July 08, 2007
Look Both Ways
I’m never quite sure what wakes me up. Sometimes it’s the traffic, other times it’s the welder across the street. There are even times where going to bed at 10 pm has paid off, and I wake up naturally. However, days only officially start when my alarm buzzes at 7 am. I slip out from under the warm covers and turn off the air-conditioner, open up the sliding doors to my balcony and survey the street below. It still amazes me how early Phnom Penh wakes up – there have been times where I’ve had to leave the house at 5 am for a site visit, and the streets are simply filled with people. Some are shopping, but most are simply going on their morning walks or playing badminton on a patch of grass. Brushing my teeth on the balcony, I have a perfect view of my friend across the road. In her 70’s or 80’s, she exercises in front of her living room window every morning. She flaps her arms like people do in the movies who have lost their balance – it almost looks exaggerated and fake. However, she looks pretty healthy, so maybe I should try it before I knock it. I walk inside – my bedroom is still cool – and put on BBC News while I scrounge around for some cornflakes and milk. I shower. The only small window in the bathroom is about 3 feet away from someone’s house, and so I constantly hear what’s happening. While I don’t speak enough Khmer to fully understand a full conversion, I get if it’s happy banter (dinner time, usually) or brief, anxious orders (around 7.50 am, right when the kids have to go to school). I rarely see my neighbors – I’ll smile to them through my kitchen window while I’m cooking, but that’s about it. I feel as if I know so much and so little about them, and I kind of like it that way.
I leave the apartment just before eight. Sometimes I’ll drive, depending if the driver is there or if I feel like walking. Walking is an adventure, to say the least. I take a right out of the apartment building and find myself in a maze of traffic. I live a block away from a school, so there are constantly kids jumping out of cars with backpacks and kisses from their mothers. I walk by the “karaoke bar” 100 meters down the road. The girls are known as “entertainment workers”, meaning that while they may try to sing (they can rarely carry a tune), it’s just a façade for sex work. While brother-based sex workers almost always use condoms, these girls do not necessarily see themselves as sex workers, and therefore do not insist on 100% condom use.
The cars I can somewhat predict, it’s the motorbikes that come out of nowhere. I cross the street, looking left and right continuously. Pollution can be suffocating – now that the rainy season has come though, things are a bit better. I walk down Street 63 until it meets Sihanouk and take a left. Shops are clustered in Phnom Penh: 63 and Sihanouk boasts4 opticians, all next to one another. I went in last week to get my glasses tweaked and was presented with the same situation you see all over Cambodia: 3 girls greet me at the door and they (all) call over a girl from the back who speaks the best English. She comes out and takes my glasses and gives them to the assistant manager. He takes them to the manager, who gives them to the guy in the back who fixes them. After that, the manager brings my glasses to a different girl behind a desk, who cleans them for me. After 10 minutes, and what it feels like 20 people having fixed my glasses, I finally get them back. They fit perfectly, but the shop is empty, and they refuse to take my money (“Complimentary, sir”). How do these places survive?
I’m still on Sihanouk when I pass the Lucky Empire. While I shop at Lucky Supermarket every day, and while I’ve even had my haircut at the Lucky Salon, I still haven’t made it to Lucky Burger. The only international chain in Cambodia is Dairy Queen – that’s it. It’s only a matter of time before Starbucks, McDonald’s and Burger King migrate from Thailand into Cambodia.
On the final stretch of the walk to the office I pass the chicken ladies. No matter what time of day it is, there are always a dozen or so chickens being cooked, rotisserie style. Their scents mixed with the traffic fumes are enough to make anyone feel dizzy. I buy the local English speaking newspaper from a street girl and walk into the office – sweating – and seek refuge under the air-conditioner. My colleagues are opening laptops and sipping iced coffee. It's 8 am. “Good Morning”.
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June 06, 2007
Settling In
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve arrived in Cambodia. My time has flown here – on the one hand I feel like I touched down in Phnom Penh yesterday, but on the other hand I feel like I’ve made Cambodia my own in the short time I’ve been here.
Phnom Penh is like many cities: packed; buzzing with motorbikes; and hugging a river. But unlike many cities, it has had to rebuild itself in the last three decades. The Khmer Rouge basically ruined Phnom Penh in the 1970’s – buildings were destroyed, and combined with the economic impact of genocide, was forced to develop slowly. Today, things have changed. My office is being torn down in a year to be replaced with the largest building in Phnom Penh, and just down the road is “Lucky Burger” – Cambodia’s answer to McDonald’s. Cambodia is developing quickly, and a comparison between a map of Phnom Penh today and one of the early 80’s is enough to convince anyone that this city is on a single track to expansion.
My weekend was interesting. I visited the genocide museum with my friend Ghazaleh, and we were guided around the former school-turned-torture-venue by a guide who incorporated her own stories of the Khmer Rouge regime to the tour. The museum itself was pretty horrifying: pictures of the victims were lined up against the wall – some alive, some dead. One picture framed a wasted away corpse on a bed with chicken footmarks in the blood next to it - the chickens had eaten part of the corpse. The museum additionally had representations of torture instruments that were used to punish the prisoners – any school teacher, anyone who spoke English or anyone who wore glasses was arrested and sent there. After staying at the prison for anytime from one to six months, victims were sent to The Killing Fields to be executed. Ghanzaleh and I went straight to the Killing Fields after the genocide museum. We were both initially shocked at how serene the area is - the only sounds you hear are those of children playing and birds singing. However, as we walked around we soon realized the horror of what had happened here. We were walking on graves. Over 8000 people were bludgeoned to death (bullets were too valuable) and left to die in pits. Their clothes were sticking out of the soil, as were bones and even the occasional tooth. And it’s everywhere. You look around you, and all you see is small bits of fabric pushing its way up to the atmosphere – it almost seems like they’re gasping for air. While the experience was incredibly moving for me, I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who actually lived through the genocide itself. And there are many of them: anyone over the age of 35 has some recollection of the Khmer Rouge period. The only firsthand stories of war and/or genocide I had ever heard had come from WWII survivors, men and women two generations above me. Having such young people experience the atrocities made them even more real.
After a day like that, Ghazaleh and I needed some cheering up, understandably. So what do you do after a day of walking through fields of genocide? You go listen to ‘Asia’s “Tom Jones”’ of course! That’s right, a Malaysian Tom Jones impersonator performs in one of Phnom Penh’s fanciest hotels, and the most bizarre thing is: he’s pretty good. In addition to wooing us with classics like “It’s not unusual”, he also charmed us with his Welsh/Malaysia accent. Where there’s a demand, there’s a supply: you see, westerners touched down in Cambodia 15 years ago; and in that time countless hotels, restaurants, bars and apartment buildings have sprung up for our convenience and pleasure. It’s very easy living like a king here, but at the fraction of the cost. Dinner at a beautiful riverfront air-conditioned restaurant, martinis to follow (tamarind martini? Bring it on) and drinks at a bar will put you back less than 20 dollars. The ex-pat scene is vibrant and varied: anything goes. Want to go out every night? OK. Decide to stay in and watch movies? That’s fine too. Working from 8 – 6 every day means that I don’t always have the energy for a night out, but once Friday night rolls around it seems that everyone is up for a night out. It’s not the first time I’ve been in an environment where ex-pats are paying 3 dollars for drinks while countless people are starving, and there are ethical dilemmas going out with hordes of white people. But I did find it interesting that so many restaurants here work as NGOs themselves - to cater to westerners who work at other NGOs. The restaurants train children off the street to be waiters, cooks and hostesses and are then sent to work at some of the top restaurants in the country. It’s a system that benefits Cambodians, and the feeling of guilt that exists when westerners pay 10 dollars for dinner.
Work starts at 8, which is a bit of a shock to the system that ran at Brown time (no classes before 11, thank you very much). But the two hour lunch break makes up for it: offering time for errands, a nice long lunch or even a short nap. I’m working for The Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI). CHAI in Cambodia is primarily involved with procurement of pediatric ARVs (AIDS drugs). My role in all of this is varied: in my time here I’ve edited documents; made flow charts of children should be diagnosed; visited hospitals in the countryside; checked floorplans for a clinic and done a lot of reading about HIV/AIDS in Cambodia. Work is good – I’m kept busy, so the days fly by pretty quickly. However, by the time 6 pm rolls around I’m pretty knocked out, and I usually come back home to my apartment, throw down my bag, switch on the fan and flop onto the bed. “Another day in Cambodia” I tell myself; before I slowly get up, change out of my work clothes, and go get dinner started.
Posted by Guy Bloembergen at 04:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 20, 2007
Arrival
Sometimes you can't help but laugh.
As a child, I had a sort of surrogate grandmother who used to cycle to our house to see us all the time. When it rained, she wore this ridiculous clear vinyl raincoat that, while practical, looked a bit silly. Never ever did I think I would wear one of those things, but it seems the Gods had different plans for me.
These plans take shape at Hong Kong airport. To be more specific, on the airport bus that was about to take me to my "Dragon Air" plane with its destination Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The monsoon-like rain meant that these thin plasticy raincoats were the only protection we had against the brutal rain that pounded us as we walked up the steps to the plane. But on the bus, while putting it on, it just felt too ridiculous. "Surely the rain can't be that bad..." I thought to myself. But it was - and while I may have found it hilarious to dress up as an old lady or a tourist at Niagara Falls, it was a moment where hilarity met practicality.
I arrived, fell asleep soon afterwards and woke up the next morning in my new home. My apartment building is in the middle of "NGO Land" as my colleages like to call it. The whole area is quite swanky, while simultaneously still staying true to a developing nation. The apartment complex, named "Wonderland", has an pool and guard, and the houses around us are quite nice, albeit gaudy beyond belief. Imagine the house in "The Fresh Prince of Bellair", but then picture it painted pink and with add blue tinted windows. Yeah, pretty great. My street has a fair share of Khmer restaurants, a local pharmacy and a welder who has woken me up two mornings in a row. I face a main road which is constantly busy, but the back roads feel like a neighborhood, which is great.
I'm quite fond of the Phnom Penh. It's managable on the back of motorcycles or taking Tuk Tuks, and getting anywhere in the city doesn't cost more than a dollar or two. US Dollars - yep, that's the currency. Makes life easy. The riverfront area offers vistas of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers which stretch as far as the eye can see. The architecture is a blend between Khmer and colonial France - the Royal Palace, while I only drove by it, was absolutely breathtaking. The cuisine is has a French influence, with baguettes on almost any menu. My supermarket is called "Lucky Supermarket", and has almost anything an expat would need, at a price that reflects the distance my nutella traveled.
I spent this morning with two of my colleagues volunteering at an orphanage for children aged 2-5 who are HIV positive. Because I'll be working Monday - Friday for an organization that is doing pediatric HIV/AIDS work, it was great playing with the kids who are on treatment, thanks to the Foundation I'm working for. Within two minutes of walking through the gates I had a child on my shoulders and two in my arms. We played with them, helped feed, wash and clothe them and I also spent about an hour making paper airplanes for them. Their greatest joy was flattening them and forcing me to make new ones. I've pretty much perfected the skill.
Work starts tomorrow. I'm exited.
Posted by Guy Bloembergen at 03:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
