LIGHTS ON IN WONDERLAND
After the second or third time I asked, Heng just gave me a withering look and said, “Don’t ask. Up here it’s ALL landmines. No diabetes, cancer, road accidents. Every single amp you see is a bomb victim.” They are ALL ex-soldiers too; up there, one would have to surmise that they are ex-Khmer Rouge. We are up in On-Noung, Samlot District at the Trauma Care Foundation workshop. Everybody who works in the shop is an amp; there’s every size and shape of them: uni-lateral BKs, unilateral AKs, bi-laterals of every description and lots of blindness and other assorted shrapnel wounds. Everybody who works in the shop gets 50 bucks a month regardless of their disability and they all have their respective tasks. An incredibly heart-warming display of fraternity and humanity.
Principally, at the moment, in the shop they will fabricate anything you need as an amp to get you on the move and get you back to work. Crutches, canes, walkers, wheelchairs from the ground up and, their flagship piece, ‘The Farmer Leg’, in all its permutations according to your amp-ness. The workshop itself is rustic, sure, but well-designed, well-kept and lovingly maintained, and so are the outbuildings and they need them because the place is also an unofficial community centre and, village-style, people will often find a spare hammock and stay the night. They stay for meals too, which is, of course, problematic for Heng as he never knows how much food to buy. Happily, a lot of it grows on trees which shade the yard.
They also have one of the few generators in the area plus a compressor and a welding kit. So everybody drops by to charge car batteries (for household lights at night), pump tires etc and repair farm equipment. A great community service; Lights On In Wonderland. All the other amps drop by too, and here’s where we’re onto something, because all amps employed at the workshop responded to the therapy with great alacrity, to the point where 2 volunteered immediately for deeper explanations and to take up the torch in my absence and teach other local amps how to take their own well-being into their own hands and treat themselves. It’s a first for me and I’m extremely pleased. Nean (pictures forthcoming) is my first Khmer ‘therapist’ – he won due to sheer enthusiasm – and his sidekick (whom I jokingly just call ‘Brother Number 2’) are busy teaching the technique to others as we speak. And that ain’t nuthin’, because On-Noung is in the heart of Samlot district and there are over 600 other amps in that district alone and, by-and-by, they will mostly all pass by the workshop. Heng is making a banner just now – no Me And My Mirror logo and, for that matter, no Trauma Care Foundation logo either – just a big banner facing the dirt road on the outside of the workshop (1st in Khmer and then in English) that says: ‘Free Pain Treatment Using Mirror Therapy For All Amputees’. They know how to make the mirrors now too; so it really IS Lights On.
TCF do so much else up there too. More vocational training: moto and TV repair, carpentry, animal husbandry, fish (very small fish, it must be said) farming, mushrooms (the non-hallucinogenic type) and other agri-projects ie: free land to farm for the poor, widows and amps. They do micro-loans, seed bank, savings counseling/mgt; they are very invested in obstetric intervention (devastating infant and mama mortality rates), so they have trained emergency intervention staff, equipment and protocol. They teach natal and pre-natal education and construct ‘waiting houses’ and they train TBAs (Traditional Birthing Assistants – I think). Lots more too. Heng describes it as ‘chain of survival’ measures from the top down.
Up until, like, last week, he was funded by Norwegians, NORAD, I believe, which I also believe is a government agency. And they’ve pulled his funding and so all this is in very real danger of disbanding and disappearing. Very sad indeed.
There have been a lot of concrete improvements for a people who have a very difficult and tragic lot indeed. And, too, there are plenty of other NGOs in the region who are either totally ineffective or, worse, are busy beating the locals over the head with bibles.
Again, it’s remote, and so for example, many of the amps there choose to roll on what I call ‘Captain Ahab Legs’. No better than table legs (for above-the-knee guys too, ie: zero knee). They could get a free leg if they made their way to the International Red Cross in Battambang, but these guys are literally too busy supporting their families spend the 3 weeks (and the money) it would take to go the city and get a proper leg cast and fit. It’s heartbreaking; I’ve heard it many times before and seen examples of this predicament much closer to Battambang or, for that matter, Phnom Penh. On the 3rd morning I was woken from my hammocky slumber at 05h30 by what sounded like Ahab himself banging down the decks of the ‘PEQUOD’ with his harpoon in his hand. I parted the mosquito net to see the local carpenter humping across the forecourt wearing nothing but a lungi and one of these legs and easily 100 pounds of mature palm trunk on his shoulder (he peels it with a machete and feeds the shavings to his pigs).
Getting there by bike is a bit of an adventure. There’s the heat; there’s always the heat. And there’s often, it seems, a headwind. There sure was this time. But it’s pretty and all with the little subsistence farms and whirring cricket roar to let you know you’re getting into cricket ranch country. First though there’s the hilltop Wat across from Crocodile Mountain before you hit a broad plain encircled by low mountains. Out of season rice paddies and their checkerboard of levees as far as the eye can see. Everything is washed in apricot light (it’s still only 07h30) and graced by the amiable and elegant munching Brahma cattle. The functional part of a cricket trap is a small upright piece of white polyethylene and they are dotted everywhere like a regatta of dinghy sails on a sea of rice stubble.
It’s a few hours of picturesque riding (which is relatively rare throughout much of Cambodia) to the turnoff at a truly ugly town called ‘Treng’. By Treng I’m already feeling toasted and in need of food. So I stop at one of two open-fronted restaurants (the same one I stopped in a year ago) for, like, 3 litres of water and a bowl of rice topped with something that looked and tasted like chicken (disturbingly small chicken with kind of double-jointed knees). The woman serving me is friendly enough, but the guys, especially the older guys, are ferocious-browed and they are positively scouring me with black looks. More than one is one-eyed and many are talisman-tatted and they are all ex-soldiers and this is Khmer Rouge country. The KR, um, Spiritual Homeland, where they finally retreated to and where there are still abundant sympathizers is Pailin, just a handful of kms further down the road. In these parts I often have the sense of walking into an old Wild West Saloon. Just crack a smile though and they are all grins and shoving tea mugs and cutlery and every other gawdamned thing at me. As Billy says, ‘They’re the nicest mass-murderers you’ll ever want to meet!’
From the turnoff at Treng there are maybe 5kms of asphalt and then it’s 30 kms of fawn siena-colored dirt road and ramping terrain, mango orchards and logged-over hilltops to the town of Samlout, then another 18kms upcountry to On-Noung and the workshop. There’s no real town to speak of, just the workshop compound and a big general store across the road. At dusk after the sessions or sometimes between the morning and afternoon session I would sneak off for a discovery ride. Just a few kms further West you round a corner and suddenly face a range of high mountains and the Thai border. There are Bailey bridges and skewed wooden plank bridges, stripped-down motos (it seems to be the local fashion) and everywhere those low-slung goofy and lethal Chinese tractors that look like catapults ever-ready to hurl their human and material loads into oncoming trucks. I’ll stop for a secret beer and the shop girl will fish around in one of Cambodia’s ubiquitous orange coolers, tentatively hand it to me and jump back like a new squirrel. They don’t get a lot of the likes of me up here.
On my way back, fully 2 kms from the shop, I pass Brother Number 2 walking proudly right down the center of the road. Going home for the evening and holding on tight to his notebook and his new mirror. Another one-legged guy goes by with a mirror. He’s on a Mad Max-style moto and changing gears with a stick. Just before dusk dinner arrives, fully-feathered, upside-down and very much alive under the throttle fist of another one-legged moto rider. Everywhere bottomless charm, limitless pathos and joyful ingenuity. A couple of generators stutter to life and it’s Lights On for a brief evening before everyone swings themselves to sleep in their hammocks.
