If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itThis is Peng. He’s an AK or trans-femoral amp. About halfway down his bone, same as me. He lives in a town called, in Lao, “10 Kilometers” ‘cuz it’s about 10 kms out of Luang Prabang on the road out to Kuang Xi (a lot of stuff has a Chinese ring to it up here). Peng and Onu makin’ a difference! He’s a strange case; he got terribly burned in his lower body due to a propane tank explosion. He ran into his flaming hut over and over to save his family. Fully 15 years later, having been more or less functional for years, he developed a bone infection in his right leg and consequently lost it. The stump looks real good, it was a good procedure; practice makes perfect and the surgeons here get plenty of opportunity to hone their craft. After the surgery, though, he was offered a pair of shitty crutches for 10 bucks USd and told sayonara. He doesn’t have a fake leg and there is no reason why he shouldn’t; he has plenty of stump. I’m not sure what happened and I bet he isn’t either. I went out with a mirror feeling certain that, all things considered, he must be in a world of phantom pain. In a word, he’s not. Some peeps just get lucky. In a way, phantom pain is like life itself. Anyhow, I was perversely disappointed that he wasn’t in agony and equally perplexed as to why he wasn’t up and running, so to speak. His operation was in 2006. The wife gets pissed off cuz he’s not much help in the garden. He used to make his money as an organist and musical composer but found that after his trauma his creative talent dried up. This is super-common and not very well understood. Now he just kinda skootches around his hut on his ass, cuz he doesn’t even like his crutches. He couldn’t believe that I was on a bicycle. 10KM Town is fairly isolated. I was brought to him by my new Lao friend Onu who is both a first class chap and a number 1...
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If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itHeng, Country Director for The Trauma Care Foundation, bringing the mirrors to the peeps! The Mirror is The Message! Thank you...
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If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it Hopeful protesters, Freedom Square, Phnom Penh, before the heavies...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it‘Record Number of Peacekeepers Fail to Stop Wars’. That’s the title of a page 1 article in a recent edition of the Cambodia Daily. The article isn’t quite as nonsensical as it sounds; the gist of it is that, though the UN has deployed a record number of peacekeepers to trouble spots worldwide, a record number of clashes have broken out; from ‘Dirty Little Wars’ to conflicts tottering on something quite a bit more fearifying. Cambodia’s leader, Hun Sen, has got a powder keg in his dirty grabby little girly hands too. No ‘Blue Helmets’ have yet been dispatched but Hun Sen has certainly dispatched a handful of civilians. Aside from general dissatisfaction and unrest and the bald-faced certainty of ballot-box stuffing, he has other specific mosquitos whining in his ear. The garment workers are up in stones: they are striking, off and on, over their pitiful salaries. They managed to force the unions (many of whom are aligned with Hun Sen’s CPP) up from 71 to 80 to 95 and finally to 100 dollars per month. The last 5 bucks cost 5 lives. They’ve promised $160 (les promesse du putain!) by 2018, but 4 years more of living, traveling to and fro, and working stacked like cordwood in un-ventilated sweat bunkers with a growling tummy somehow seems unsavory to them. So they are protesting and they are getting shot. It bears mentioning that these threatening protesters are almost all women, poor, and 85 pounds wet. They also crank out a lot of clothing. This is, for example, one of the world’s chief dispersal centers for yoga pants. People like Vancouver’s own ‘Chip’, the CEO and founder of LULULEMON, the one who built a 37 million dollar palace along the most expensive strip of real estate in Canada, would have us believe that he’s a gift to the Cambodian economy, as he employs so many people… Hun’s heavies, for their part, can’t figure out who killed the workers – it wasn’t them. ‘We never shoot at a target to take a life… so we don’t know who killed them.’ All the garment workers were shot in the head or...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itOff to northern Lao tomorrow, and he`s off to work in the fields.’ ...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itHappy to be back in the Land of Blunder… I love it soooo...
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