motorcycles. Monks clad in saffron orange, squinting, without the aid of hat or hair, ride on the back of motorcycles through intersections where five bikes in each direction cross flawlessly, all without stopping. Middle aged white men inhabit the city’s restaurants by day and bar by night, they might not all be sex tourists, but one bad apple, well. Vendors pushing sunglasses, leftover guidebooks, and cigarettes wander unimpeded into sidewalk cafes. Wat Phnom is surrounded by monkeys and the children poking them, I asked a man at in the temple to write it’s name in Khmer script in my temple journal; he desperately tried to escape but managed just fine in the end. The Royal Palace was brilliant, a colonial relic filled with stupas, temples, and a pagoda; lotus stalks surrounding the smooth and painted structures. It has the potential to be a beautiful tropical city, it just isn’t one now. Lush, drooping trees line broad sidewalks, but as of 2007, the sidewalks are stuffed with trash, parked cars, and abandoned piles of junk. May 24. Pursat, Cambodia, a small provincial city sitting on a perpetually muddy river. I’m staying at a Chinese businessman hotel and volunteering at the local environmental NGO as well as an English school in the evening. I just walked into the school at 5:00 pm one day and ten minutes later was teaching a class of a dozen teenagers. It was a loud and hot building, and I had trouble understanding the other teacher’s English when they spoke to me. I visit the home stay of the other volunteers in the town for dinner. They have a large house full of people coming and going, and a few of the daughters speak some English; the mother speaks a few words of French.
May 26. Yesterday at the English school I had them write down their goals for the next ten years; most were jobs, travel, and family, the same goals any group of kids would have. A few wanted to be billionaires, start hospitals, and help the poor (never got that one in Japan). Some of the students are teenage monks; they mentioned mother god helping them study, visiting Angkor Wat, and guiding tourists. The monks are six or seven, at college age a few years older than most of the other kids and sit together like punks in the back of the classroom. The kids say thank you and the girls giggle after every opportunity they have to talk to me. They ask me where I stay, where I eat, and how is the hygiene. At the restaurant I go to for lunch, the juice guy invited me to eat with him, we chewed on a plate of rice and chicken claws and smiled at each other; my ten words of Khmer all but matched his English. Later on, in the internet café, kids sit next to me finishing homework assignments on Word and Excel. At night I went out with two of the other volunteers and we drank palm wine while the bar girl tried helplessly to talk to us in Khmer.
May 28. I went to the village of one of my students, they were a farming family; some neighbors were making rice noodles. The father had a tattoo on his chest dating from Pol Pot; it was a traditional Buddhist mark of good fortune. The family of six has one good motorcycle, the son uses it to go to high school twenty km away. The father wanted me to take the son to America to study. When we started walking around the neighborhood a group of no fewer than eight children started following us. I had dinner that night at the house of a friend and three young women living together; they had photo albums consisting entirely of themselves, I had fun looking at each shot and asking, who’s that? Me. Who’s that? Me. Who’s that? Me! They were fascinated that I was traveling alone and wondered why I came to Cambodia; they seemed truly sad that they couldn’t afford to go anywhere. Travel anywhere, or simply talk about traveling, and a light turns on in people, but there was really something longing in their eyes. It is kind of a mellow, sad envy: they see a foreigner traveling through like it’s a vacation but they’re afraid that they will never have the opportunity to see another country.
May 31. I visited the village of the ecotourism project that the NGO is working on. Rice fields filled all available land, water buffalo mingled among the ditches, and children were working the livestock. All the houses are on stilts, an adaptation for flooding as well as livestock shelter, and many of the houses were only accessible down a narrow motorcycle path. The full onslaught of monsoon is coming soon; the fields are beginning to fill up with water and the rice is only ankle high.
In the morning I went to the monastary where one of the monks who attends my English school lives. We had a little trouble communicating the concept of early morning prayer, so I rode up in the predawn haze at five in the morning, thinking it an appropriate time for some action, only to find that they pray at four am! All the monks are about twenty years old, they study the teachings of Buddhism, then they can become monks and gain a scholarship for general study at a school. I’ve ascertained that it most Buddhist cultures monkship is more of an avenue of youth scholarship than a vehicle of religious devotion. Robes hang outside the dormitories like sheets on a clothesline.
June 2. The people I meet keep asking me about how I feel being in such a different place. On June 1 we went to a local festival for international childrens day (something I had not known), and watched traditional dances with peacocks and fisherman, in additional to seeing a traveling science fair put on by a provincial university. I stayed part of the weekend at a friends house that could have doubled as a supermarket. Dozens of various fruit trees bearing round pomes with hard peels and fleshy seeds surrounded the house, while hundreds of football sized catfish wriggled over each other for scraps of food in a pond. But the most fascinating were the crocodiles, no larger than a dogshed enclosure full of satchels of leathery monsters sunning and snatching at rhodents. The father, a fisheries manager, buys them from fishermen who accidentally catch the baby crocs in their nets. Then he raises them and sells them off to food stores, petting zoos, Chinese collectors, you name it. We went out to a floating village on the Tonle Sap lake, there were hundreds of wooden huts and shops floating in shallow water a few hundred meters from shore. Most were fishermen who either found this life easier than land or couldn’t afford a house on land; women and children passed around the “neighborhood” on canoes and rowboats. We stopped on a friend’s porch and ate bucketfuls of pea sized shrimp, freshly dug out of the muck not far away, in addition to a few quarts of clams roasted on the top of a canoe in the sun.
June 5. I went to the house of one of the teachers from the English school. We drank beer in the afternoon and went swimming in the river; it was just like any afternoon BBQ in any country in the world. We feebly tossed a net into the river a few times, but they said that there are few fish in the river on account of electric shock fishing. The guys made cheers every time they drink and touched each other frequently. The women cooked and disappeared quickly. I went to the host family’s house for dinner and met the daugther’s arranged fiancée, he worked for a tobacco company and asked questions about democracy in America. The other volunteers were out, so I managed to get the family to eat together with me, something that they hadn’t been doing with us before. They eat a bowl of rice before they begin eating the accompanying dishes, and they forsake a perfectly good table to sit on the floor of the front porch. We ate Thai curry (they said it was “Khmer” curry) and watermelon. I went to my friends house one last time, the three young women, and one of them, a tailor, had sewn me a shirt. I almost cried and went to hug her, but she cringed in terror. I regain my pride and give her a thumbs up, and we spend the rest of the night laughing at Khmer music videos.
June 7. Leaving Pursat was sad, all the people I had met wanted to have dinner with me on the last night. Everyone spoke to me with a slight of longing; they thought that I would forget them soon, while they would never have the 
chance to go to the places that I was going to. Volunteering was a mixed bag, I felt kind of useless at the environmental NGO. I didn’t have any great skills that I can contribute, and as soon as I arrived I realized that a few weeks wouldn’t be enough time. I even have some experience with non profits, which made it even more frustrating that I couldn’t be of assistance. One of the other volunteers said that this kind of volunteering was glorified ecotourism, and although he was an arrogant know it all, he might have a point here. I’m 27 years old and I just feel like I haven’t accomplished anything; I haven’t gotten good at many things. I try something for a short time and gain an understanding but don’t truly learn a skill. Plants, GIS, marine biology, teaching, I’m only a novice at all of them. If I can go to the Peace Corps, what will I be able to do (contribute)? Colorado College said that I was learning how to learn; maybe that’s what I’ll do. I’m imagining myself with some NGO in South America, coordinating an environmental education program. We’ll see what happens. Teaching at the school was a lifesaver here, it was a fantastic experience for me and I’m pretty sure that it was a good experience for the students and other teachers as well. Its something I would recommend to anyone traveling, teacher or not. So many volunteer placements are not something that an individual can be squeezed into easily, but teaching English can be. If you find yourself traveling for an extended period of time, just drop in somewhere and ask if they want help, you probably wouldn’t get turned down too often. And if you have any kind of specialty: a nurse, a carpenter, mechanic, or tradesman, skills with computers, grant writing, accounting, anything like that, just pick out a place you want to go, research some organizations, and contact directly. Don’t bother with any of those volunteer placements that pop up in internet ads and charge thousands of dollars: if you have the time, just go to the source and cut out the middleman.
Now I’m in Battangbang, waiting to take a boat across the Tonle Sap to Angkor Wat: the slow route. Battangbang is beautiful, a decent sized city with supple parkland lining the river and wats topping the surrounding hills. I hopped off the bus and a man speaking perfect English caught me and wanted to take me to the Royal hotel. Hey, that’s actually where I was planning on going, so I hopped on. Handing my bag to him as we walked over to his motorcycle, I immediately thought, this is how people get ripped off. But this was Cambodia, a country that treated me perfectly for three weeks, and we zipped off to the hotel. Lets go for a ride, I want to show you some sights, he persuaded me after arriving at the hotel. We cruised around the countryside, he asked me what I was doing here, and we talked about Japan. We had a few laughs about the wonderful women from that great country, and he said he dated a Japanese volunteer for a couple years when she lived there, but then she returned home alone, both of them unable to give up their home. We rode the “bamboo train” back to the city and as I walked off, I thought, he hasn’t asked for any money. How much do you want, I asked. Its up to you, he responded, a phrase I had grown accustomed to hearing in Cambodia. I gave him something, not nearly as much as I should have, and offer this advice to travelers: if you have time to spare in Cambodia, go to Battangbang and look for the guy speaking perfect English who wants to take you on a tour on his moto.
The Royal Hotel was nice, complete with a fine rooftop restaurant, and the next morning rode the boat: it was a little long (3-5 hours) and hot, and seating about a dozen on rough wooden boards, its no cruise ship, but it offers a nice view of life along the lake.
June 14. I met my friends Randy and Allison in Angkor, as well as Mike, Gill, Mark and Megan, and we had a glorious time together. The temples were amazing, mountains of rock risjing from the jungle. The restored temples, meaning the more popular ones, were less like ruins and more like temples, while I really preferred the others, which were more less like temples and more like ruins. You could touch almost everythjing and walk around anywhere, quite a change from my many years with the National Park Service. Our guide told us how the Hinduism and Buddhism basically coalesced at Angor Wat, as the Buddhist gradually took over the temples in the 12th and 13th centuries and replaced most 
of the Hindu deities with their own. I was shocked how much was looted in the wars of the 1970’s and 1980’s. As I child I would gaze at my father’s photos of the wats, he stopped on the way home from Vietnam in 1970. Now in 2007, the same statues were there but missing heads. Even now, understaffed, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been hard to walk off with a few backpacks of artifacts. Returning from the wats to Siam Reap on Sunday evening, we passed by what must have been the whole town, out picnicking in the fields outside the main Angkor Wat. All Cambodians are allowed free access to the temples, and at that moment I could comprehend the support that Khmers have for their historic monuments. Deny locals access to parks and reserves and watch them fail; this was not happening here. I bought postcards from a little girl; I used my ten words of Khmer language and asked her what her name was, she gave a brilliant smile and proudly stated an incomprehensible mix of sharp consonants and soft vowels. A few minutes later she found me again, and running up to me, handed me a bracelet and wished me good luck.
REFLECTIONS on CAMBODIA
Phnom Penh is just a few hours from the coast and the jungle, but ecotourism is still infant and the coast is far from a beach paradise. Angkor Wat, not to mention dozens of fascinating villages, wats, and sights around the Tonle Sap lake are only a few hours north, but a horrible road network makes it difficult for visitors to spend much time on the ground. Seeing Cambodia one must remember that this is a country about ten years old, less than a generation removed from a genocide, civil war, and border war with Vietnam. They have a long way to catch up with their more affluent neighbors, but I truly believe they are on the path. They have a lot of faith in education improving people’s future. Here is an entire generation whose parents knew no school. People would tell me about how there wasn’t enough to eat under Pol Pot, and how he killed all the teachers and educated people. A good friend of mine, a teacher about the same age as me, had five siblings killed by Pol Pot. After Pol Pot, his parents returned to their hometown, and started their life again, having four more children, including my friend. His father died last year of natural causes, and one of his sisters died last year from AIDS. My friend is a lively personality, a fantastic teacher, and an optimistic man.
A British aid worker told me that the aid agencies are like a parallel government in Cambodia. In my short experience, I saw this happening; dozens of organizations and agencies from around the world packing into the few cities in the country, trying to help a broken society back on its feet. Cambodia needs help everywhere: schools, infrastructure, finance, government, the list goes on. NGOs also provide some of the best jobs that educated locals can get, and some that I met gave me an interesting perspective on the influence they receive from different countries. The Chinese just want to come to make a buck on short term businesses, but it is something that the country needs to an extent. Japanese help with projects like roads and bridges, and they offer aid because they have a war guilt (maybe this is where the Japanese war guilt is focused, because it surely isn’t focused towards China, or inwards). America is helpful but they are obsessed with democracy; so much of their aid is linked to democracy benchmarks. The World Bank and company are afraid to fund roads and bridges for suspicious governments because they’ve spent decades propping up murderers while destroying tropical ecosystems with misguided projects. So now this is left largely to China, who is perhaps even more immune to brutal regimes and environmentally damaging projects in the developing world. But China is filling a void, a void left by the west. A middle ground must be sought: development needs roads just as much as it needs democracy, and many countries are teaching the US that prosperity is more important than democracy, notably Iraq and almost all the rest of Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment