A big event today and the friends got the daytime  exclusiveness with Sarah, so we organized the family evening and celebrated with a cake, champagne and a very philosophical discussion on…..if we remembered when we turned sixteen?

For Mum it was probably shuttling on a bus between Kikwit, where she was born  and her home in Kinshasa, Zaire. For Dad it was most certainly his blue Honda Amigo II and the liberty of having a mobylette to explore Gent, probably the first secret beers in the pub and earning his first pay as a student worker in the local supermarket as ‘ head of the book department’.

The Korean Salute is a very popular pose for the moment...

Sarah concluded that learning how to drive a car would be something to consider….. beer, supermarket work and bus travels being old fashioned habits…

Mum quickly reminded her of the right she retains as a parent  to decide on everything and today wouldn’t change anything to that. Maxi is always very practical.

Sebastien had left for the beach in Sihanouk and send his sister a facebook message asking her to phone him, so he could wish her a happy birthday..he did not want to use his mobile credit. … a practical man, our son with probably Dutch or  Scottish origins.

Absent and on the beach today but November is his big month with 18 years around the corner.

Kalpana in India wins ‘the perseverance’ price by keeping Sarah awake yesterday until one second past midnight, so she would be the first to convey the birthday wishes.

We just had a look at Sarah’s facebook page with over 100 greetings, we still need to get used to these new media….

Saturday Marc is traveling to Angkor Wat …. so keep on following our postings before our home leave in June.

Click for a larger picture

This Saturday we went to the national museum.  The museum houses one of the world’s largest collections of Khmer art, including sculptural, ceramics, bronzes, and other objects.

Click for a larger picture

The Museum’s collection includes over 14,000 items, from prehistoric times to periods before, during, and after the Khmer Empire, which at its height stretched from Thailand, across present-day Cambodia, to southern Vietnam. So there is much more to Cambodia than the Angkor Wat temple. The Museum buildings, inspired by Khmer temple architecture, were constructed between 1917 and 1924.

During Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-79—devastated all aspects of Cambodian life including the cultural realm. The Museum, along with the rest of Phnom Penh, was evacuated and abandoned.

Click for a larger picture

click for a large picture

The Museum, closed between 1975 and 1979, and was found in disrepair, its roof rotten and home to a vast colony of bats, the garden overgrown, and the collection in disarray, many objects damaged or stolen. The Museum was quickly tidied up and reopened to the public on April 13, 1979. However, many of the Museum’s employees had lost their lives during the Khmer Rouge regime. Nowadays it is a very well organized national treasure, mainly in the open air. We will take you there when you come and visit us.

What else is there to share. Well, Sarah’s booklet on old colonial houses has now been published and copies are for sale….. We shared some pictures of her work in previous postings and have about 30 copies to break even. The booklet has an introductory letter from the UNESCO director……

Marc is back on track and after 5 weeks I am now back in Cambodia after 5 weeks of brain stroke recovery in Belgium. He  still remains with a loss of
sensation in his left arm, but that will not keep him from functioning. The cerebral bleeding is slowly disappearing, but more importantly,
the epilepsy is fully under control. Tentative diagnosis is a cavernoma, or a vascular abnormality of the central nervous system ‘in young men’ ( and that is a Lancet quote). Basically a cluster of abnormal, dilated vessels which ruptures without any reason. Final investigations are planned  in July, back in Belgium, once the bleeding has fully subsided. This is the story in lay terms, but prolonged stress might have facilitated the rupture; and as far as you can trust the doctor’s statistics, it will remain a one off event. After a period of rest, he will continue with a normal life, only with less feeling in his left arm. Maxi is not longer allowed to take him in a Chinese porcelain  shop with narrow corridors
as he  might sweep away all cups and plates on his left without feeling
it, all by all a manageable compromise…..

Some pictures below from Sarah’s maiden dive trip in in Sihanouk ville, but we are still waiting for pictures from Sebastien’s Jungle trek in Thailand…. and pictures from his unique tour in India and Tanzania and pictures from his bicycle race in Angkor Wat and many more…. check out the K650 Ural page also.

Click for a larger picture

Sebastien has become an adventurous explorer. He traveled on his own back to India, to meet with his friends, the Nanda Family, but more importantly to undertake with them a safari in Tanzania. This is the first time he traveled unaccompanied. This was an experience of a lifetime and soon we will get the pictures.In December he completed the Angkor Wat cycling tour, and became so the first of the family to see the temple complex.

The Colonial

Sarah’s time was fully taken by her project. You will remember that she started a booklet to document the colonial houses in Phnom Penh. After weeks of hard work, visiting forgotten parts of Phnom Penh and capturing an impression with the right picture, the booklet is nearly finished.

Mammy’s everlasting manioc leave project has received a new boost. The stems that traveled with us from Zimbabwe and survived India’s acid rain pollution all of a sudden died here in Cambodia. Little did we know that cassava roots are part of the national Cambodian dishes, but the leaves are not used in the kitchen, so mammy kin has found her new project and filled the garden with manioc stems each in their own micro-climate….

Amok Trey

Maxi is picking up a rhythm to manage the ministry of interior. She even followed Khmer cooking classes and learned how to prepare the most popular dish, Amok Trey or catfish covered with kroeung and coconut milk, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed.

Marc’s journey in Cambodia does not leave him without a legacy. He came home yesterday afternoon after nearly a week in the hospital, of which three nights in Intensive Care. He has been blessed with the diagnosis of intracerebral bleeding, a stroke with grand mal seizures and was hospitalized in emergency last Tuesday in a ‘status epilepticus’. The attack was so violent that he was resuscitated after kicking 8 Cambodian nurses and doctors away from his bed and than stopped breathing.

My brain

He woke up 24 hours later, intubated, with all his limbs tied with straps to the bed. For the moment he lost sensation and coordination in his left arm, but all functions will come back with physiotherapy, including this long and tiring update of the blog. Luckily there is no tumor, no meta, no hole in his head. We will keep you posted on this one….

Relaxing in the old colonial Elephant Bar

November was a very busy month which left us very little time to update the Family Blog. Marc was in the hospital for a week and got his belly button removed. A 12 cm incision is all what is left, so his number of overseas abdominal surgeries is starting to add up. His only talking about the quality of Thai nurses now.

Sarah has been working hard on her project to document old French Style colonial buildings in Phnom Penh. She is in the final stages of editing her booklet which will be published before Christmas. To cover the costs, she is selling some of the copies so let us know if you are interested. Maxi and Mum are slowly managing the big house and we finally got a maid to work with us. She is an excellent cook for Cambodian dishes which are low fat, veggie style accompanied by lots of soups. The weather is becoming more pleasant and we can be outside the house in the evening, however friends have warned us that this only lasts for two months, after that we start again with the heat.

Marc has started what he calls ‘a new project’, the restoration of a 1962 Ural motorbike… an opportunity to study Russian mechanics. Have a look at the page.

Both Sarah and Sebastien have done extremely well at school. Today is the end of the term and both came home with a Director’s Award of which only three are given in each year. They are developing as confident teenagers, and enjoying the more relaxed environment of Cambodia. Sebastien is going his own way and carefully selecting his friends in the new school, his popularity indicator is again very high, so high that he received an invitation from his friends to come to India and travel through Tanzania for two weeks, all catered for, an opportunity of a lifetime. He is leaving on Monday and will miss Christmas and New Year. We realize now more then  ever that Kids will soon  start to fly out of the nest which opens a new era in our family life. We have to plan for that.

Mamy observing the Gulf of Thailand

Hi there and many thanks for taking an effort  to visit the site. This month it has been 11 years since I started the pages on the Angelfire Lycos servers… I still keep an opening there, but lost most of my archives. I should work on their recovery one day, but not now….

We are now fully settled in Phnom Penh, right  in the middle of the monsoons… raining, floods, hot and humid… sweating…

Maxi found a big house, I really mean a mansion, a palace with 7 oversized bedrooms. The container with our goodies from India has arrived with a month’s delay after it was send to the wrong destination… oops…yet another bonus point for ‘ Incredible India who was managing the shipment.

Corner of Street Sisowath Quay

Apart from that, there are many small stories to share, but let me start with Sarah’s project. She is doing a documentary on architecture. Phnom Penh’s building development had halted for many years  and only now we see that new big constructions are rising on every street corner, including supermarkets and KFCs. Where we go in town,  we see remnants of  old colonial and post colonial houses and buildings combined with ‘ New Khmer constructions’, a style conceived by a Cambodian student of Le Corbusier, Mr Vann Molyvann. Sarah’s  aim for her school project is to capture this with the eyes of an adolescent and publish a booklet in December. Follow her on Sarah’s project page.

The former house of the Governor of Indochine, .....our place for 4 days

September is also the month of Maxi’s birthday. We still had nothing in the house to organize anything by than, so we decided to head to the coast,  to Kep, the colonial ‘Knokke le Zoute’ of the old Indochina and have 4 days in the relaxing environment of Knai Bang Chatt resort.

The whole resort is made up of eleven rooms that are individually decorated with its own identity and taste. The villas are designed with large terraces open to breathtaking views of the sea and the islands. The surrounding
garden space is perfect for yoga and meditation, Marc’ s cup of tea…. Have a look at the page with the pictures.

At the cross roads of Buddhism and Hinduism

Buying Krabs .....

By the end of October the monsoons will end,  we hope to be able to plan for a family visit to Angkor Wat before the end of the year. We still have a lot to explore and to discover in this country.

Wish you all the best and keep in touch

Wat Phnom Temple with the 5 Buddhas

Life is different from India, actually much different and all in a positive way …….until now. We love to be in the busy streets when cars do not honk like in New Delhi. We occupy a service apartment until a suitable house is found. This is also the right time to discover the capital . Phnom Penh takes its name from the present Wat Phnom (“Hill Temple”). Legend has it that in 1372, an old nun named Lady Penh went to fetch water in the Mekong and found a dead Kukui tree floating down the stream. Inside a hole of the Koki tree were four bronze and one stone Buddha statues. Daun (Grandma) Penh brought the statues ashore and ordered people to pile up earth northeast of her house; she then used the Koki trunks to build a temple on the hill to house the five Buddha statues, and then named the temple after herself as Wat Phnom Daun Penh, which is now known as Wat Phnom, a small hill of 27 meters in height just around the corner from our apartment.

Weekly fish in the market

One place we discovered is the Central Market of Phnom Penh. It is a large market constructed in 1937 in the shape of a dome with four arms branching out into vast hallways with countless stalls of goods. When it first opened, it was said to be the biggest market in Asia. From 2009 to 2011, it underwent a  renovation funded by the French and it realy made a difference. This unique Art Deco building is a Phnom Penh landmark and the place where I bought my 4 kg mussels for a Belgian dish.

Wat Phnom temple, near our place

On our balcony

Delhi is sizzling with a high day temperature. The maximum recorded last week was two degrees above the average at 43 degrees Celsius. The minimum in the morning was 30 degrees Celsius, three degrees above the average for this time of the year, yet we still call the mornings pleasant.

The high humidity level,  recorded at 62 percent added to the weather woes, contributing to an uncomfortably sultry living condition. No respite seems to be in sight as the forecast is for the mercury level to increase further over the next weeks. Our decision to stay here during the summer might come at a high lack of comfort price.

While going through my paper archives, I found back an article published by the Economist Intelligence Unit on: Which is the worst place for foreigners to live in? New Delhi had been rated as the third worst city to live, in a “hardship rating” which dates from way back in 2002. That’s 9 years ago, yet I wonder if things have improved? Last year’s ‘worst city’ survey by Business Week, ranks Mumbai at number 5 followed by New Delhi at number 6 and Chennai stands at number 10. Only a few words by the author on New Delhi in the report, but they are to the point : ….a city with an impossible climate, with high pollution, poor sanitation and a badly build infrastructure, leading to an increased level of disease. No wonder why all of us got Dengue.

It is sad to read that NewsWeek describes Delhi’s sacred Yamuna River as “a putrid ribbon of black sludge” where fecal bacteria concentration is 10,000 over safety limits despite a 15-year program to address the problem of this historical river. Air pollution from the transport system is enormous. Name the pollutant of your choice, we breath them and after 4 years we can claim that we probably have a solid deposit of it in our lungs. The air pollution in New Delhi is rising to such an extent that it is now 2.3 higher than the acceptable levels recommended by WHO. I smile when people in Europe have to close the windows because of the ” fine road dust” while levels here are 30 times higher than the international norms.

What worries us most are the pollutants which we do not see or smell, such as the heavy metals in the water, the uranium and mercury in our vegetables or the arsenic in our fruit.

Namaste…

Last  weekend was filled with again another Regional Track and Field Competition for Sebastien. The school is now part of the  MESAC together with  5 others:  the American Community School, Abu Dhabi ; the American School of Doha, Qatar; The  American School of Dubai Dubai;  The American Academy, Dubai; The Cairo American College, Egypt and the American Embassy School, New Delhi, India. MESAC stands for Middle East South Asia Conference.

The school managed to get hold of a one of the stadia of the Common Wealth Games, the Chattrasal Stadium which was the ideal site for such a great event. However the selection criteria were very strict and few athletes actually made it. Only two age categories are considered and Sebastien competed in the 14-15 age group or the junior varsity.  The name Varsity is a British abbreviation  from ‘University’ and  is the principal team  in a school. Only two boys could participate per age group in only 5 events and Sebastien was one of them.

He was at his best and won medals in his 5 events with a fabulous 200 meter win, which we posted on You Tube.

He came second in the 100 m , in the 400m  and  4  x 100m with a third place in the 4 x 400 meter.  It was a great day.

These were the exact words of the Field and Track coach after the 2011  SAISA track events, we were wondering why he mentioned the ‘Derveeuws’ as a family but we know for sure that Sebastien contributed again to another victory of the American Embassy  School by doing extremely well in all the events he competed in. He came second in the 200 meter Dash, second in the 4×100 m, first in the 4 x 400, an unfortunate but strong 4th place in the 100m dash, 0.01 seconds behind they third and  0.02 seconds behind the second.

He has developed more strength in the last year which resulted in an excellent  2nd place in the 400m dash and a 4th place in the long jump. He contributed 53 points of the overall 93 of the school points in his age group and of the total 326 points for the boys, which put the school as the overall winner of the 3 day competing event.

This year’s results allowed him to be selected for a 6 country track and field event which will take place in two weeks. Only two boys can compete from the school in his age group…

.

.

More to come….

The SAISA track and field competition is also a wonderful opportunity to meet new people. This year we hosted Camie and Shanti from the Overseas School of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Camie is french ( she on sarah’s right side) and Shanti is Dutch ( on Sebastien’s left). They spend the week with us, and if they would have staid one day longer, they would have been part of the family.

.

.

.

.

SAISA schools include the American Embassy School- New Delhi, India (AES), American International School/ Chennai, India (AIS/C), American International School/ Dhaka, Bangaladesh (AIS/D), American School of Bombay, India (ASB), Karachchi American School, Pakistan (KAS), Lahore American School, Pakistan (LAS), The Overseas School of Colombo, Sri Lanka (OSC) and Lincoln School/Kathmandu, Nepal (LS).

A fumin' start Credits Vince BauerMeister Photography vmbfoto.com