Went to Group 78 in the afternoon. It is the day before the next deadline brought on by the municipality.
All but 7 families have agreed the compensation and started breaking down their houses for the eventual move.
Unfortunately, I can’t run any of the photos as they are being selected for a slideshow with the Phnom Penh Post. So I have a shot of Rick Valenzuela with his new video kit at the site. Ten minutes later, he fell knee deep into the swamp next to 78.

Rick Valenzuela at Group 78

Just stumbled on this blog and is as classic as Fake Steve Jobs was.
For those who don’t know who Chuck Westfall is, he is Canon’s main media spokesperson for new camera products (thanks Digital Journalist).
FCW really hits the mark on the problems that I see with the Canon brand and its current line of products.
From what I have read, Canon is not too pleased about it:

http://fakechuckwestfall.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/shut-down-notice-from-canon/

Anyhoo, have a read.
http://fakechuckwestfall.wordpress.com/

Fishing again for past stuff to post. This is a view from my office, here in Wat Phnom (Cambodia).

photo

don’t forget to take a look at my other artwork at http://apeirokalia.gfxartist.com/artworks

Taken around the corner from one of the schools in Phnom Penh when all the students were on break.

A schoolgirl takes a break

I just bought a Nokia 1661 after losing my Sony mobile at Preah Vihear last week.
A very basic phone, it has one great feature which is the flashlight. Nice to have when trudging around Phnom Penh after a power cut or just heading down a dodgy alley.
Yesterday I took a photo at a bar just to see how the light looked (though several people have suggested that I should sell the photo to BIC).
Tonight, I used it in conjunction with a gridded Vivitar 283 just behind and to the right of my subject.
What do you think?

Portrait taken using a Nokia 1661

Technically, I took this photo before midnight but the post is a bit late. Have a friend in town. Sorry.
As for the photo, an experiment with the flashlight on my new Nokia phone. Nice controlled light which has some potential for certain lighting situations.

An experiment with my new flashlight

Now who would live in a house like this? The King of mother-lovin' Cambodia, that's who.

One of the first things that we see in Phnom Penh, as we wander along the banks of the Tonlé Sap River, is a young boy catching sparrows. With a snare attached to a long fishing pole he stalks them through the scrubby undergrowth, just a stone’s throw from the Royal Palace. Plucking them deftly one-by-one from the ground, he imprisons them in a cage with dozens of fellow feathered friends.

At first I assume that this must be for food. There’s not much meat on a sparrow, but there do seem to be plenty of desperately poor people in Phnom Penh. But then I start to have doubts: surely that fishing pole could be put to better use in the wide, muddy river that runs through the heart of the capital.

The next day, when visiting the city’s Wat Phnom Pagoda, all becomes clear. A man approaches us outside with a cage of little tweeters and offers to set one free for the sum of $1. “Good luck, good luck” he says. We politely decline. On the steps of the Wat, and all around the city, there are people who probably need a dollar much more than the birds do, and some good luck more than we do too: victims of landmines and war, the disabled, the vulnerable, children. One way or another, poverty is much more visible in Cambodia than in neighbouring Vietnam, the socialist system in the latter providing at least some kind of social safety net.

As we sit in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club later, I get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that we’re back in colonial times. Inside Europeans sit on the balcony sipping drinks and watching the world go by while outside – across the road in fact – poor children sit on the riverbank.

Despite its relative poverty, Phnom Penh is a fascinating place. It’s not the prettiest city in Asia by a long way, but there’s something about it that’s refreshingly down-to-earth and a little bit mysterious too. Go out at night in the city centre and you’ll be faced by an overwhelming darkness and stillness, punctuated here and there by the lights of government buildings and bars catering to foreigners and ex-pats. There are few cars on the road and few people in the street, and this after a decade of huge growth, economically and demographically.

In the mornings, we watched saffron-robed monks walk in small groups from shop to shop to beg for alms. In the cafés nearby we discovered not one but two excellent English language newspapers – The Phnom Penh Post and The Cambodia Daily – and a pretty good French language one – Le Cambodge Soir – too. How these papers are viable in a country of only 15 million people, most of them Khmer speakers, I couldn’t tell you.

The stories printed did not always inspire great faith in the government. In a typical week there was one about the forcible displacement of HIV positive slum-dwellers from the city to a camp in the countryside and another about the government’s angry reaction to a World Wildlife Fund report suggesting that Irrawaddy river dolphins are nearing extinction in Cambodia (the WWF were telling ‘lies’ and the board should resign, the minister responsible said). But they did testify to the freedom of the press in this once rigidly-controlled country. Or at least, to the freedom of the foreign language press, which must have a fairly limited readership.

Some light relief: a monkey scratches himself inappropriately.

Back at Wat Phnom, an elephant was having its afternoon shower and a monkey was scratching itself inappropriately. We’d come here both to climb to the highest point in the city (erm, it’s not very high) and to see where the story of Phnom Penh began. The first pagoda was supposedly built here by one Lady Penh (’Phnom Penh’ means ‘Penh’s hill’) in 1373 to house four golden Buddha statues that she found in a tree that washed ashore from the river. Inside the present day pagoda, at the top of the hill, a glittering and – dare I say it? – slightly gaudy selection of Buddhas sits on a dias, one with an electric space-age halo. The faithful come to pray and leave incense burning before the altar.

Later, we headed to the Central Market (Psar Thmei) for a good nose around the stalls and a bowl of noodle soup, before walking down to the Royal Palace, residence of King Norodom Sihanouk and his family. Much of it is off limits to the public but the bits that we did see, including the famous Silver Pagoda, were impressive, although not exactly restrained in their use of gold and diamonds to coat every available surface.

As a tourist, you can’t walk anywhere in central Phnom Penh without being offered a tuk-tuk ride every two minutes. “Do you want to see The Killing Fields, sir?” is a common refrain shouted by beaming tuk-tuk drivers. To see the horrors of Cambodia’s recent history transformed so quickly into tourist attractions is unsettling, but understandable – this is a poor country after all. As well as the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, 14 kilometres from town, you can also visit the notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 Detention Centre where, under the Khmer Rouge, 12 000 people were tortured before being executed. I didn’t have the inclination or the stomach to go to the place. One hopes that people who do behave as they would at Belsen or Auschwitz.

Indeed it’s strange when travelling around Cambodia to think that anyone you meet who’s over 30 somehow managed to survive that time, when around 1 ½ million people out of a population of 7 million were murdered or died from starvation, slave labour and disease. What’s all the more remarkable is what a friendly, happy bunch of people the Cambodians seem to be today. Almost everywhere we went we were greeted with a wide, warm smile. It seems that the woolly humanist conclusion is the correct one here: when a country has been through so much horror, its people truly appreciate all the things that we rich foreigners take for granted – peace, enough to eat, and a roof over your head.

But I don’t speak Khmer, so I couldn’t say for sure.

]]> http://blindeyeproductions.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/group-78/ Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:16:27 +0000 blindeyeproductions http://blindeyeproductions.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/group-78/

A resident of Group 78 takes apart the tin roof of his house.

Group 78 is a community living on the Bassac riverfront that has been facing eviction since May of last year. It is looking like the evictions will begin sometime next week.
Some of the families have taken payments and have started moving their belonging out of the area but the majority will probably stay to be forcibly removed.

For more information about the evictions, click on the link below:
http://www.apyouth.net/?p=627

Residents of Group 78 move their houses

Discarded wood lays on top of coconut husks in Group 78

Taken during a drive with Rick from the Post to find used computer parts.

Reflections

I spent the past week traveling in Cambodia with my boyfriend, Andy.  We hadn’t seen each other in two months and it was so nice to be together again… somehow, there was so much to talk about and so much life to catch up on even though we had been talking on the phone almost every day.  He’s my best friend– someone that I can be with constantly for days and never get tired of.  It’s comfortable for us to joke and laugh, or to discuss the deeper side of life, or to just be silent and rest in each other’s presence.  And he’s very adventurous and capable, with extremely low standards of what’s bearable or edible, making him the perfect travel companion in the third world.

We made no plans before going except to buy $5 bus tickets from Bangkok to the border the day before we left.  At the border, we had our first experience with corruption and bribes in Cambodian government.   After we successfully escaped the eager-faced men trying to herd us into their travel agency and convince us to pay double for our visa, we made it to the “official” visa window and realized we had forgotten to bring passport photos for our visa.  For a small fee that we haggled out with the border officials, we were able to enter the country anyway.  As soon as we crossed into Cambodia from Thailand, things looked different.  It was insanely hot outside, for one thing, and most people had much darker skin and were wearing scarves or what looked like modified beekeeper hats to keep the sun off of their faces and the dust out of their mouths.  We were immediately accosted by a crowd of taxi drivers rushing toward us and– again– trying to swindle us into tourist-level rates to get to Phnom Penh.  They get treated like trash by most of the foreigners who come through, because their trade is pretty obnoxious.  But I think it’s all in the way you approach them.  They’re so desperate to squeeze money out of you because they’re incredibly poor and have to compete pretty aggressively to get work.  If you’re friendly and respectful with them, they turn out not to be very pushy at all and we were even able to befriend some of them  and they would help us negotiate fair prices with others.  Fortunately, Andy had been here before and knew it was much cheaper to go further in to Si Siphon or some other town and find a way into the capital from there, so we took a free shuttle into the small town square and found a pick-up truck full of Cambodians headed for Battam Bong.  We speak virtually no Khmer at all, and the people in the truck had a comparable grasp of English, but a taxi driver we had been talking with on the shuttle helped us to get a good price.  

We piled into the truck bed with several other farmers at first, but the police quickly pulled the truck over and refused to let the driver go any further with us sitting out back.  The only thing I can figure is that they don’t want anything to happen to tourists in their country, and they unfortunately value our lives more than those of their own people.  We were reluctant to leave the breeze in the back, but the cab was just as exciting.  It was an old Nissan, and really small, but we and our backpacks were sandwiched between a farm woman on one side and a grandmotherly Buddhist nun on the other.  For the first twenty minutes we were in the car, the other four passengers kept asking us questions in Khmer and laughing hysterically at our confused faces and irrelevant English responses.  The grandmother sitting next to (on top of) me had a mole on her wrist that looked like a sixth finger.  At first, she suspiciously pulled on Andy’s blonde leg hair, but it didn’t take her long to rest her arm across my lap and offer us rambutans and a strange, scaly fruit neither of us had ever seen before.  

When we reached Battam Bong, we were dropped off in the town center and began to look for our next ride.  The town was a shambles.  Trash everywhere, run down buildings, hot and dusty.  The usual crowd of taxi drivers literally sprinted towards us yelling, but we were eventually able to find another truck instead.  This was another beat-up Nissan, and it already had furniture tied down to the top of the cab and a completely full bed of vegetables and who knows what else under tarps.  We settled on the price of $5 passage for both of us to the capital, and were told that we’d be leaving in the next hour.   That done, we left our bags on the back of the truck, had lunch at a sidewalk stall nearby, and headed out into the city to look around.  We were both sweating even more profusely than I do in Bangkok, and I was starting to feel the beginning of a light-headed dizziness when the sky darkened suddenly.  The temperature dropped within minutes and a cool breeze came up while we searched around for the market and wondered where anyone in this place got their food from.  In the middle of a roundabout we saw a huge painted statue of an eight-armed Hindu god looking ominous and imposing as it loomed over the traffic, facing into the gathering storm.  We made it back to the covered sidewalk next to the truck just as it began pouring rain.  Thankfully, our driver had covered our bags with a tarp.  It hadn’t stopped raining by our planned departure time, and when it did stop we were told there’d be another hour delay because we were waiting on someone to bring money to buy gasoline.  We watched the men stand around on the sidewalk yelling and joking and playing together like little kids for awhile, wondering when or if we’d be leaving, and then we headed off again and finally found the market.  Again, the place looked trashed– there was a good deal of buying and selling going on, with two floors of clothes and meat and two dirt roads of food on both sides, but there were piles of rotting fruit, vegetables, and other refuse lying around in the dirt everywhere, and it was very dark inside the building.  We bought some fruit for the road and headed back over to the truck, only to find that there was still no sign of leaving.  We sat down again.  It rained more.  We finished our fruit.  Then there was a flurry of activity as the men loaded more hay and vegetables onto the truck and five other Cambodians climbed aboard.  We climbed up with them and made ourselves comfortable sitting amongst the bags and people.  Money was collected from everyone and our departure seemed imminent, but just then two of the men pulled up across the street with rice wine and all the hooligans we’d been hanging out with on the sidewalk (as well as our driver)  piled into that truck bed to smoke and drink together.  A vendor came by and sold us seasoned crickets from a basket on top of her head, and all of us passengers sat around eating bugs and waiting for the boys to finish up their fun.  I shared around some dark chocolate, but after the delicious crickets no one seemed very excited about that.  The men eventually headed back over to the truck and I was relieved to find that we were switching drivers, because the original guy probably weighed all of fifty pounds and had really liked the rice wine.

Finally, three-and-a-half hours after arriving, we set out on the six-hour truck ride.  I was excited.  The weather had cooled off and felt great, we were crowded in with the locals, I felt free being outside unrestrained, and the scenery was beautiful.  There were seven of us sitting on the back, and I kept having to reposition myself every few minutes because it wasn’t a very comfortable set-up, but at least no one had any qualms about personal space.  When it got dark outside, we all tried to spread out and sleep and everyone had legs and arms wedged against them but no one cared.  At one point when the truck stopped on the side of the road and everyone piled out for a bathroom break, I was surprised to see everyone squat down within a few feet of one another.  It’s not like anyone was exposed, but there’s just no expectation of privacy or    space for people there.  Eventually, everyone had been dropped off besides Andy and I, so we were invited into the cab up front just before it started raining again and I drifted off to sleep until we arrived in the city around 1 am.  It had taken us about eighteen hours to get from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, but it only cost us around $10 apiece, and we got to travel in authentic Cambodian style.  

Bleary-eyed, we were dropped off in some nondescript street and hired a motorcycle taxi to take us to a guesthouse where Andy had stayed before.  The place is called Lakeside, but it could just as accurately be called Swampside.  Based on the mysterious rippling and bubbling I saw right outside my door, I’m pretty sure there are swamp monsters living in the muddy arm of the lake that wraps around the roughhewn wooden boardwalk of rooms.  The place wasn’t too clean, but for $4 a night there’s not much ground for complaint.  I was so exhausted that I fell asleep immediately.  Next morning we grabbed more street food for breakfast and borrowed a Cambodian cell phone to call our Cambodian friend, who had expected to meet us the night before.  Within a few seconds of hopping onto another moto taxi to head over to his temple, our driver threw on his screeching brakes.  As we nearly smashed into the back of the car pulling out in front of us I realized that his motorcycle barely HAD brakes.  I tapped him on the shoulder, “Hey man, I think you have problem with your brakes!”  “I know!”  he yelled back over his shoulder.  We just had to laugh.  It was either be amused or be terrified.  Traffic in Phnom Penh makes traffic in Bangkok look sane.  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen– a  streaming mass of criss-crossing motorcycles, cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and the occasional produce wheelbarrow or tractor dragging a two-wheeled platform piled high with people or hardware.  Vehicles play chicken with each other.  People brazenly cruise down the wrong side of the road, amidst oncoming traffic.  And people will carry anything and everything with them on motorcycles– mattresses, sheets of glass, sleeping babies.  The roundabouts are even crazier, and at intersections the few traffic lights that have been installed are a great expression of the Cambodian sense of humor, because no one pays any attention to colored lights in that city.  Another running joke is the fact that foreigners are sporadically held accountable to ethereal traffic laws or even rules that have been made up on the spot to gouge money.  The cops’ pitifully low salary breeds corruption because they have to find their own way to make ends meet.  We would often see them on rural streets collecting “tolls” of their own accord.  And when we rented a motorcycle ourselves, policemen walked out in front of our bike to pull us over at random.  One of them asked to see Andy’s driving license and then pocketed it and threatened to keep the license and the motorbike unless we payed him 40,000 riel ($10).  Andy tried to talk him down, but there were six of them standing there and the guy wasn’t about to budge.  He showed us a thick stack of confiscated licenses from California, Australia, and all over the world to prove that he really would keep it.  He refused to tell us his name or to actually write us a ticket, but he kept yelling “You break Cambodian law Cambodia cop keep license and motorbike!” and growing more and more heated.  We finally paid the bribe and drove off.  I was furious.  It was only $10, but the complete lack of justice made me sick, and I can only imagine how much more serious those infractions of justice must be for impoverished, illiterate locals who don’t even have a foreign embassy on their side.  

When we reached our friend’s temple, it reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of India.  Even this respected religious sight was crumbling, faded, and dirty.  We met him inside and sat talking for awhile in one of the rooms where four monks sleep.  Each of them had decorated the wall behind his bed with pictures and photos.  One of the walls was covered with religious images of the Buddha and sketches of Hindu goddesses; another was covered in pictures of Cambodian beauty queens and girls from fashion magazines.  Our friend is a Buddhist monk who we met while teaching English at Wat Suandok in Chiang Mai last spring.  He graduated this spring, so he’s back in Cambodia biding his time until he figures out a way to pay for further study.  When I left last year, I had never expected to see him again, so we were surprised and happy when we emailed him about our trip and he immediately offered to take us to visit his village.  I remembered him as a very intelligent and ambitious man, but now we found him even more serious than before.  He has heavy things on his mind.  He told us that he doesn’t like going outside of His temple and seeing the suffering of the beggars on the streets, and he doesn’t enjoy going back to his village and seeing the difficult lives of his family, and the lack of education and opportunities for the children there.  It is difficult for him to relate to the people there who are ignorant of the outside world and don’t understand why he stubbornly continues his studies instead of returning to the village to marry and become a rice farmer once more, like all of his other friends who originally became monks with him.  He idolizes education, studying the speeches of American leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, and he dreams of becoming a politician in his own country and improving Cambodia with education, fair democracy, and developing infrastructure.  Right now his future feels very uncertain to him because he is unsure of whether he will be able to pay for graduate study and doesn’t know what to do otherwise.  By the time we left Cambodia, he had firmly decided not to continue as a monk, so that he will have freedom to relate to others like normal people and so that he can work.  The three of us had lunch together and then crowded into a van to head out towards his village.  It was crowded enough, but he told us, “We are very lucky today.  Usually four people on this bench, and more sitting facing us so we all have to sit like this.”  He drew his legs up into a crouching position.  Thank God.  We traveled past endless, flat, vibrantly green rice fields dotted with the palm trees that provide fruit, coconuts, roofs, and lumber for the villagers there.  Every time we stopped, vendors would shove their wares in through the window and if you made the mistake of eye contact with them, they would be convinced that you were going to buy and would keep holding out their dumplings or crickets or boiled bird eggs towards you until the van pulled away.  When we arrived in the “district center” for James’ area– a few palm leaf structures along the side of the dirt road selling fruit and gasoline– we exchanged the van for two motorbike taxis and set off on a narrower dirt road toward the village.  We passed people working ankle-deep in the rice fields with wide straw hats and palm tree houses on stilts, one of which was apparently used as a Viet Cong outpost during the Vietnam war.  Our friend says there are still bomb craters around it.  The vast expanse of the blue sky and the green rice fields was like a two-page spread out of National Geographic.  I had been waiting my whole life to come to a place like that.  And the air felt so clean in contrast to Bangkok’s smoggy, exhaust-filled haze.  The motorbikes dropped us off at the local temple, where many villagers were gathered for an ordination ceremony of novice monks the next day.  Everyone crowded around to stare at us as our friend introduced us to two ancient, potbellied men, one of which was the abbot of the temple and his teacher.  Everyone was smiling broadly so we smiled back.  We were all just standing there staring at each other– there would be a lot of that in the next couple of days– but it didn’t feel awkward.  Our friend then asked if we would like to see some local ruins that were older than Angkok Wat, and we followed him back onto the dirt road.  He looked out across the rice fields and paused for a moment.  “I think, maybe there is not a road.”  We then followed him through a half mile of rice fields, crossing rice canals, sinking into the mud, and wading through water above our knees.  We took off our sandals and went barefoot to keep from getting sucked into the mud.  It was fantastic. We were slipping around and laughing the whole time, trying not to destroy the rice shoots between our toes and trying not to fall in and soak everything we had packed for the next three days.  

After visiting the small ruins, we waded back and walked the rest of the way to our friend’s house.  There were a lot of little children hanging around there with his parents, and none of the boys were wearing any clothing.  Our friend says that in the older generation, boys never wore clothes until they were about fifteen years old (yikes!), but nowadays they can only go around naked until about age ten.  To me it seems like a hygienic nightmare, not to mention that climbing trees and running around that way strikes me as dangerous, but I guess they make it to adulthood alright.  His mom greeted us as we entered the yard: a short, wizened woman with a broad smile full of teeth stained reddish-brown from chewing beetlenuts.  She was very hospitable, but she had a fierce demeanor.  When she saw Andy she spoke very aggressively and slapped him on the arm several times, but she kept smiling the whole time.  Andy and I looked at each other confused, waiting for translation.  She apparently had said that she was glad we had come and that Andy looked exactly the same as Alex (an American friend of ours who had visited the village last year).  It must be the beards and the light eyes.  She then peered up at me with brows knit together and asked me something in Khmer with the same seemingly aggressive tone that was hard for me to decipher.  “She wants to know, if you plan to come to Cambodia, why you have not study Cambodian language already?”  our friend translated.  I really had no answer.  “I wish I had!” I told her.  

She was clearly in control of the household.  She dictated the times we ate and bathed.  Bathing was an interesting phenomenon in the village because there is no running water or private space, and the villagers bathe without removing all of their clothing, so men and women can bathe standing next to one another.  There’s a technique to it obviously, and that technique is a mystery to me, so it was a bit intimidating the first night when she handed me a bathing sarong and sent me around to the side of the house to wash up with the giant jars of water they keep there and a small bucket.  At least the dark was in my favor.  Humorously, several of the women and little girls in the family kept coming over to check on me and give me suggestions.  But the next day she sent me over there during daylight hours while the whole family was sitting together in the shade under the house about twenty feet away, so needless to say I didn’t get as thoroughly clean that time.  My first toilet experience in the village was also supervised.  As there are actually no toilets in the village, people just have to walk out into one of the rice fields to take care of business, and when I asked the mom where this should happen she responded by walking me out to the place and then standing nearby to wait for me.  Ha.   

That evening, our friend took us around from house to house to meet neighbors and relatives, and every time we stopped we drew a crowd of shy but curious onlookers.  Sometimes they would ask questions, but mostly we spent a lot of time laughing and smiling and staring at each other.  There was a tiny seventy-four year old man who was fascinated with Andy’s beard and with the bridge of his nose.  A crowd of children followed us around, and we learned a few Khmer phrases to talk to them a little bit.  We walked out behind the village and tried our hand at helping some of the people in the fields pull up rice shoots to replant, and I got to ride on the back of a water buffalo that was being brought in from the fields for the day.  We also visited a woman in her home who has been sick and unable to walk for several years now.  It was so great to have the opportunity to talk with and pray for her.  I assume she doesn’t know much about Jesus, but she was happy to have us pray to our God for healing and was very grateful afterwards.  She wants very badly to be able to walk, and I hope that God will show Himself to her by doing that.  We’ll see, I guess.  As it started getting dark, we headed back to the house and ate the same food we would have at every meal for the rest of our stay: rice, sticky rice, raw fish with bones, fried salty fish with bones, cucumbers, and clover-like vegetables dipped in thick, fishy soup.  Afterwards, there was thin, salty tea to chase it down.  I’m not a big fan of fish or salt, so I was never excited about eating in the village but I can eat anything to live.  I slept so well that night, for at least eight hours, since there’s no point staying up very late with no electricity.  All of us slept in the same big room.  I woke up a little after sunrise, and everyone had already left the house to go about their daily activities.

It’s funny in Asian culture how big things will happen with no lead-up at all.  Before I had even brushed my teeth or grabbed water, our friend asked if we would like to go see the lake.  We thought it would be a quick walk, but it turned out to be another hike through the rice fields and then through the brush, for over three hours, with our friend playing an odd assortment of Justin Timberlake, Irish boy bands, and Thai love songs from his cell phone the whole time.  On the way back, we stopped at several houses to pay visits to friends and relatives before finally returning to the house for lunch.  We then discovered that the only truck of the day had left at 6 am and we would have to wait until the next day.  Our friend told us it would be absolutely impossible to leave any sooner.  We were disappointed because we had planned to make a night of it in the city for my birthday, so we mentally adjusted ourselves to spending another 24 hours in the village and laid down to take a nap as the oppressive heat of the day set in.  It was so stuffy in that house.  We both fell asleep on and off, but after about an hour we woke up completely drenched in sweat and realized that everyone else was sleeping on palm wood platforms under the house because it was so much cooler down there.  A few minutes after we had joined the others under the house, our friend came into the yard and started packing up his things.  “Some motorcycles are coming in a few minutes.  You should gather your things.”  The motorbikes pulled up almost immediately and, just like that, in five minutes’ time we had said our goodbyes and left.  His mom had been eying my polka dot umbrella most of the day.  Before we left I offered her some food, but she refused it and said something in Khmer.  Our friend laughed as he translated, “She says she doesn’t want that, the only thing she wants is your umbrella.”  Awesome.  So she sat there silently with folded arms until I offered it to her, and then lavishly thanked me and bowed several times in the Khmer style, as though the gift were completely unexpected.  She was a funny lady.  

Back in the city it was pouring rain.  We waited out the rain at another temple with James, then left to find another guesthouse for the night.  For $5, we got a closet-sized room with a tent ceiling, holes in the top half of the only permanent wall, and paper-thin improvised walls on the other sides.  There was no AC, we were next to a noisy lounge, and there was construction going on outside.  We had a good laugh about that and headed out to dinner.  

Since it was my twenty-first birthday, we went out for red wine and chocolate souffle.  We were sitting at an open-air cafe in a touristy part of town along the river, but even there the poverty of the city was inescapable.  A little boy soon came over to our table to sell us books and postcards, and I was reluctant to buy anything because I knew that he wouldn’t keep the money and there was no telling whether this money actually went to pay for his schooling or not.  He spoke great English, and had obviously learned a pity-inspiring routine to use with foreigners, but I think we surprised him by asking his name and just chatting with him for several minutes before finally buying some postcards.  Not five minutes after he left us, another little boy came up selling the same things.  Andy asked him if his mother were nearby and whether we could go meet her.  The kid was really confused at first and kept insisted that his mother had no postcards to sell, but he agreed to wait while we finished our drinks and paid the bill and then took us down the street to meet the rest of his family.  A teenage mom with a drugged infant approached us on the way (just like in Bangkok, the beggars will often drug their children so that they can sleep soundly on the street), so we brought her with us and ended up talking and praying with all of them on the darkened sidewalk there.  Then we took a few of them over to another restaurant nearby to share amok (Cambodia’s signature curry).  As we sat there playing jenga and connect four while our food cooked, we drew the curiosity of the restaurant staff, as well as a throng of other street kids.  It really hit us that there were way more people on that one city block than we could possibly reach out to in a night.  As we left, one of the other street boys who had been watching approached us.  We didn’t give him any money, but when I stooped down and hugged him he literally clung to me.  It made me wonder when he had last been hugged by anyone.  It hadn’t ended up being the night out we had planned, but it was a great birthday nonetheless– God’s presence was with us everywhere we went, and it was incredible to see the effect that encountering that Presence had on people. 

Throughout our stay in the city, God continued to bring people to us.  There was a man named Sot who peddled a tuk tuk alongside us that night for several minutes trying to get us to buy a ride.  We made small talk with him as we went along, and the next day we ran into him again.  He told us that he had no work for a couple days, and that he was sick and hadn’t eaten because he had no money.  We explained that we already had a motorcycle, but he was welcome to come with us to get something to eat.  We sat down with him at a noodle place and talked to him in simple English about Jesus until the food came.  Then we held hands and prayed with him– for healing, for his family, for God’s provision.  When we finished, his eyes were tearing up.  He hugged us both and told us to write down our names for him because he never wanted to forget who we were.  Such a simple act, and less than ten minutes of our time, but Sot was deeply moved by that expression of the love of Christ that was so dramatic in opposition to his daily reality.   

Cambodia is the poorest country I have ever been to.  There are parts of Bangkok that are desperately poor, but those beggars and slums exist alongside world-class shopping malls, hotels, and cinemas.  In Phnom Penh, there is nowhere to get away from the poverty.  Even the most respected temples and the touristy areas are dirty and unkempt.  The entire city looks trashed, as though it was abandoned and then re-inhabited by squatters who haven’t attempted to rebuild or maintain anything.  It reminds me of a war zone.  As a matter of fact, the city WAS evacuated completely by the Khmer Rouge in the ‘70s, and I don’t think it has recovered yet.  The country is still reeling from that brutal regime which sought to completely destroy culture and family life and which succeeded in murdering millions of Cambodia’s most gifted, educated, and intelligent people.  About 45 minutes outside of Phnom Penh by motorbike lies one of the Khmer Rouge killing fields where this genocide was carried out.  There, we walked around an eerily peaceful, shaded field of grassy pits that were once used as mass graves.  In the center of the area is a stupa (a Buddhist monument tower) constructed of human skulls.  We came upon a tree marked as “the magic tree”, once used to suspend a loudspeaker for blaring music to drown out the moaning of victims as they were torturously killed there.  Another was marked as “the killing tree”, which soldiers had thrown children up against until they died.  Nowadays there is a school next to the killing fields, so all the time we were wandering amongst the ghastly pits and trees, we could hear children laughing and playing in the distance.  They sounded like ghosts.  

Within the city itself, there is another school that the Khmer Rouge had turned into an execution camp.  Like the incongruent serenity of the killing fields, the school is especially chilling for its perverse transformation of a safe and innocent place into a site of unspeakable horror.  There are iron bars and razor wire primitively installed on the top of the surrounded wall and over windows.  There, we and some other silent visitors drifted in and out of classrooms– with the chalkboard still hanging on the front wall– that had been converted into torture chambers and holding cells.  Some of the rooms were entirely empty save for a metal frame bed, chains used to fasten prisoners onto it, and a black and white photo on the wall of a mutilated human being who had been tortured on that bed.  The Khmer Rouge were proud of what they did, and they carefully photographed each of their victims twice: the first time on coming to the prison, and the second time as they were dying or had just died after torture.  These sites were disturbing to visit, but I wanted to see them because I know that it is impossible to understand contemporary Cambodia apart from understanding the recent violence it suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. 

We stopped by our friend’s temple again that afternoon to say goodbye.  He had spent the day sleeping and thinking, oppressed again by the heaviness of his thoughts and the uncertainty of his future.  We had talked with him over the past couple of days about God’s character as a Father and about the hope that He brings, but he had seemed very closed off.  Now we spoke frankly with him about the futility of education and democracy as an end in themselves.  We told him that these things had not eliminated homelessness or suffering in America, and that Cambodia needs God’s power to bring a deeper, spiritual solution if things are ever going to change for the better.  Before we left, we asked if we could pray with him and he surprised us by extending his hand to us.  As a woman, I am never supposed to have physical contact with a monk, so the gesture was dramatic.  We joined hands and prayed for God to give our friend wisdom and to show him the truth.  Afterward he seemed to be thinking again, but he was smiling and more peaceful this time.  We encouraged him to trust that whether or not he is financially able to continue his education, God has a destiny for him and can do incredible things through his life.  He shook both of our hands again before we left.  I am excited to hear how God continues to show himself to  this searching man.  

I’ve already written a novella here but I could go on.  There was so much substance to this trip; so many thoughts and impressions.  I was deeply stirred by Cambodia, and I feel confident that I’m not even close to finished there yet. 

The Bassac River Front was part of an ambitious plan in the 60’s to create a new Phnom Penh and was originally designed as low-cost housing. Inspired by an Algerian housing project by Vladimir Bodiansky and co-designed by Vann Molyvann, it is 300 meters long and comprises of 6 blocks that are separated, yet joined by opened staircases.
Now, the building is left in disarray, occupied by squatters. Pretty soon, it will go the way of other historical buildings in Phnom Penh and will be levelled.

The Building

For those of y’all who don’t know, one of the main reasons we’re going to Cambodia is to work at an orphanage for a week or so. I’m excited to visit Angkor Wat, but I’m ecstatic at the thought of getting off the tourist trail to work with people. We’ve been planning this part of the trip for quite sometime, but for a while there, we were both wondering if it would all come together. It’s a little difficult with the language barrier and our undefined and often loopy itinerary.Well, we finally had a breakthrough this morning. After emailing the Director of The Light House Orphanage last week, I had all but forgotten about it until I received an email this morning letting me know we could come anytime and they would help us find nearby accomodation for the week.

Yes. One less thing to worry about and one more to look forward to.

One year ago, UNESCO recognized Preah Vihear as a World Heritage Site. Around 11AM, schools let out their students to celebrate the ruling.

University students celebrate the first anniversary of Preah Vihear Temple being listed as a World Heritage Site

It was a tiring day.

Monk at Mobitel.

Check out the tattoo on his left hand.

A monk at Mobitel

Ruas de Phnom Penh

Gente, esses foram os templos que mais gostei, mas é claro que vimos vários, pois fizemos em dois dias. Têm alguns mais distantes que vc tem que negociar com o tuktuk o valor, mas chegou uma hora que eu já estava começando a achar que tudo era igual, então, não rolou o terceiro dia.

Pagamos $5 por uma passagem de ônibus para Phnom Penh. Não vimos classe, nada, pegamos mesmo a primeira opção às 8h30 da matina para chegar à capital. Nossa, até chegar na rodoviária, que fica no meio do nada, trocamos duas vezes de ônibus. Apesar de vc ter número marcado na cadeira, ninguém quer saber.

As estradas não são tão ruins, apesar do motorista não tirar o dedo da buzina. Nunca vi nada parecido! Os caras até para ultrapassar outro carro tem que buzinar. Chegamos em Phnom Penh às 15h15. Não sei pq, mas no meio do caminho já estávamos tão cansados do Camboja que decidimos ir direto para Ho Chi Minh (Saigon).

Só que o último ônibus que cruzava a fronteira com Vietnam saia às 15h e, perdermos. No início ficamos P da vida, mas depois decidimos relaxar e dar uma volta na cidade.

Achei Phnom Penh feia, muito feia. Tem gente que odeia La Paz, mas eu achei uma maravilha perto da capital do Camboja. O único prédio bonito era o do palácio real.
Aliás, o atual rei é Norodom Sihamon, que foi nomeado após sei pai, Norodom Sihanouk, abdicar do trono, alegando problemas de saúde, em 2004. Atualmente ele mora na China com sua esposa.

Confesso que me decepcionei um pouco com o Cambodia. Sei lá, as pessoas tentam tirar dinheiro de vc a qq preço. Se tivesse que refazer a minha viagem com certeza eu faria o possível para chegar de avião em Siem Riep, visitar os templos e tchau. De qq maneira, eu não me arrependo de ter ido, isso nunca.

My rendition of what i was in early 2009

I guess I have finally succumbed to the ever growing need for public blogs.

The drawing above is a little doodle I made of myself. It’s not really precise but it’ll have to do for now.

I’m not a big fan of blogs, and seldom have anything interesting to write anyway, but I want to start uploading my illustrations and doodles to a free site that unfortunately does not do direct uploads… So wordpress is my storage unit for posting at http://apeirokalia.gfxartist.com/artworks

Enjoy…

THE KILLING FIELDS: I watched the film ‘The Killing Fields’ a few years ago and yes it was chilling but there’s nothing quite like visiting them just outside Phnom Penh in Cambodia itself. The ‘Killing Fields’ are ironically beautiful and it is hard to imagine the suffering that happened here. It looked like a garden alongside a river with shady trees. As we walked in, the first thing we saw was a tower of skulls. There were so many, it was sickening. We saw the point at which the blindfolded, silent prisoners were delivered in a truck to be killed before being dumped in mass graves. Babies and children were unceremoniously taken by their feet and bashed against ‘the killing tree’ in order to save precious bullets. Men and women were beaten to death, some had their heads slammed into walls to finish them off. Another tree had a loudspeaker hanging from it which would make loud noises to drown out the screams of these innocent victims. Walking around the many mass graves, the extent of Pol Pot’s insanity truly sank in. There was worse to come.

TUOL SLENG: We made our way to the ‘Tuol Sleng’ Museum where prisoners were kept and tortured before being driven to the Killing Fields to be killed. Many died in the prison. This place was so sick. Previously a high school, it was converted to a prison where people lived chained to a single bed and whipped, dunked in water and submitted to every other type of torture. Each prisoner had a mug shot taken before they were killed and these were displayed. The old men, with their heads hung in defeat and the children, with confusion on their faces broke my heart. It was all too much and not long before tears were running down my face. The fact that the UN did not recognise the new government after Pol Pot until 1991, almost 10 years after the Pol Pot (official) government was overthrown is unbelieveable. Thank god these disgusting animals, who inflicted so much pain, are finally being put to trial although many have died already before justice could be done.