Outreach

Bill Morse

By Stephen on Jan 16, 2012 in Outreach

If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it Bill Morse; the chief @ Landmine Museum and Relief Center. Don’t be put off by the uniform. It’s an inside joke; they all wear uniforms of all the different combatants inc the Khmer...

Temple Monkey

By Stephen on Jan 14, 2012 in Outreach

If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itI’ve got a few hours on most of you and seem to have skated across Friday the 13th with no misfortune. On Thursday the 12th I wasn’t so lucky. Well, to be truthful, bad luck had little enough to do with it, as is so often the case. I went to download videos from my fancy new HERO CAM into my computer only to discover that the whole time I was shooting the memory card was actually still in my laptop. I’m just getting to know this cool little GO PRO device and the brochure keeps telling me it’s ‘idiot proof’; obviously I was not among the sample group of idiots. It wasn’t too much that I missed: 2 afternoons of gamboling around two or three different temples with the headcam on. I was hopping and dashing and bouldering and skipping down stairs ostensibly showing how my fancy electronic prosthesis can navigate crazy terrain, but more than anything I was just showing off; so in the land of Karma, I guess I got some on me. No matter, I’m gonna jot this down and go out and try it again – a little bit anyhow. I’ve been riding out to the Angkor Wat temple complex for 3 or 4 days now and, for the most part, just taking a little time off. All work and no play make Stevo crabbay. Though today I’ll go for the late afternoon light, as a rule I’ve been heading out plenty early; around 06h30, and as I get closer to the major temple complexes I laugh to see the roads becoming more and more congested with ratty little kids on giant step-through bicycles (the bikes here are, for the most part, Chinese-made and come in one size only: huge). The kids I call temple monkeys and it’s like they’re going to work, punching the clock on their way in to where they can lurk in the shade and hassle tourists. I can’t imagine they often succeed in shaking a nickel out of anyone, but it gives them something to do – they’re certainly not going to school. Lots of kids are though, the...