WILDLIFE
Time to wind down Phnom Penh-way for a final kick at the curing phantoms cat. Fresh out of the hospital from the second surgery to my now crab-like hand, and bike-less for a change (I’d left it in storage for 10 days in PP), I decided to hop on a bus. There are dozens of bus companies operating all over Cambodia; most every bus is full to the rain gutters and, more or less, each company is worse than the next. The only time they’ll leave on-time is when you’re runnin’ late. They leave with a belch of black diesel smoke, a wail on the horn and lope down the center of the road all loose in the hips and rolling on spent rubber and next-to-nothing brakes. It was Khmer New Year, their biggest holiday of the year and one that lasts a full 2 weeks for most and more for some. So the buses were extra-full with peeps traveling to see their peeps and the roads were landmined with 2-day drunks. Positively wild out there: smoking hulks overturned in roadside ditches, everything with a motor and wheels insanely overloaded and the aforementioned drunks weaving through it all on baling wire step-throughs; leering and waving their hats like blottoed Don Quixotes. More determined step-throughs also snake by with three passengers aboard, the middle one hoisting an IV bag taped to a bamboo stick for a more ardent yet banged-up reveller who’s also aboard. The bus drivers themselves are notoriously aggressive and sanguine about their chances at arriving safely at their scheduled destination. They appear to come from two (and only two) schools: there is the ‘Happy Dragon’ school where they are taught to perform astoundingly irresponsible driving feats while trusting wholly in DESTINY to take care of the outcome; and then there are the alumni from the ‘No Brain No Pain’ school who literally go out there and play ‘Chicken’ with oncoming in the spirit of sport. I made’er down in one piece, which I thought was remarkable, but just after the Khmer New Year smoke cleared I read in the Cambodia Daily that this holiday season was a safe one: only 48 road deaths next to last year’s 58.
Phnom Penh during Khmer New Year… almost everything is shut right down; ghost town. It’s nice though; kinda like Paris in August. No trouble finding parking, even for my x-tra long Kona Ute. Everyone in Phnom Penh is from somewhere else, kinda like Vancouver. Here, though, they’re all from the provinces; Cambodia is a profoundly rural and agrarian country. They are also extraordinarily family oriented, so during this time everybody goes back to their home villages. In days-gone-by they would (and some still do) load up a bullock cart with rice and fodder and kids and grandfolks and dogs and whatall and trundle down the road from village to village visiting ALL their relations. They’d range widely, exchange rice for everything else they needed and not come home til ploughing time. In many ways it hasn’t changed that much, though there are more Camrys than bullock carts and more people flooding to the discos on the beach.
Of course you can’t get anything done during this time; there’s no one to see. My laptop flamed out, so did my cellphone and so did my electronic knee. They say bad things happen in threes, but I know from up-front personal experience that they can just as easily happen in tens. So I’m prepared. And meanwhile, while I’m waiting for people to come back to work and fix my shit, I’m reading, I’m writing, I’m going for rides up and down the river. I’ll ride over the ‘Japanese Friendship Bridge’ and go left along the East Bank. It’s amazing along this bank and only this bank and only if you head in a northwesterly direction; Phnom Penh instantly turns into its country bumpkin cousin. Dirt roads, cattle wandering around, fishermen mending nets and those same bullock carts groaning down the road with a load of pigs off to slaughter; all while you can actually still hear the din of traffic and the steel girders of the bridge moaning in the current behind you. And the further you go, the better it gets; as usual.
I’m reading Ramachandran, the guy who developed Mirror Therapy. It turns out he’s a very gifted and accessible writer, for a brainiac. Plus he has a charming and impish sense of humour, which goes a long way in my books. His two most available books are: ‘Phantoms in The Brain’ (1998) and ‘The Tell-Tale Brain’ (2011). It’s kinda required reading for me and great reading for anyone who’s interested in how their noodle works, and I figure we all should be; I mean, give your head a shake. Just kidding, but the other great book out there on the subject of how your mind works is Norman Doidge’s ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’. I haven’t read it yet, but I will. I will say though that reading about the brain makes your brain hurt; my inferior parietal lobules are killing me. I’m also reading ‘Lords of Poverty’, by Graham Hancock. It’s an expose on the corruption and ineffectiveness of the international aid world, which, in addition to my brain-pain, is giving a me a raucous sense of Moral Outrage. Shocking shit, plus it’s important to know your enemy. I’ve always thought that the UN were the bad guys; now I know for sure. Them along with outfits like the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Health Organization (WHO). More harm than good by a country mile, and an awful lot of people lining their pockets at the expense of the poor and miserable. It’s not pretty out there, so when it gets me down I stick my nose in a collection of Gavin Young’s travel essays and everything gets OK again. Without compassion we’re nowhere. Compassion keeps us human; and without humanity where would we be?
I read the papers too, from time-to-time. Cambodia has a couple good ones, particularly the ‘Cambodia Daily’. However, it’s just more evidence that it’s wild out there, especially during Khmer New Year. Guys getting shot in the face in discos; cops on cops; cops on peeps; military on cops; and, of course, rank-and-file peeps on peeps. It’s endless. I’ve said this before and I’ve said it, too, about the Philippines and Sri Lanka (only cuz I’ve been to these places), but it never ceases to amaze me that a people so outwardly warm and hospitable and familial can, at the same time, be so murderous. A terribly sad example of this occurred over the New Year up west of Pursat, in the Cardamom Mountains (is that not a lovely name?) near the Thai border. A very well-known and well-loved forest conservation officer (a Khmer guy) named Chutt Whutty (is that not a lovely name too?) was shot dead by the military police who in turn shot dead a private security guard (with an AK47 at face-to-face range) in order to blame it on him. So, case closed right? The two perps are dead, so there’s nothing to prosecute; they’ll skate over the forensics and weather out the news brouhaha and Bob’s your uncle. It happens all the time here and everyone’s in on it. Whutty was very vocal about the illegal logging of precious hardwoods in the Cardamoms and the Military is heavily involved and mightily profiting from said poaching; so they wasted him and they’ll all walk and blithely continue to rape their forests for dirty money.
Hardwood poaching is a huge problem in Cambodia and throughout S E Asia for that matter. Rosewood, and a lot of other more exotic wood besides, command huge prices on the market. A lot of the most prolific forests here are right along the Thai border; you get lots of cross-border poaching and cross-border shooting too. There’s another wood up in them hills too that causes a big ruckus. It’s called Marea Pareuh (something like that). It’s a relative of cinnamon and sassafras trees. Throughout the Cardamoms it’s illegally felled and chipped and distilled and rendered into an orange sweet-smelling oil called ‘safrole’ oil which is the precursor to MDMA and used in the production of the drug ‘ecstasy’. It’s fascinating, but people die there too, you can bet on that. Check out this clip of a great ‘Vanguard’ film called ‘Forest of Ecstasy’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hYPJX0rxtk&feature=relmfu&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLKse5ElqnNo&has_verified=1
Believe it or not, even meth, a brutal dope and one that one would think is the most chemical thing on earth, is derived from a root, and that root grows in the Cardamoms too. And, likewise, people are dying over that shit. Wild.
People are trickling back to work from their holidays and so it’s time for me to get back to work too. First up is the ‘Kien Khleang’ in Phnom Penh, just over the aforementioned ‘Japanese Friendship Bridge’. It’s Cambodia’s national rehab center and its biggest. Inside the gates it’s a regular village as there are many different medical buildings, various courtyards, playing fields and volleyball courts (Cambodians LOVE volleyball). There are food stalls and drink vendors and snoozing relatives everywhere… and me and my mirrors on my UTE. The actual rehab center is run by Veterans International http://www.ic-vic.org/ and at least partly funded by USAID – a relatively rare case of the bad guys doing something good. There’s another Vancouver-based organization called The End The Pain Project, see : http://endthepainproject.org/ and they have been here before, at least once, disseminating on mirror therapy and handing out mirrors. So I was reluctant to return, feeling that I may just be redundant, but the directors were keen to see me and both ETPP and I have found through experience that it’s valuable, where possible, to visit and revisit clinics and clinicians and the amputees themselves to make sure that the therapy is forefront in the minds of staff, the mirrors aren’t collecting dust, and the amps are continuing to treat themselves. Object One is to get peeps to take their own well-being into their own hands – and sometimes we all need to be reminded.
So a great visit to a dynamite facility full of friendly professional people. They see an enormous turn-over of amputees (they make prosthetics and orthotics here as well) and they are basically an optimal locale to both spread the word and get to people while they are still fresh off their trauma. They also have 4 or 5 other rehab facilities spread around Cambodia, so I will have the opportunity to visit and revisit them too. I had a brief meeting with Song Sith, the clinic director and Bak Tokyo the Country Director. Tokyo is also the director of the National Society for Rehabilitation and he invited me to come and speak at the National Congress for Pain and Rehabilitation in December, a request both flattering and exciting for me. I’ll do it.
Back in town a couple nites later I had a shitty pizza and a couple of glasses of shitty wine for dinner and a few hours later was spewing all over the bathroom and by-and-by found myself curled up naked on the bathroom floor shivering in the heat with big stomach pain. I was cursing the restaurant and then I thought a little harder on it and realized that I was only spewing from the one end, so-to-speak, and that the pain in my abdomen was formidable and unusual. I tried to sleep it off and the pain just mounted so that at, like, 4h30 am, I got scared enough to screw up my courage and pull on my leg, stagger through the hotel lobby and tumble into a tuk-tuk for an agonizing ride to the Calmette Hospital. I was mostly worried about the possibility of an appendix attack, cuz that shit’ll kill you. Anyhow it appeared that misfortune had come home to roost again, already. By mid-day I’d had a sonogram and a couple x-rays and they were rolling me in a wheelchair with an IV bag all over what is a very big hospital indeed. They’d surmised that something was wrong in my left kidney area but couldn’t find an actual stone or other obstruction. They worked me over good: 8 x-rays, a CT scan and an MRI all on the same day, which strikes me as a whole lot of radiation. The upside is I prolly won’t have to get snipped; the downside is I may well wake up one morning to find, like, ears growing out of the middle of my back. They were hitting me with IV antibiotics (yet again, argh!) and jacking me in the ass (they called it my hip, but it was patently my ass) with pain killers and anti-inflammatories. But that wasn’t the worst of it; the worst of it was my room-mates.
Theoretically that would be ‘room-mate’ as I was in a double room… but not in Cambodia. My neighbor was a young man from the villages (you can always tell by the feet). He was in for jaundice, judging by his Poupon Gris complexion, and I learned later that he had a graver as-yet-undiagnosed problem, as was evinced by the brace of IV bags hanging from his stand. He was crazier than a rat in a coffee can too, but even that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was his wife, his father, his family, her family, his father’s friends, his father’s business acquaintances and, for all I know, complete fucking strangers were coming in to visit this clown… all day long and deep into the evening. His wife was LIVING with us – 24/7. She slept on a mat beside his bed surrounded by dozens of cheapass plastic shopping bags stuffed with redolent unhygienic foodstuffs and gawd knows whatall else. And that was the sound-track to my eternal 3 day stay: dozens of different people endlessly rummaging through plastic bags for shit. They were Cham Muslims as well, which complicated matters, cuz she was veiled (she was pretty hot, too, from what I could see; I mean, she had nice ankles) and every time I was about to do something immodest like drop trow to get my ass injected, I had to signal her and she’d dive down under his bed for fear of committing the sin of ogling a giant white over-aged one-legged barang. The old man, who was clearly very devout, slept over (on the floor beside his daughter-in-law) a couple times too. I was woken then by his cellphone calling him to prayer at 5 am. Good Muslims world-over have their watches, cellphones, radios and cars programmed to prompt them 5 times/day. Mealtimes were worst tho; sometimes there’d be 6 or 8 of them over there squatting on the floor and munching away. I half expected to see one of them shuffling in with an armload of kindling and a goat on a tether. Jaysus. Many Asians eat with a lot of lip-smacking and other voluble and diverse palatal noises and I’ve always found it off-putting. I know, I know, but I just can’t help myself. This action was like a hundred octopi climbing out of a leaking aquarium. And to top that, the guy himself, the patient that is, had a bigtime actual Parkinsonian tic which launched him into spasms of gobsmacking and tooth-sucking and hoicking and barking. A genuine horror show punctuated by the thong-slap of myriad feet heading for ‘our’ ensuite bathroom and then the sound of birdsplash and endlessly running water as one villager after the next explored the luxury of hot water raining out of a bonafide shower head, a wash basin with twin controls and a flush toilet. The hospital is well-inured to these types of provincial visitations; there is a pictogram above the toilet of a man feet-up and squatting on the toilet with a big red circle and a stroke through it all… .
I couldn’t beat it outa there fast enough, but I had to make my way past the cash register first and a fleecing was afoot. The Calmette was founded by the French and is funded by the humanitarian org ‘Medecins Sans Frontieres’, but it seems, billing-wise anyways, that the ‘frontieres’ stopped just short of me. They rolled me for 600 bucks, which pales next to, say, the States; but I know another guy who got treated for a similar problem in Cambodia for 13 bucks. I’m just saying. Where they got me was in helping them pay for their expensive and already dated MRI and CAT scan machines and the dye they shot in my veins. They dinna have to do that, but who was I to say no? Oi Gefeldt.
I needed to ride off being bed-ridden and miserable and gut-bothered so I booked a gig 2 days South at the Cambodia Trust’s rehab clinic in Sihanoukville, a coastal resort town on the Gulf of Thailand. I found a place on the map called ‘Teung Traveng’ about 105kms from PP where I figured I’d prolly run out of gas … and so I did. There are exactly 3 guesthouses in town and I chose one down a red dirt road in a mango grove and drank 3 quick beers with the fat transvestite proprietress before I had a hoppity birdbath from the giant plastic water bucket in my bathroom which felt as good as any ol’ 5 star shower I’ve ever had. It was head-windy and intermittently rainy and truck buffetty alldaylong and plus, alldaylong, my right ass-cheek was killing me from all the needle-jabs and prolly unnecessary noxins that the Calmette had hoaxed me with and, anyhow, I was both peppered and shelled. I found a plate of rice and chicken and a bowl of cucumbers uptown and then hit the sack. The next day, into Sihanoukville on the coast, was a full 140 kms with some serious-ass hills at the end, the same bluster and worse rain. I went soft a couple of times and considered sticking out my thumb, but I ploughed on. 70 kms from the end I stopped for a bowl of rice and my 7th litre of water and 26 kms from the end I ate my last 2 mini bananas and phoned Billy in the slashing rain and said I just might make it, and Billy, bless his heart, came out from Sihanoukville on a rented step-thru and kicked my ass up the final hill. Our friend Mike Rowley came out on his own mountain bike for extra-extra support and guided me into town along a shortcut that eliminated the final climb which I may well not have made ‘er up anyhow. Cheers, mates. 8 litres of water, 6 mini-bananas and a bowl of rice and frogs. That’s not a pretty footprint, but it’s a small one, all in, next to a UN convoy of 8 armoured Range Rovers plus outriders… .
Billy was meant to bring the mirrors with him on da bus, but he forgot; which is something, of course, that we all do, but something that potheads may do more frequently than others. He phoned his daughter and leaned on her to bus them next morning (my seminar was booked for 2pm) and she came thru, bless her heart, but could only afford to ship half of them. I’m now down to using glass mirrors, cuz they are a lot cheaper than acrylic, but they’re real heavy and downright dangerous; I can’t carry more than 5 or 6 a time on the bike. So I was all panicky and Billy never panics. At 1:25 we went to a glassier and had him cut us a small batch of long leg mirrors and at 1:47 we were at the bus depot picking up the daughter-sent mirrors from PP and at 1:59 we were at Cambodia Trust’s rehab clinic nestled on the grounds of the Kampong Som Provincial Hospital… nice; Billy rarely misses.
CT’s clinic is an oasis in a relatively beat-up hospital compound and it’s pretty small; they only have 6 or 8 technicians and therapists plus Men Thavro their super-kind director. But there is a world of amps down South there too, and many of them pass through those doors. So I’m teaching staff again and not so much treating amps, which is not only fine, it thrills me. It jacks my dissemination rate. What I’m really trying to focus on is getting these clinics to set up what I call an ‘Admissions Protocol’ which simply means adding an extra box to check on every in-patient’s file: Do you experience phantom limb pain? YES/NO. This, til now, has not been done at all in Cambodia and I beg to say it’s rare world-over and I can’t for the life of me imagine why. Of course that simple question may elicit a world of query and delicate explanation, so maybe not so simple after all, but that’s what healing is all about, isn’t it? You can’t just give somebody pills and tell them to come back when they’re empty… .
They were all super-receptive and super-friendly and I consider it a model visit. At that hour there was only one amputee in the room and she was a lovely tiny woman of indeterminable age quietly putting herself thru her own paces between the parallel bars with her new Cambodia Trust AK prosthesis. Slow goin’ for sure. She was quietly also keeping her eye on us and, after 45 mins or so when I’d said my schtick (I’m getting a little bit better, a little shorter-winded), I said, ‘Well, have you asked her yet?’ We all kinda scrambled up together and, much to my joy (sort of) she started nodding and pointing to various places where her leg is no more that just fucking KILL her. After a spell I packed up my snake oil (leaving the fresh-wrought mirrors behind) and parted, sayin’, ’Well, here’s your first customer.’
Back in Phnom Penh the rains have come and I’m thinking it’s time for me to git gone. At this point, I mean, the rains aren’t a total deal-breaker, but they’re heavy. They tend to hit between 3 and 5 pm and last an hour or three. Hard-core when it comes down tho, boy. When the first drops hit, smacking down hard like Venusian butter pats, half the people bolt. Certainly the infamous 1 % do, for fear of their coifs. There’s a 5% sub-strata that don’t, and they’re very picturesque: the tuk-tuk drivers, asleep in the back of their tatty rigs, keep their eyes closed (they’ve done this before), and reach out with prehensile toes and undo the tidy knots of their oiled canvas sidings and let them drop. Nothing changes the pace of the ‘Ciclo’ drivers who may or may not drape something over themselves and may or may not drape something over the slatted bucket which should contain a client … they swim, slowly, thru this soft aqueous mayhem like antediluvian creatures; like they were born to it. On the quay, the kids, who never have much on anyways, strip down and take running dives at the French marble and skate on their chests in the rainsmack for 20 feet and more. Guys like me go to the bars and hope for the best for all and sundry.
You can hope all you want and it may well do shit. I’ve set some birds free and tied monkish strings round my wrist and also, tho rarely, bought lottery tickets. Meantime now the rain is positively Hammering. Smashing. Anything like a gutter or a rain-spout: it’s positively gouting out; it’s sheeting an inch thick down the walls. There’s a guy out there just now with an already inverted giant garden umbrella…. He appears to be using it for protection… I mean it’s REALLY raining…so he’s protecting himself with the blown-out garden umbrella and at the same time using its pointy end to try and clear the drain-grate infront of his house – there’s flooding everywhere and he’s in danger of losing his trousers cuz the side-wind is blowing so hard – there’s yer monsoon, if not yer despair. Mummies and Aunties and Nannies of every description are outfront of every doorway dandling Cambodia’s future and showing them the law of the land. It’s pretty wild out there and this is how we roll.
It’ll settle, of course, but I won’t; I’m not done with this place. I don’t think anyone who’s ever been to Cambodia has ever said, ‘I’m done with this place.’ And so neither am I. I’ll be a keynote speaker at the Southeast Asian Pain and Rehabilitation Congress on December 12th in Phnom Penh at the behest of Veterans International; there are still thousands of amputees – tens of thousands – in Cambodia alone who I have not seen and who are, as I write, suffering from phantom limb pain. Lom Orng, the Khmer Phnom Penh/Battambang relief organization I’ve been working with, have plenty more for me to do too, in 8 provinces throughout Cambodia and up into Laos too… plenty to do. Hell, I just may stay on; Blair says if I marry his Cambodian nanny he’ll carve me an acre of prime farmland up Banan-way. I can see myself as a gentleman farmer, or better yet, maybe a cricket ranch; it’s real low intensity ranching. All you need is a big roll of poly, a bunch of sticks and a bunch of plastic tubs and you’re good to go. I’ll use wild brood-stock and maybe push the genetics a bit and breed some real whoppers. Anything’s possible.
I’m back in Vancouver now looking back fondly at what was a truly eye-opening and gratifying adventure and one that was often very enjoyable too. As I said, I’m already planning my return. There are dozens of people whom I should thank, aside, that is, from the Legendary Wild Bill Irwin. For now I’ll keep it to a big thanks to: Sisary Kheng, the Country Director of The Cambodia Trust, to Sam Pok the Director of Lom Orng (and his side-kick Henry) and also to Dottore Nicola Donati of the Handa Emergency Hospital, who stitched me up the second time and made it stick. Thanks from the heart.
