The photographers assigned to Tan Tock Seng Hospital (Bryan Van Der Beek, Lance Lee and Ming) have begun their coverage in earnest on Tuesday, after more than a week?s delay.

New cases of infection have slowed down and the paranoia that gripped Singapore has since cooled off with kids returning to school and life coming back on the streets and in public places.

I?m still wary of the virus, taking the necessary precautions while we (family) went out on our first outings in weeks.

Its not been easy for the wife and little one being cooped up at home for a good part of April. I mean, cable TV did get boring after a week.

At least one good thing has come out of the situation. I learnt a whole new set of personal grooming and health care habits?..things that normal human beings do to take care of themselves?..things that I?ve always been too sloppy to care about in the past.

So, out of the window went my last sacred rituals of manhood, with the following major changes:

1. I shampoo my hair daily, sometimes twice a day (I used to do it once every 3 days!),
2. I actually use more soap (OK, pipe down you guys)
3. I now actually cut my nails once a fortnight (good-bye my beautiful long nails)
4. I put on a clean pair of socks everyday (used to stretch each pair for a week or two in the past)
5. I now wash my hands
6. AND I change my underwear??..

My wife couldn?t be a happier woman at these changes that the SARS epidemic has brought about. I felt?..strange?..and clean

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After more than a month in Singapore, I left for Phnom Phen, Cambodia yesterday (yes, I?m writing from Cambodia for this installation). I plan on shooting for a couple of new stories over the weekend before getting down to work for the rest of the week.

I had brought along the Contax G system together with my newly acquired Canon G3 digital camera (with 2 CF cards, a 256mb and a 512mb). The outfit was relatively light and easy on my shoulder.

Pochengtong Airport is now modern and much more efficient from its old self. Arriving on Silkair 602 with a sparse 15 other passengers, it seems that they?re aware of the SARS situation in Singapore and weren?t taking any chances. All the ground crew receiving us were decked out in surgical masks and rubber gloves. The paperwork was more than normal, mostly centering around SARS and health declarations.

It was a furnace when I finally walked out of the terminal building. At 37 degrees C, (it was only 10am) the heat was unbearable and dry. I beat a hasty retreat to the air-conditioned comfort of the hotel and holed up in my room, avoiding the noon-time hellish temperatures until after 3pm.

It began raining at 2pm and the whole of Phnom Phen turned into an overheated Turkish steam bath; the drizzle sizzling the hot roads and roofs.

Friend Adam Gregor dropped by my hotel as scheduled. He?s been in Cambodia for a few months. He?s spent a good deal of his time, living on a farm run by land mine victims and working at an Italian NGO orphanage. He looked physically run down but otherwise in very good spirits.

We headed out to Hun Sen Park and covered the kick-boxing fights that afternoon and I protein-loaded him with an all-meat Korean dinner.

I feel that the body of works for the July exhibition (?My Fists Feed My Family?) was incomplete and the aim here for these couple of days was to add more depth to it.

Rather than picking out the best kick-boxers who won their bouts, I focused on the losers. One guy was knocked out with a vicious kick to the side of his head. No loser is in the mood to talk to a photographer so we waited until they were changed and composed. I managed to get one of them to agree to a shoot and an interview at their home later in the week.

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I miss my family. I really miss Genna. Parting from my little girl is always painful although my trips are normally short. I can still feel her soft breath on my face as I kiss her good-bye early in the morning while she is still sleeping. As I lay in my bed at the hotel at night, I dream of my little flower asking me to tell her the story of ?little princess and the puppy? or ?the 3 little pigs?. In my dreams she?s asking me to play ?party time? or holding my hands asking me to dance or pretend to be a choo-choo train.

I wake up at 3am in the morning, power up my laptop and open up picture files of her that I?d saved for such emergencies?. And spend sometime looking at these family pictures.

She sprouted another 2cm in height over the last month.

End