The Incidence of Incidents
In Cambodia it’s very high, The I of I is High. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, shit’s going down and a lot of it seems willfully fatal, or at least overly fatalistic. A lot of it, though certainly not all, is to be seen out there in traffic: the blind merges and U-turns, the comically overloaded Camrys, the buses splitting the center-line at 120 kph with 8 bald unmatched re-capped Chinese-made tires, a hand-on-horn and left blinker flashing; the puffed-up self-styled VIP flunkies blasting through villages in their 100 thousand dolla Range Rovers with Police escorts and sirens on full. All regardless of the naked children playing in the roads, the Brahma carts; the dotty helium balloon salesmen jinking along the non-existent shoulder with their sloping pushcarts. These people, in general, are callous to life and suffering while being incredibly warm and amiable, family-crazy and respectful of their elders. It’s kind of a 3rd world conundrum, but Cambodians have a special flair for it. Maybe we would too, having seen what they’ve seen, and having thrown our eggs that aren’t Animist into the Karma Rice Bowl. Nothing is more extended than a Cambodian family; the parents work, for nothing, and the kids are left with the Grand Ps and, by-and-by, end up worm-turning in traffic and doing all the other shit that unattended kids will do. So kids find incidents with worrying frequency. It’s how it is and it’s not good.
In Battambang Province, all roads lead to NH5 – National Highway 5 – the route that connects Battambang with Phnom Penh in the SE and in turn swings around the end of the lake ‘Tonle Sap’ to Siem Reap. There’s a lot of action on NH5; the above-mentioned action and a lot else besides. I’ve been roaming it back and forth with the boys from ‘CWARS’, or The Cambodian War Amputee Relief Society. They’ve re-branded themselves as a new NGO called ‘LOM ORNG’, which means ‘Bee Pollen’ in English, and they’re spreading a little sweetness wherever they can. I believe they are no longer CWARS because, for years now, they’ve been doing so much more than just helping war amps but, rather, are invested in the betterment of the quality of life for ALL Cambodians.
Most of you will remember that during the monsoons of last year much of SE Asia was ruinously submerged for literally months. Crops and homes and machinery destroyed, epidemics and parasites; isolation and misery. Since the moment it was possible Lom Orng was in the field trying to provide relief for those people. Even now, long after the floods have left the headlines, the people, of course, are still suffering; still trying to recover while this year’s storm clouds are boiling on the horizon. Lom Orng are giving the villagers fruit and vegetable seeds, long and short-term rice seedlings, chickens, geese and other livestock; all the things that were destroyed in the flooding. Also they are working on potable water projects and teaching them village sanitation; in the floods, they were literally swimming in their own shit. Up to their asses in crocodiles too, literally. I treated a man in one village – a clean-swept village of total bucolic beauty, far from NH5 and any traffic noise at all, and with not a single car in sight. He said, ‘Sure, it looks good now, but 8 months ago you would’ve been up to your chest in water standing here.’ I looked around at his beautiful mangoes, his banana trees, his bean and mushroom plots. He’s an AK amp, way up high, so he uses mostly a single crutch. ‘Not only that,’ he says, ‘but the neighbour over there has a crocodile farm. They all escaped and they were everywhere. One neighbour got bit the torso and one in the ass. There were lots of venomous snakes too.’
Generally, we never went further than about 25 kms South of Battambang; there’s no need, there’re amps everywhere. One day we went as far as the 48km marker to a village that could be described as ‘deadbeat’. Henry and his crew were going to give a sanitation presentation and they invited me to sit in and that they would do their best to round up a few amps for me. This is the kind of thing I had envisioned so many months ago in Vancouver, and I’m thrilled that these opportunities are unfolding for me now. Far more engaging than my mirror treatments though, was the sanitation chalk-talk that Henry and a colleague presented. They’ve done it before and it’s a pretty slick act. The most revealing skit is where they get the villagers to scratch a map of their village in the dirt and then place colored rectangles of paper where their individual huts are, and then each villager is invited to step forward and sprinkle red sand in the spot they performed their morning duties. The, as they say, job that no one else can do for you. Only 3 of maybe 40 huts had toilets of any description (and I could venture to describe them here, but I’ll spare you). Each villager shamelessly shuffled up and sprinkled sand. Willy-Nilly, I’m tellin’ ya. When they were done, that shit was EVERYWHERE.
One thing clear is that in these tiny impoverished and backwards villages, there’s no word for privacy. Now, another compelling part of the presentation: Henry quickly scanned the earthbound diagram and strode off behind the woodshed with a long-handled spade and returned in two shakes with a fresh human turd. He puts the turd on the ground in the middle of the village-a-gram and his assistant puts, right beside it, a Styrofoam box of food. Before she even has the lid open, a hoard of flies materializes and is busy hopping back and forth between dishes. A regular smorgasbord. The villagers seemed nonplussed at this, so Henry kicked it up a notch and produced a sealed small bottle of treated store-bought water, cracked the seal and offered a woman a slug. She laughed and obliged him and Henry then went over to another villager and plucked a long glossy strand of black hair from his head, dragged it across the turd and then dropped the hair in bottle of water. He returned to the woman and offered her another hit. THAT got the message across; to me, at least.
They had several other parts of the presentation, much to do with food safety and water hygiene. As anyone who doesn’t live under a rock knows: aside from boredom, diarrhea is the world’s # 1 killer.
Life goes on and NH5 is roaring away just over there, and Battambang, the big smoke, the Kingdom’s second biggest city (though that doesn’t say much; Phnom Penh is vastly bigger), is less than 25kms away; yet these folks won’t go there, pretty much ever. And that applies to the amps too, and they have every reason to go; the International Red Cross (ICRC) is right in Battambang and they’ll treat anyone from the Province free-of-charge, including fitting (and re-fitting/repairing) prosthetics. This led me to perhaps the biggest and most perplexing question I’ve been confronted with since I’ve been here: Why don’t they go? Why don’t they avail themselves of this free succour, this expertise? Why don’t they take this simple step to improve their lives? Why this resistance to assistance? Can you tell me? It’s not pride. It’s something more culturally mysterious, something darker. Because some, no, MANY of these guys are rolling on hand-made prosthetics that make Captain Ahab look like the 6 Million Dollar Man. I ain’t kidding. CWARS has had some success getting some of the guys into their compound where they can stay and eat for free and learn a vocation, but often it’s not easy; they come in kickin’. Henry himself has no real cogent explanation for this sad phenomenon; through him I’ve offered to pay for their ‘moto-dop’ rides to and from the ICRC; still no takers. It gets me riled. I wanna go kick their table legs out from under them and give their heads a shake.
Along one stretch NH5 is lined with red clay building brick kilns. The kilns themselves dot the area like sienna-colored beehives. 5-ton dump trucks beetle down the highway in both directions, off to the buyers and tottering under their overloads. Weeks ago while riding my bike into Battambang one of these trucks ground past me and I noted with alarm that not only was the whole truck kind of hitching down the road under all those bricks, but the top, say, two rows of unsecured bricks were kind of twitching and dancing. With further alarm I noticed that the entire verge of the highway (you really can’t call it a shoulder) was lined with pulverized and powdered redbrick. With still more alarm I noted the angle-of-incidence between the tittering top of the truck and my cherished melon and straight away sat up and soft-pedaled while the truck lurched down the road. 100 – 150 meters down the road he passed another cyclist and I saw a handful of bricks fall off the back of the truck. By the time I came abreast of the other cyclist (a peasant on a beater), he was far from dismayed, but seemed quietly happy with his windfall and was busy tying the 3 intact bricks onto the back of his bike. NOTHING is wasted in Cambodia. And incidents, it seems, can sometimes be avoided: by luck, divine intervention, and sometimes even prudence.
More recently I must’ve been on the tail of the dragon instead of the hump: I was manoeuvering on my bike through the cluster-fuck around Psar Nath, the Central Market, and I was whacked from behind by the passenger-side mirror of a passing idiot. I ended up spraddled face-first on the road. By the time I got up (me, I no longer spring up, what with my appliance and all it’s more like pitching a tent), all I could see down the road was the usual seethe of directionless traffic. Whoever it was decided it wasn’t a stopper-and-asker. An inch of my right brake lever was broken off and it felt like maybe I’d chipped my right kneecap (the flesh-and-bone one) and the back of my left shoulder was real sore. In the end it wasn’t a bone chip on my knee; I probably just knocked loose some age-gristle or something. It’s being nicely re-absorbed. Feels like I dodged a bullet there. Imagine the headline in the local tabloid: ‘MIRROR MAN TAKEN OUT BY OWN TOOL’.
The brickyards can be dangerous in other respects too. I treated one lad, 16 years-old, who lost his arm below-the-elbow in a brick making machine. 1 year ago. I was happy to get to him because his phantom pain was acute – a daily tribulation – and now he can get rid of it early in the game instead of enduring it for decades like these tough-ass soldiers I’ve been treating. He was a sombre kid, but I caught a flash of incandescence in his eyes when he first got the mirror in place. Nice. The soldiers, man, they’re a mixed bag. Some haunted, some class clowns; some with 9 kids, some hiding alone in the back 40 in a palm lean-to and unwilling to come out and mix it up for maybe 30 years and more. Tough sledding across the board. More than one soldier, unbidden, harked all the way back to the moment of detonation. The most disturbing stories are from the guys who stepped on the two-stage landmines. These can be either anti-tank or anti-personnel (don’t you just love that word ‘anti-personnel’?) mines which are designed to first spring up out of the ground and THEN explode. Presumably the idea is that this way One bomb stands a greater chance of maiming and killing More people. The most notorious model was jauntily nicknamed the ‘Bouncing Betty’. I’ve talked to several guys who knew full-well what a fucking Bouncing Betty was BEFORE stepping on one. You can step on one; inching along while knowing, also full-well, that your life is a hair across a door-jamb, then hear the first stage spring trigger – freeze in your tracks – and know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the moment you move that foot, you’re going to Hell in a handcart, or just plain going to Hell.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Weeks rolling up and down on ol’ NH5. Rarely a village with fewer than, say, 6 amputees living in it. Some of the guys I missed, they are off to the Thai border area now cuz the cassava harvest is on and it’s pretty good work for an amp. You can tie a hankie between two sticks for a stamp of shade under an angry sun and sit on your ass and chop cassava for 12 hours a day with a razor-sharp machete, no probs. They pay up to 5 dollars a day in the cassava fields, but at the brickyards the most you can hope for is 3. 2 bucks for day-labourers on construction sites in Phnom Penh; 40 to 60 bucks/week for serving girls in restaurants and bars, 12 hrs/day, 7/7. How’s that grab you? You in? Better not want internet cuz that’s 40 bucks/month. My new friend Thuen, a unilateral AK amp, has a 3-hive brickyard at the 23k signpost. All of his extended family – and there are lots of ‘em – are busy helping him fill orders. He’s got orders galore and would like to hire labour, but the cassava crop has taken Help North.
So we drive down and back and we find what we find. Henry has a pretty long list of amps and their cell numbers and knows the area like the backs of his hands (both of which are intact). He grew up here. Sometimes he has to stroke one guy off the list cuz the fellow’s gone to meet his maker already and hopefully has no need of mirror therapy – though that’s not certain. We have an inside joke cuz, at about kilometer 13/14, in an area where the rice paddies – dry in this season – sprawl off to either horizon, there are a bunch of food stalls side-to-side and often we’re actively trolling for lunch. I piped up there once and said, ’That looks good, Henry. What about that stuff?’ He chuckled and replied, ‘Ya, but they only have 2 things.’ ‘Well, what kinda things? Looks tasty.’ ‘Rat. Roasted or deep-fried.’ The locals make a big distinction between paddy rats and their city slickin’ cousins. Fair enough.
So I hate to harp on about this stuff, and I am spreading my wings even if it’s only a little bit. I mean, I do frogs. You can get the bigger ones stuffed with rice and peanut sauce and I tell you; it’s better than chicken. But I see more and different bugs being eaten all the time now and plus all that standing water produces the most unlikely provender. It all adds new poignancy to the hail, ‘Grub’s Up!’ Henry is also keen to just forge on and find some garden variety chicken and rice. As we adroitly U-turn and head back to B-town we pass a convoy of some 40 step-thrus riding in single file on the edge of the highway, Phnom Penh-bound. Each and every guy has EXACTLY the same load: 2 big boxes lashed on the back with tire casing straps and a full new 5 gallon propane tank between their knees. Henry explained: ’They’re travelling salesmen, speculators. They all load up at the same warehouse. It all costs about 200 bucks retail and includes a two-burner counter-top stove, a set of pots, and a full gas tank. You can buy it on installments. I got one.’ I just wonder how the guys split up their sales territories.
Enough of these tatted and tatty soldiers along NH5. It’s time to mix it up; time for a different batch. I got Billy to send me up another whack of pre-cut acrylic on the bus from PP and, while I waited the requisite 6 hrs, I nestled into the 50 final pages of V S Naipaul’s ‘A House For Mr. Biswas’, one of my favorite novels of all time. I truck with fiction a lot. I’ve learned everything I know from fiction, which may explain my own personal incidence of incidents. Plus, Naipaul’s a word guy and I fancy I am too. Hell, I can put ‘elide’, ‘jalousie’, and ‘adumbrate’ into the same sentence. See? I just did. But nevermind, ‘Biswas’ is one of the world’s greatest novels in the humanist tradition, and though it’s hardly germane to a blog about using mirrors and psychological snake oil to cure killers of their phantoms (consider the fact that by now I’ve treated dozens of Khmer Rouge soldiers too – the Bad Guys – and changed horses in mid-stream, just like they did, who-knows-how-many times. As always, the lines get fuzzy) – well, Pain is Pain and Art is Art, and neither, really, is ever out of place, and, often enough, they sleep, or at least snuggle together. They dry hump. This from the succulent dénouement of ‘Biswas’:
‘But the back of the house was dead. The courtyard was littered with packing cases, straw, large sheets of stiff brown paper, and cheap untreated kitchen furniture. In the wooden house the doorway between the kitchen and the hall had been boarded over and the hall used as a storeroom for paddy, which sent its musty smell and warm tickling dust everywhere. The loft at one side was as dark and jumbled as before. The tank was still in the yard but there were no fish in it; the black paint was blistered and flaked, and the brackish rainwater, with iridescent streaks of oil on its surface, jumped with mosquito larvae. The almond tree was still sparse-leaved, as though it had been stripped by a storm in the night; the ground below was dry and fibrous. In the garden the Queen of Flowers had become a tree; the oleander had grown until its virtue had been exhausted and it was flowerless; the zinnias and marigolds were lost in bush. All day the Sindhis who had taken over the shop next door played mournful Indian film songs on their gramophone; and their food had strange smells. Yet there were times when the wooden house appeared to be awaiting re-animation: when, in the still hot afternoons, from yards away came the thoughtful cackling of fowls, the sounds of dull activity; when the evening’s oil lamps were lit, and conversation was heard, and laughter, a dog being called, a child being flogged, but Hanuman House was silent. No one stayed when the store closed; and the Sindhis next door slept early.’
OR,
‘Here, claimed by no one, he had reflected on the unreality of his life, and had wished to make a mark on the wall as proof of his existence. Now he needed no such proof. Relationships had been created where none existed; he stood at their centre. In that very unreality had lain freedom. Now he was encumbered.’
The acrylic has arrived, so it’s time to make my fingers bleed. It’s not that bad, really, just wears the tippy-toes of my fingers down a bit and my nails are long-gone. But I’m makin’ mirrors for a pre-planned trip to Samlout, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is considered to be The, or one of The, most heavily land-mined areas on Earth. So no whining allowed. I start cutting and glueing and taping and stacking and I think about my last trip up there and the slightly hysterical brown emotional wave that rolled over me and I think, ‘Brother, you takin’ a knife to a gunfight … a pie-in-the-sky to a crater factory.’ Plus, I’ve been admonished for spreading false hope and I’ve felt chastened. Now, it’s a bit different; I’m not so chastened anymore cuz tho I’ve seen a world of pain, I’ve seen a world of breakthroughs. It Works. Now I’m thinking: ‘OK, motherfucker, YOU go to Samlout and tell me there’s any such thing as False Hope.’ There’s only Hope. There’s Only Hope.
So sometimes I get positively buoyant makin’ mirrors. I put my i-Thang on; I dance around sporting the ‘white man’s overbite’ (when white guys chew their lower lips while trying to shake they hips). I take a break and a sip o’ Red Label. Or maybe I take a longer break and shave my face just to mix it up. Then I got shaving foam all over my earmuffs and I look like an Indian Sadhu. Now ‘Sigur Ros’ is keening Icelandic laments into my headfoams, here in the Hotel Paris; my Cambodian Outpost St. #3, Battambang Town, 90210. And it’s allll good; there’s mirrors in the making and tomorrow I’ll pedal off to Samlout and try and spread it around some.
I forgot to mention that during all this, Incidence came home to roost. Somewhere between NH5 and my trip to Samlout I stumbled and put my left hand through a glass table at the ‘Anchor Thom’ restaurant in Battambang. I was there just tonite, for the 3rd time since, trying to smooth things over and pay for the tabletop, but they won’t hear anything of it. I cut my left hand up pretty good and in so doing severed the two flexor tendons that serve my ring finger. I wrapped my dinner serviette around my hand and took a Tuk Tuk to the HANDA Emergency hospital to get her sewn up. It was a horrible (and correct) presentiment seeing the 4th fingie on my left hand just hanging there, all useless and all.
I had been there only a couple weeks earlier teaching their rehab therapists mirror therapy. Now I’m something of a fixture (though not, at least, a bathroom fixture). Imagine our collective surprise.
Here comes a super-big and super-sincere SHOUT to the many, many fine, fine folks at EMERGENCY. It was less than 1 hour between when I ate shit and was in the Operating Theatre. It was a 2 hr procedure and 3 days bedbound and there was not one red second that I wasn’t surrounded by someone thoughtful, amiable and professional. Thanks.
As a Pain Therapist, these things happen to me, or I happen upon them. It’s comforting to know that there are Professionals around when I start testing my theories. And, theoretically, it’s good to know that there is no end of incidents and that here, in Cambodia, I’m in good company. I may stay; it’s nice to have family. And if you’re in the Incidents Line, there’s always plenty of clientele.
So a lot of the aforementioned stuff, including the ride to Samlout, I did with stitches in my hand and a big-ass rig on my arm that they called a ‘dynamic splint’. It’s a nice piece of jury-rigging: they put a half-cast (not in the mulatto-sense) on my inner arm, bored a wee hole in the end of the offending finger and used the torn cuff of a surgical glove to attach flexed finger to a nub on the cast. Dynamic. Pls see photos. It worked pretty good tho I occasionally got the rubber part caught in my handlebar-end and nearly ate shit all over again … an Orderly tore the cuffs off 4 rubber gloves and gave me back-up. It’s always good to have back-up.
Rubber bands or not, the ride to Samlout is a lovely one. It’s now kinda my stamping ground. I pass the Wat on the cliffs, then the base of Alligator Mountain, then there’s Sneung, and Sadao and then Treng, where I hang a left and the road gets dirty and boney and starts to go up. I got the t-shirt and the hat for this joint and I’d now like to go back for more; maybe a Safari Suit and a Pith Helmet. BTW, if U wanna go to Samlout, there’s only one Guesthouse, but it’s never, ever full; so no need to make rezzies. Half-way in along the dirty part a big green bug scuttled across the road and I followed him into the verge on the other side. He ended up being a very diminutive MAG de-miner wearing full work fig: helmet, visor, diverse frontal armour; boots. All in bright rice paddy green with the bold MAG logo and all while the ambient air temp was, like 103 degrees at 2pm and maybe 60% humidity. You try it. There was a bunch of them halloooo-ing each other in the adjacent field there and a forest of the ubiquitous red skull-and-crossbones mine danger signs. He waved me back; for a change I dinna have to be told twice.
The guesthouse peeps are super-welcoming and friendly; they don’t get much business, but I think a lot of it is repeat; guys and girls like me, and travelling salesfolks. The first mirror session wasn’t til 5pm, so I had time for a kip while the electricity ie: fan was still on. Come 4pm Bill was there but no Blair, and Blair was to be my translator. I had 20 long mirrors and 4 short ones on the back of the bike – roughly the going ratio, it seems. Plus, when I meet a guy who’s lost both an arm and a leg, which in Samlout is often; I can tell him to use the same mirror for both apps, tho they are sometimes clearly choked at not being able to double-dab. So 4:45 and no Blair; thank gawd I got Bill. His Khmer language skills are a little thin, but he’s got a world of charm and, anyhow, The Mirror is The Message. I confessed to Bill that anyhow it might be a wash as 2 or 3 of the NGO-types (mostly white-folks, including Angelina – Angelina never returned my call, lesbian bitch) hadn’t, basically, got back to me, though they all knew the time and place. We rolled out for the CARITAS Field Headquarters. CARITAS is an arm of the Catholic mission, as I’ve said before, and here I must thank them, and specifically Kosal, the program director in Battambang, for embracing relief and providing both a venue and an audience for it. We arrived and there was just one amp shuffling around amid the chickens and geese. By 5:15 they were filtering in from all angles; walking, hand-cycling, riding or on the backs of scooters. We got underway and Billy warmed up to the task admirably; and so did they. A very receptive crowd and full of trick questions, including the one about double leg amps (there were 3 dbl AKs in the group).
Mirror Therapy is obviously a visualization technique and by the same token that I feel that by now I can treat myself with no mirror but the inside of my eyelids, I see no reason why I can’t stack, say, a double above-the-knee amp ontop of a consensual partner with 2 perfectly good legs, and take a swing at it. There are no rules, yet. Plus, Ramachandran has already broken most of the rules. Given the right degree of intellectual inquiry and supplesse, I can’t see why mirror therapy could not also work with blind amputees. It’s a blind leap, but I would take it in a heartbeat if I were in that sitch. No Money, No Honey. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Bill is also my counselor on all Khmer culture issues. I told him my thoughts on the dbl AK question and said, ‘Waddya think?’ He said, ‘Sure, no problem on the touchy-feely stuff; they sleep tumbled together like kittens!’ ‘OK, yabut, you do it, K?’ So Bill, putz that he is, chooses the biggest, stoutest, strongest dbl AK guy – a guy who arrived propelling himself with, um, hand-blocks, you have see it to really imagine it … he puts this guy ontop of the only dwarf polio victim in the house. It wasn’t a good or effective match. As penance, I put Bill himself under the guy and it was luvley. And anyhow Everyone had a real good laugh. Again tho, there’s No reason why it shouldn’t work. Imagine the amp on top going, ‘Right, Left, Right, Left!’ and the legs swinging in tempo and on command … using his brain to command his ‘legs’ and consequently shutting all phantom pain signals down. Money.
Gimme stroke victims; gimme Complex Regional Pain sufferers … it can be done. It’s worth a shot. NEVER discount the mirror. NEVER discount your own reflection… .
In Sadao, on the return trip to Battambang (it never fails to amaze me that all these hard-core trouble-spots are SO close to such a charming little burg) I just couldn’t hang onto the bike anymore; my hand hurt so much. So I paid 5 bucks for me the big white Barang and my bike and hopped on a bus. But first they had to reshuffle the cargo bay to fit the giant UTE in. They threw a bunch of stuff out on the curb at my feet and one of the bags started wiggling on my fake foot – enough so that I could feel it, which is a fair amount of wigglin’. I said, ‘Hey what’s this?’ The bus porter said, ‘Puppy’ and pointed to another plasticized rice sack; they’d scratched some ventilation into the side of the sack and one of the puppies (a beautiful guy that looked like a Vizla-mutt) had worried his head out. He explained to me that by dinner-time they’d be in Phnom Penh, about 400 kms away. At least they didn’t put my bike ontop of them, I got on my ‘knees’ and gently placed them inside the commodious and protective main-triangle of the UTE and scratched the other guy’s head out so the two could at least chat and compare notes during the voyage in the dark cargo bay under a hot and heaving airless answerless diesel bus; til the looming question of ‘dinnertime’. Jesus. I was still cooing to the doggies when they grabbed me by the collar and stuffed me in the jumpseat, which is not where you wanna be on a bus ride in Camkillia. You do not want to see what’s happening in front of you. You’ll die if you do.
At some point they did, however, throw a couple of the ubiquitous 5 gal propane tanks on my rear-end, putzes, and bent my rear derailleur hanger. Here at the friendly Chinese hardware store they lent me a 12” crescent wrench and I just removed the derailleur and bent her back cold by eye, while yet another puppy licked my aluminum shin. Now she’s as good as gold (my bike, that is). In a world of electronic diagnostics I just love a good clean hip-shot fix. Even more when it worx.
After a couple days in Battambang (I never tire of typing that out – even with just the one hand), my hand felt good and I chose to temporarily wrap things up here and head to Phnom Penh via Siem Reap; the long way around the Tonle Sap, but there were people I wanted to see there and I really wanted to take the speedboat from SR to Phnom Penh. You sit on the roof and get a good view of riverlife and a real good politically incorrect tan. It’s a 2 day ride and first stop is an ugly town with the lovely name of Sisophon, where Blair has his principle home and most of his family entourage (a word to wary guys: if you marry a Khmer girl, DOZENS of people may come live with you, like, permanently – this culture totally DEFINES the term ‘extended family’). You might want to whip out a pre-nup.
Anyhow, Blair promised me a square of floor for the night, so once I hit town I stopped for water and to give him a call for directions. I believe it was at this point, when I thoughtlessly grabbed the rear of my super-laden, super-heavy Super UTE, that POP went my two flexor tendons again. I don’t know; I dinna feel anything; I just looked down and saw my ring finger, again, just hanging there in dead space – resolutely defying commands of any sort. Oi. I even tried a mirror onnit, to no avail. It doesn’t work for Everything.
I managed to call the chief surgeon @ the now HANDA EMERGENCY HOSPITAL, Nicola Donati, a Ticinese from Lugano, who super-kindly offered not only to take me back in, but perform the re-surgery personally. Plus, he didn’t say that it was necessarily my idiocy which parted the tendons again. I find that very becoming. He also said that a handful of days with the hand dis-connected makes no difference; so I carried on to Phnom Penh and a CBC radio interview and a meeting with Lom Orng with a floppy fingie.
Blair went to PP too, to conduct ESL exams for his Battambang English School, so we shared a car-ride back up to the NW. For a lot of the trip we had, this time, 10 people in a CAMRY. A lot of Camry-spotters say that kidz don’t count (we had 2 kidz in our car), but to me kidz have always counted; so I count ‘em. Anywhere in the 3rd world, maing, you do not want to be driving after dark. That’s when the incidence of incidents positively Spikes. Yikes. I saw that Blair, over the years, has adopted a good and very Buddhist technique for coping with being with 9 others in a Camry after dark with a driver who for some reason very vigorously wants to get back to his squalling family. He just tilts the bill of his Molson Canadian gimme cap down over his eyes and closes them and rides the dragon. Easy for him cuz he’s got very little hair left and so always has a cap on hand, or on his head. I just closed my eyes, but the brights of incoming penetrate your lids and it’s hard not to take a peek and see how bad it’s gonna be. But the dragon’s Long and fulla humps.
And so I made it. I mostly do; incidents be damned. Not an hour after I got sorted at, again, the Hotel Paris, my 10 dolla paradise (with A/C), Blair texted and said that Vinh had fallen off the back of a tractor (@ 8pm that nite – so tractors, too, are to be avoided after nitefall), so Vinh had fallen off a tractor and cracked his skull open. Vinh is 11 and the eldest son of Mala, who along with her husband, husband Blair’s farm. Mala, her husband, and Vinh are all HIV Positive. Their youngest son, Winh (don’t ask), is maybe 6 and he’s negative. I bring this up only to draw notice to the fact that sometimes Shit DOESN’T happen, and it can be an achievement. Blair brought Vinh’s misfortune to my attention mostly cuz he knew I was going in to EMERGENCY to get re-snipped the very next day, and would I go see Vinh and chuck him under the chin and just say, ‘it’s OK, shit happens’. As it happened we were neighbours in ICU. He’s fine. He’s gonna be OK. I discreetly asked Blair if the hospital staff knew that poor Vinh was HIV pos and he said prolly not. Mala herself has been refused treatment at hospitals (other un-connected incidents) when she stated her condition. Now, she flies under the radar til her blood tests show, and by then it’s too late; they’ve stitched her up and she’s good to go.
Incidentally, my new, new hand is a right barrel of monkeys. It does everything I tell it too and then some. So what first seemed like misfortune may well have been fortune smiling on me; Buddha, Angelina, or Cheshire Cat; a smile is a smile. It all comes out in the wash, ‘specially if you got a good machine and a little SHOUT.
So I’m here. I ain’t leaving any time real soon. I got the t-shirt, but I don’t got the hat. In fact, I got 2 t-shirts: one that, on the front, says: ‘SAME SAME’, and on the back says: ‘BUT DIFFERENT’. The other one simply says, on the front, ‘No Money, No Honey’. I’m gonna stay for another t-shirt or two. The world has been so bloody unfair to these people, and they’re so relentlessly nice and obliging and conveniently needy. They call me ‘Sir’. I mean, that Never happens at home. Maybe I’ll get me a t-shirt that says, “Up To You!”, which is something you hear from the locals, like, 20 times/day. And it IS Up To You, innit? It is, categorically, Up To Us. You Name It. Word. Nothing could be more emphatically true. Up to you.
Meantime, incidents clearly continue to incidate and if the ball keeps rolling, I’ll roll with it. I have my Love for the World, my Love for my Girl, a freshly charged i-Thing, a new book with fancy new 2-bit words, and a fresh batch of mirrors down Phnom Penh way. Tomorrow’s another day and I can pretty much SEE the coffee… .
I’m good to go.
Peace and Love, … . s
