Christmas in Cambodia
Christmas in Cambodia. There is one; at least there has been for me. Lots of good things on the boil and even tho Ol’ Santa would positively expire in this heat in his uni, never mind his beard, I get the feeling he did do a drive by (late at night when it was a little cooler).
I got an early present in the form of the Mighty Mekong itself. Billy and I took pedicabs (called ‘ciclos’ here) down to the river. He jumped out on the way and picked up a 6pak of Corona and a brick of ice the size of a building block. Corona is a lot pricier and, I would say, shittier than the local beer, but there’s no accounting for taste, or Christmas, when you think about it. Billy and his pedi-dude were on a first-name basis and the guy was totally toothless (the other guy, not Billy. Billy’s still 13 or 14 teeth left) and both he and his ciclo were so skewed that, tho his pedal-stroke was cool on the starboard side (I’m a cyclist, remember), he was showing 2 inches of daylight between his foot and the pedal at bottom-dead-center on the port side. He just kinda nursed it around with his right leg. That all takes some doing as those pedicabs weigh, like, 200 lbs. There are no fat ciclo drivers. No rich ones either; they not only only rent them, they bunk down in them at night. Sometimes their pimps give them a douche and dinner (tarantula, perhaps, or something a little less hairy on weekdays) before nighty-nights. It all puts the tough-titty back in tough.
The river is majestic, and its pace is something north of stately. The whiff on the bank alternates between primordial ooze mixed with human faeces (the only thing gnarlier, I think, is feline faeces), and something almost saline and fresh and bracing. The wind blows allthetime, so it’s never nasty for long. Our boat we had to ourselves and it would have fit in nicely on the Mississippi circa 1890. It was great, charming and shitty. Our skipper’s voice hadn’t changed yet, yet he managed a 10 outa 10 on landing in really, really tight quarters in a really strong wind/current. Plus there were puppies on board which made it worth ez double the 20 bucks we paid. We were up out there on top of the wheelhouse in those universal sun-rotted plastic lawn chairs of the 3rd world and it was exquisite (and silent, cuz Billy was mad at me for giving one Corona to the ciclo driver and clumsily breaking one trying to get my asymmetrical ass outa the thing. We saw sampan villages, tugs and fisherman doing their river thang … which has always captivated me.
After, clomping up Billy’s Vertical Stairs (there are 69 of them by actual count) I was greeted on the 2nd floor by a chorus of “Hi-Low … Hi-Low”. I call her the 2nd flr girl and she’s maybe 2 ½ or 3 and unbearably cute. She’s learned the cadence of my, erm, feet on the steps and comes running to the gated but open doorway each and every time. Her Mum speaks quite a bit of English and gooses her sometimes if I’m grinding by and she don’t hear me. She’s a bit of a fashion-plate and has a crazy selection of pinafores, Chinese-style pyjama suits, and Hello Kitty wear for casual Fridays. Now she sticks her hand through the grate and squeezes my finger and shouts, ‘See You Again!!!’ It makes my day. But then lots of other stuff does too. It’s a lovable, beat town.
It’s a little on the crime-infested side tho and a fool and his shit will soon be parted. I’d up and die if the UTE got nicked before I even got my show on the road, so I’m trying to be prudent tho it’s clearly not in my nature. Part of that means leaving the bike at an outside security-manned mini-parking lot kitty corner to Billy’s flat. Though the guys who ‘work’ there are all pissed 24/7 on toxic-looking urine-colored rice-based white lightning they seem to be keeping other criminally oriented thugs away from my baby; all for fiddy cents a night. They LOVE the UTE and can’t resist clicking the shifters back and forth and twiddling the barrel-adjusters on both the rear derailleur and the brakes, so every single morning I have to ease on down the road into the maelstrom of traffic tweaking my brakes and shifters. Some of them can’t resist a good quick-release lever either and I’ve had to zip-tie the one on the rear to ward off incidents or accidents. The Cambodian approach to preventing B&Es is to throw up as many layers of defense as possible, which means that in order to finally arrive inside Billy’s third for flat after all those goddamned vertical cat piss-soaked stairs in that Stygian well while sweating like a dog I have to open padlocks on no less than 4 grated steel doors. And all the padlocks are on the interior ie: opposite sides of the doors which necessitates Houdini-esque manipulations with Both hands. I have big-ass hands and abnormally large wrists and the hole in the door through which one must reach to even make contact with the padlock is simply far too damn small for me. So each nite, if I’m comin’ home after 8 or 9pm (after which that door is locked), I gotta get one of the monkeys at the parking lot to roll me over on the scooter and do the monkey business for me. Last nite the guy – a tiny, tiny dude – was too wasted to manage and I had to hit up another guy on the street.
I got another stocking-stuffer yesterday; I got myself a massage – not a ‘happy ending’ although in the end I felt quite joyful. There are 4 or 5 joints in town called ‘Seeing Hands’ where all of the masseurs/masseuses are blind. There is a high incidence of blindness in Cambodia ; I don’t think either bilharzia or river blindness are endemic here but most blindness is, kinda, the saddest sort. It’s called ‘refractive error’, which is a fancy way of saying that the people go blind simply cuz they’re too damn poor to buy specs. And time marches on.
My guy, I call him Willy, which is what it sounds like in Khmer, is a giant; he’s an easy 210/220 and solid. When he felt his way into the room I told him straight-off, ‘I’m outie. You’re gonna kill me’. His English is pretty good and he basically told me to gear down, shut up, and chill. I was belly-up and he was kinda patting me down to see what kind of creature he had on his seeing hands when he dusted his knuckles on my ‘appliance’. He just stopped everything and put a hand on each of my thighs (sort of) and just kinda looked at me. It was very moving and I know it wasn’t the first time – for him, that is. Sure it’s a cliché, but his hands did ‘see’. Like any Amp, it costs me lots to move; I work hard to stay afloat. And it tells on my body; tweaks and asymmetricies allround. His seeing hands – and Not tentatively, I’ll tell you – found many of them and kinda straightened me out. Felt great; tho I’m crooked again a’eady. I guess I gotta go back.
I’ve been on the bike a lot, which has been great, tho deadly. I coddled my egg a couple days ago riding out in crippling sun to the ‘Cambodia Trust’ compound on the outskirts of town. PP sprawls relentlessly; very few buildings are over 3 stories high, and beyond the palings it ain’t purty. No good maps around and anyhow the CT compound would be off them … so I got lost, and like a rube I forgot to apply sunscreen when I twiddled out @ 07h30. I got half-way to f*cking Laos before I realized I’d missed the ol turn-off and gone way too far and then hired a tuk-tuk driver to make it all right. My giant and fantastic Kona Ute is WAY longer than a tuk-tuk is wide, yet I chivvied her in sideways and it all worked out. I had a bunch of test therapy mirrors bungeed on the back on the UTE’s acacia wood deck and the top two were tin. I glued them on backing, but that tin is, like, homicidally sharp. It was all sticking out into traffic like a runaway guillotine exactly at neck-level for most folk zipping by on their step-throughs and I just gritted and thought,’Sheeeeeit, sumpin’ happens, what a charming friendship gesture’.
Cambodia Trust, (check them out @ http://www.cambodiatrust.org.uk/ ) is an inspiring outfit. They’re UK-based and active, real, invested and effective at reducing the misery here; and that’s not always the case with NGOs. They have 3 facilities around Cambodia where they assemble and fit prosthetics for the poor and teach people from all over the 3rd world the science of prosthetics/orthotics. They rehabilitate amps, get the young ones back in school and get them mobile. They have, for example, a program where donors are able buy a kid a bike for 30 pounds. Their compound here in PP is brand-new, purpose-built and totally impressive. They have modern workrooms for the prostheticians, similar workrooms for the students themselves, dorms for both the students and patients who are in from the provinces and rehab studios and equipment galore.
At first I will be teaching the students themselves how to treat patients with Mirror Therapy. This is a gift of significant magnitude; while I was there I spoke to students from Burma, Thailand, Philippines, New Guinea, Nigeria, etc. Imagine my joy at knowing that these young students will then be returning to their native countries and in addition to their newfound skills as international-standard prosthetists, they will be spreading relief from phantom pain through mirror therapy.
The Phnom Penh branch of the Red Cross, the ICRC, see :
http://www.icrc.org/eng/where-we-work/asia-pacific/thailand/index.jsp has similar operations (they, in fact, manufacture all of the artificial limbs that are prescribed here in Cambodia). They also have a facility here for fitting and rehabilitating amps and I will be working there teaching both caregivers and amputees the magic of mirror therapy.
It doesn’t stop there my friends, on the 24th I heard from CMAC, the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (see : http://cmac.gov.kh/ ). They are the largest de-mining organization in Cambodia and therefor the largest in the world. They have mine-clearing operations all over the North and elsewhere too. They have just launched a new and aggressive ‘Victim Assistance Program’ and I will be working with them throughout the heavily mined areas outside Phnom Penh not only teaching the amps themselves but the de-miners too, who necessarily come into contact with thousands of the afflicted.
So, you see, it may be 38 degrees out and mostly Buddhist, but there sure as hell IS Christmas in Cambodia. I couldn’t be more stoked. I hope all of you are having a wicked season too.
