handouts, I supposed there is an onus to use the money for which it was donated for, in which case, yar, clients at the top of the hierarchy makes sense? There is also the hierarchy that comes with family members, something I experienced way too much of, which seems to be an in-thing in our fine meritocratic country, and which I rather not ever come across again. As the new MCYS ad [which I still think after watching it like 7 times is contrite though the conception is good] says, family is imperfect. So I say, it's best to keep the imperfections within the family?

Yes, I do know about hierarchies.

And I tire. WIll carry on the rest tomorrow.