Sanitation Brigade: The Introduction

The last ten days have been jam packed and I mean this in the best possible way.  I’m not going to lie, a good amount of my time spent here is what you would expect; reading, writing, pool, smoothies and occasional forays into the surrounding urban jungle from which I emerge sweating, slightly rattled and bearing hard won bags of tropical fruit (meaning that I bought them in a market where I did the least amount of bartering possible).  However, this past week I had a unique opportunity to expand my expat horizons, upon which I packed up my bag and saddled myself for an adventure.  Little did I know what was in store!  Crocodiles, floating gardens, giant sleeping Buddhas, sacred phalluses, huge toilets, no toilets, bright red bananas, and of course, tons of other fruit, floating houses, temples in jungles…the list goes on.  “What’s this?” you ask.  “Has the Zilla been participating in ritualistic fruit orgies?”  No indeed, friends.  But I did go out into the field with my father and his team of intrepid environmental cohorts.  Armed with clip boards and extensive biological and ecological engineering knowledge and waste water treatment techniques, we set off to the floating village of Prek Toal in Battambang Province.  Actually, I have no background other than what I’ve been exposed to as the daughter of a scientist in ecological engineering and economics.  I didn’t even get to hold a clip board.  But I did get to meet my 2^nd cousin Alexandra and her husband Rick, have some seriously surreal experiences, and watch/kinda sorta (not really) help out my dad.

                I want to share everything that happened, but to do that is going to require a 4 part blog special to which this will be the introduction and I’ll jump into it by laying out a bit of background about my father and what he and his team at Wetlands Work! Ltd are all about…

                Most of my childhood memories of Papa Zilla, when he was not wolfing down a hamburger or exclaiming excitedly about some supposedly rare and fascinating insect species he had stumbled upon and insisted on showing me (and then preserving in the freezer), are of a serious man at a desk covered with manila folders, loose paper and various texts books, all scattered about like offerings to the gods of higher education.  Perhaps absently rubbing a temple and adjusting the thin gold wiring of his glasses while his eyes flicked back and forth over a now monolithic computer screen.  My father’s dissertation took him, and occasionally my mother and I, to all over Southeast Asia.  Often he was there during times when it wasn’t safe to be anybody, let alone a foreigner.  In the 90s, when the Khmer Rouge still operated in scattered pockets, taking pot shots at passing boats from the dense wet foliage of the river banks, my father would travel between two guards commissioned by the UN, armed with AK-47s an rocket propelled grenade launchers, to wade into the wetlands and collect water and plant samples for his work.  His Ph.D. took him my childhood, but when completed, it was a five hundred page tome, intensively thorough and impervious to contradiction or further questioning.  It was the first of such work on the Tonle Sap flood plains and he dedicated it to his only child and daughter.

                In 2006, my father made Cambodia his permanent home, working as a consultant for a conservation agency and establishing Wetlands Work! Ltd in 2010, a social entrepreneurial business dedicated to the preservation of wetlands and their usage in sustainable and affordable waste water treatment.  Wetlands are nature’s water filtration system.  The bacteria that live on the roots eat the potentially dangerous bacteria introduced to bodies of water by human and animal excrement.  For the large populations of people living off the water in Cambodia, who fish, bathe, cook, clean and play in the same water in which they are forced to poop due to a lack of basic infrastructure, safe water is an essential issue.  Higher and condensed population areas + decimation of natural wetlands and ecological systems mean more disease and death, especially among children.  This is the meat Wetlands Work! chews, spits out and presents with a cost effective and minimally maintained solution.

Primary School in the Floating Village

And so, last Thursday (or perhaps it was the Thursday before that) we packed lightly, hopped on a bus to Siem Reap where we then met up with Rick and Alex who had been teaching children English in a nearby village before heading off to the floating village of Prek Toal where a water treatment option was sorely needed.  And thus, epicness ensued…

For more info and updates about cool people doing cool things, here's the link to Wetlands Work! on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/WetlandsWork

Join me next time for Part 1 of 4: Sanitation Brigade; Saving the Wetlands One Shit at a Time!

*There is a prevalent and ritualistic usage of phalluses and vulvas (the carving of which is called a "Yoni") in religious ceremonies among the Khmer.  These structures are called “Lingas” whereby water, after it has been poured on top of the phallus and flowed out through the yoni, is made holy.  In one of the sites in the Angkor Temple complex, on a river bed under the water, are 1000 carvings of lingas, making all the river water that flows over them and downstream sacred.