Poco a poco… .
Just over a week now in Phnom Penh. First couple of days I sure wasn’t good for much as this place really drops a bomb on your senses. I’m settling now and seeing more charm in this city every day. The river accounts for a lot of the charm; it’s big and broad with a powerful current and actually two rivers cuz the Mekong is joined by a big tributary, the Tonle Sap, right smack in front of town. There’s a big and well-done promenade for miles down there and it seems every day most locals head down there at some point over the day. At 5 on the nose all 4 lanes of the road that runs parallel get jammed; some of it’s the after-work crowd but lots or most is just peeps getting out for a look-see.
After dark a cool wind mercifully blows from upstream and hundreds of folks gather there to do a funky kind of low-impact jazzercise, to kick around a ball or to eat gawd knows whatall from a million carts. Actually I do know one thing they’re eatin’ and it’s bugs. Big ass bugs; and a variety of them too. I had me a little sample, I mean a teeny one. I had no choice whatsoever; it was a peer-pressure thing. I chose a cricket leg (a rear one, so I’m not totally feeble). It was tasty. They actually deep-fry mofo Tarantulas, if you can believe that. I was in a canteen when an ex-pat Kiwi took one out of a bag and ate it, bit by bit; the whole thang. There was no way he coulda eaten it, like, shooter-style – it was 5 inches long anyhow and all, of course, hairy. When he broke a leg off the thorax or whatever you call the giant round part that’s filled with venom and shit, well, you could see actual meat inside the leg, lots of it, and it was kind of creamy white. If you could get over the fact that it was hairy on the outside … and arachnoid … it would probably be both filling and succulent. I mean, lobsters are bugs. As you can see, I still can’t get it out of my head. Then there’s the sad part and that is that during the worst parts of the many years of civil war and oppression, an awful lot of people had zero choice but to eat bugs. I guess you can develop a taste for anything.
The Khmer Rouge regime was easily one of, if not the, most savage and senseless in modern history, and Cambodians are clearly still traumatized and blown backwards by it all. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, cuz they’re such a fundamentally joyous and gentle people, plus they are really bouncing back; but it’s there man, and it’s sinister. And let’s not forget the millions of explosive remnants of the American aggression along the Thai and Laotian borders. And I haven’t even got up anywhere near there.
For now, I’m busy trying to establish a partnership/partnerships with the local and international community here in PP that are occupied with either mine removal or amputee rehab/re-mobilization. It’s slow going. There’s the language issue and the big international concerns are usually at least a little hobbled by chain-of-command issues; one reason why I wanna stay just me, myself and I.
But I’m persistent and resourceful if nothing else. I might have to start gate-crashing. And I ain’t above that: I take nothing from them and give nothing but a little knowledge and a lot of relief. There have been some breakthroughs too. Next week I’ll be meeting with both The Cambodian Red Cross and a promising looking and effective NGO out of the UK called “The Cambodia Trust”. They make inexpensive prosthetics, rehab amps and teach prosthetics to locals. They also have extensive activities in the trouble areas in the North. One solution might be to head on up to Siem Reap, which is another NGO mecca and is much closer to the bombed areas. There’s a near mythological gentleman up there, a Cambodian, a reformed ex-Khmer Rouge, who pioneered mine removal using just a bamboo stick with a pen-knife lashed to the end. He has the country’s only land mine museum, a numberless following of legless and armless urchins and has never stopped going out into the Killing Fields and uncovering UXO.
His name is Aki Ra, you can WIKI him; he’s quite a character.
I just gotta find him.
January 18th will be a good night, that’s for sure. I’ll be screening my film at the Meta House here which is both The German-Cambodian Cultural Center and a very popular congregation-point for the expat community in general. I’m gonna try to promote the shit out of it and use it as both a fund raiser and a mirror therapy demo as well as a way get wind in the sails of my big little project. I wish you all could be there.
