This has been planned for several months now, for whatever reason I’ve neglected to share it here, but I’m traveling to Europe this evening to visit Crystal in Germany. I’ll be there for ten days, long enough to enjoy the visit but not long enough for the stress of expenses to pile up.
Last November, I received a surprise gift from my friends Andrew and Amy, a digital camera. Up until then I had felt the lack of a camera sorely during my time in Cambodia but beyond how enabling it was to have been given one how they gave me the camera really touched me. They utterly deceived me through an ultra-secret conspiracy network which included Carol and Crystal. I say it in that way jokingly, but the moment when Carol, out of the blue, handed me their gift really touched me. It was so unexpected and, at the same time, connected. They knew what I was lacking and they forged the connections to get it to me, without me even suspecting. Being the kind of person I am, I let myself cry about it later when no one else was around.
I already mentioned what happened to that camera… Last month I was either stupid and careless, the victim of someone quickfingered, or both.
Last week Carol gave me an envelope and told me that it had money for me to buy a new camera that she had held a collection for. My friends and coworkers here had donated their money to give to me to replace the camera I lost. I did not handle that moment well. Instead of responding with grace and thanksgiving, I clung to my feelings of shame and self-blame. I lost that gift and I certainly didn’t deserve a second gift. I was caught up in selfishness, defending myself from this outpouring of compassion and goodwill with declarations of how I didn’t deserve it and how others, like Ming Pheap, were in so much more need. Carol responded to this calmly, explaining why she and the others had felt lead to do this and telling me that the choice of what to do now was mine, but that their intention was that I get a new camera. Being the kind of person I am, I let myself cry about it later when no one else was around.
For most of my time in Prey Veng the sight of pumps and cranes loading barges with sand near Neak Leung has been a common one. Dredging the bottom of the Mekong for sand is a profitable business with the rapid construction the region is undergoing and land reclamation projects such as those in Singapore. Last year, sand dredging near Phnom Penh caused the riverbank to collapse claiming over a hundred homes. Following that event, the government began regulating sand dredging and apparently at least some government officials are taking the risk it presents seriously. The sand dredging operations near Neak Leung have picked up considerably over the last few months. Where once there were two or three barges now there are up to a dozen. Last weekend’s Cambodian Daily, which unfortunately lacks an online edition of note, had an article revealing that the company leading this operation has received five orders from the Ministry of Water Resources to stop sand dredging in that area. Certain government officials are, rightly, concerned that continued dredging there will cause the riverbank to collapse claiming homes and damaging national road 11. National road 11 is, incidentally, the primary road to Prey Veng town and runs along the river near the heavily dredged area. Each of these orders have been ignored by the Phal Sareth Import Export Tourism Company which, not surprisingly, is owned by a high-ranking RCAF general and a member of the Prime Minister’s elite “bodyguard unit”. The official spokesman for the company has said that the company will not cease sand dredging until it receives the order to stop dredging directly, which I suspect is a way of saying that they won’t stop until someone in the military rather than the civil government tells them to.
Global Witness’ last report, though more than a bit inflammatory, contains some information on sand dredging. The Phnom Penh Post has an article on a speech the Prime Minister gave warning villagers of further riverbank collapse this wet season. While it is kind to give villagers advance warning this time, it would be kinder to regulate the businesses so that their activities don’t come at the cost of the broader public’s well-being. But then that’s a lesson we still haven’t seemed to learn back home either.
Last Friday the Ketchum family put on a homeschool performance of Paddy’s Picnic, a play built around basic arithmetic. Arriving I was surprised to find myself cast in role of Paddy! It was a fun time but I have to say that King Dominic Divider stole the show!
I guess that it’s only been five months since my friends Andrew and Amy gave me a digital camera. I’d be wanting one since I came to Cambodia and it was one of the few things I requested. It’s really been a blessing, in the short time I had it I estimate that I took around five thousand pictures.
Last weekend, during the national staff retreat to Kompong Som, I took hundreds of pictures of staff, expatriate and national, together. With all of those great people together I managed to get some great pictures. When my battery finally died, I had around 964 pictures on the camera. Not all of those were great pictures of course, some of them were near repeats from when I had been using the Sports setting, but a number of them contained some great memories. I couldn’t recharge it in Kompong Som because of the screwy power system there so I secured it away in my satchel. Dozens of theories have raced through my mind as to how but at some point Sunday Afternoon or Monday Morning it disappeared.
This is a threefold hit for me.
1. I lost a gift from good friends. If I had bought the camera myself I wouldn’t be so shaken up by it, but because it was a gift, one of the few I’ve gotten from friends while here, and because it was given to me in such a special way I’m more personally upset by this.
2. I lost my most reliable means of conveying what life is like here. I can write volumes about Cambodia but I think pictures managed to capture life here better than anything I could write. I’ll be feeling this loss keenly during my upcoming trip to Europe as well.
3. While not as striking as the first two, I lost almost a thousand pictures that I had taken. Many of them were of the families of people I work with and wholesome interactions between national and expatriate staff.
All of that said, I am truly thankful for the people here. So many have been supportive of me in this. I had business in Prey Veng that Monday so I couldn’t stay to search beyond what I did in the morning. Carol called Chy’long herself herself to suggest that he check where I ate breakfast. Chy’long and Amara both called the bus and hotel asking if they had found a camera. Chy’long also checked where I had breakfast. Ming Pheap and Ming Khum both searched the MCC Phnom Penh office and the room where I had stayed Sunday night top to bottom. Ming Pheap called me that evening after work to check up on me. Later, Carol even offered to loan me her camara while I was in Europe, after losing mine I wouldn’t risk hers but the gesture meant a lot. Today, Bud told me about the time during his first term when his camara had been stolen. On top of all of that, the national staff have been very concerned over my loss, which shames me considering how much more advantaged I am than many of them. Ming Pheap, for instance, had her moto stolen two weeks ago and was forced to take a ‘loan’ from her termination benefits. Their concern is at once comforting, humbling, and inspiring.
Trainee tradition is to bring books and abandon them once finished, which can result in some very mind numbing literature, and some classical gems. I discovered Tess sitting on the Thomashof WG bookshelf and helped myself. It is the story of a poor farm girl in the late 1800s, Southern England, who’s father is informed by a clergyman that their family is descended from one of the great family lines. Her parents, taken with the idea, urge her in disasterous directions to try and lay claim to that famous family name and fortune. Throughout the book there is the notion that perhaps there is no fortune in old family names, and perhaps the family has been reduced to peasantry for good reasons.
Most maddening and striking throughout the book is the abhorrant sexism, and use of sex as a weapon against poor Tess. In the last third of the book, when caught at work talking to her wealthy rapist, her boss who is a hard taskmaster with a particular dislike of Tess, reprimands her. Tess takes the reprimand “with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being independent of sex. To have as a master this man of stone, who would have cuffed her if he had dared, was almost a relief after her former experiences” (ch XLVI). When her rapist attempts to defend her from the demanding boss, Tess rebuffs him, claiming of her boss that “He won’t hurt me. He’s not in love with me.”
My every abhorrance of male-female relationships finds voice in these few hundred pages. The use of money and education against ignorance and hope. The plain use of power and position to wear down someone’s moral courage. The use of few responsibilities to stalk someone with many, in order to catch her at her most vulnerable. And then perhaps, though not definitely, the worst of it all is how he blames her for it. “You temptress, Tess, you dear witch of Babylon–I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!” he cries, abandoning his fervant religious reformation. And later, “Of course, you have done nothing except retain your pretty face and shapely figure…you have been the cause of my backsliding, you should be willing to sshare it, and leave that mule you call a husband for ever!” (ch XLVII)
Of course, her rapist is only the most obvious and most openly vile tormenter in her life, and serves his purpose in justifying her character in the very end (*spoiler!!* she kills him! *cheers*). but as reprehensible and evil is her dearly beloved Angel Clare, who despite his own fornications, cannot accept hers and abandons her for nearly a year, a day or so after her wedding. Had he not done so, had he not withdrawn the protection and love he had sworn to her for months on end in relentless wooing, he would not have left her vulnerable in every way to her old tormentor.
So there is my story of Tess. Really, it is a story of a girl who is worn down, like wheat under a grindstone, first by one man, then in a ‘miraculous’ second chance, by another. The second chance might be considered miraculous because she was truly happy to have her commitment to celibacy worn down by a man she loved, but dared not commit to in light of her past. A worthy fear! as it turned out to be the first step in her final years of a miserable and abused life.
One further note: Reading the Brothers Karamazov again alongside Tess, I have been struck anew by the ‘romanticism’ of the time period. Dostoyevsky writes of one character “I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of a strange passion for a gentleman, whom she might easily have married at any moment, invented countless obstacles to their union, and ended ba throwing herself one stormy night into a deep river from a high bank, almost precipice. And so she died, entirely to satisfy her own whim, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. If this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place.” In the case of Tess, when she is being wooed by the man she does love, she lives with 3 other maidens who love him as well. And in their heartbroken sadness, though they never really believed he would choose them, they all fall to pieces when he leaves the farm and they can no longer see him every day. One falls to drinking. One tries to kill herself. One shuts herself in her house indefinitely. All for this “romanticism”, the Jane Austin style longing for the impossible and thinking such feelings require a fulfillment in order to continue living. Its just the opposite of CS Lewis’ good sense idea that it is the longing itself which is beautiful and which appeals, not so much the fulfillment of it. As we know, the mystery adds to the magic of young love, so for these young ladies I suppose the almost impossibility made their attraction (which they call “love”) so much more exciting and consuming. It is exactly the kind of sentiment which had made men over the years (and probably women too), call women things like “daft” and “illogical” and “senseless”. When I look at womenkind as a whole, and see the millions of mothers and sisters and daughters who survive wars, rebuild societies, hold communities together and by a nearly unhuman strength, perservere through horrific events, I wonder what ailment fell upon European women in the late 1800s and early 1900s to diminish these pale beauties to truly useless trophies on a shelf? In such a world, it is perhaps a smaller wonder that Tess succombed, time and again, to the persuasion of her male tormentors.
During my time here in Cambodia, I’ve gone by my middle name, Henry, in Prey Veng. Charles is usually pronounced Chawe here and is easily confused with Cawol. Henry solves both of those problems and it’s actually been quite handy to know how someone knows me simply by what they call me.
This weekend is the national staff retreat to Kompong Som and most of MCC Cambodia’s staff have gathered together. The staff from Prey Veng all know me as Henry but the staff from Phnom Penh know me as Charles.
I overheard Ming Khum, one of the housekeepers from Phnom Penh, talking with Dinh and Chy’long about some conversations she’d had with the Prey Veng staff. Apparently, when they said my name she thought they were saying, “Honey.” She later asked for clarification and found out that they were actually calling me “Henary”. How they laughed.
KARAOKE GIRL, DRIVER ATTACKED WITH ACID
A karaoke girl and a moto taxi driver were severely wounded on Monday in an acid attack on Street 376 in Boeung Keng Kang 3 commune, Chamkarmon district, Phnom Penh. Police identified the victims as Ith Muy Neng, 20, an employee of Zoom Karaoke, and the taxi driver Uon Chanreoun, 44, both residents of BKK3. Police arrested Vichet Chaly, on suspicion of involvement in the attack. The arrested suspect was severely beaten by local residents.
The Cambodia Daily had a more detailed article, though it left out the fact that Vichet Chaly had been beaten, but it is not available online.
Vichet Sothea, twenty-one years old, lived with Ith Muy Neng, twenty years old, for two years but after an argument they separated and she began working at a Karaoke club. She was riding home from that job when her former boyfriend decided to take what a police officer called, “revenge against her beauty.” He threw acid at her and her mototaxi driver, injuring both of them. Her driver, 44 year old Uon Chameorun, sustain serious burns to his back. Ith Muy Neng was able to shield her face from the attack with a purse but sustained burns to her chest, stomach, and thighs. Vichet Sothea then fled the scene with his sixteen year old brother, Vichet Chaly, but another nearby mototaxi driver chased after him and managed to capture Chaly. Chaly is now being held by the police on charges of assisting with the attack while his older brother, Sothea, remains in hiding. Uon Chameorun, the injured mototaxi driver, is asking for public support for the medical bills he is accruing that he cannot afford to pay.
This is a common occurence here in Cambodia and throughout many parts of Asia. While the victims are usually women, men are sometimes targetted and bystanders are injured in almost every attack.
Over the last week, a photographer and writer from A Common Place have been in Cambodia visiting the Takeo project and the Angkearhdei School. They ended up spending the night in Angkearhdei, interviewing villagers and taking many pictures.
It was an interesting experience, I’ve visited the school around thirty times over the last year and a half, but they managed to uncover a lot of things that I didn’t know and, at least once, embarrassed me by finding out that a fact of mine was wrong. Since Dara had to teach in Prey Veng Town in the evening, I ended up translating for a few of the interviews and I was pleasantly surprised by how much Khmer I could still manage several months after ending my regular lessons.
Now I’m looking forward to seeing some of those pictures of Angkearhdei children in a future copy of the magazine.