Arriving in Phnom Penh after having been on the country side for a considerable amount of time, is like entering a whole new world. Everything is overwhelming. You are immediately stuck in the traffic that always makes me feel suicidal, as there are no rules that are followed and everyone is trying to arrive at their destination as fast as possible. It is always an adventure; you can never be sure where you will land in the end. You will go past streets that are filled with stores that are all selling one and the same thing, as they believe in the magic of bargaining. In that way you can walk down the whole street, in search of a screwdriver, asking for the price in every store. This is of course only possible, if the same product is sold at the same place. In Germany we would find this inconvenient, as we had to drive through the whole city to do our shopping, but here the rules are quite different. It is all about finding the cheapest things. So there is for example a street that sells exclusively screwdrivers. Another option is to go to the market, where you can find basically everything. The O’Russei market in Phnom Penh is a giant shopping mall, made of sideways that seem to lead into a labyrinth that will never let you out again. There you can buy Vietnamese coffee in giant plastic bags that look like they contain flower soil, false moustaches, false money and false passports, old lamps that might hide genies living inside, rise wine that contains snake and scorpion blood or false teeth. I saw many times, how tourists try to lower the price when they are at the market. They look at the goods, turn them around, weigh them in their hand, so long until the seller really knows that they are willing to pay any price for it. When Rathana is going to shop at the market, for example when she is buying a bag, she is looking at it for about a second, taking it with thumb and index finger, just to let it fall down in the next second. Then she asks in the most casual kind of way how much it will cost. When she hears the price she laughs and then turns around to walk away. After two meters, the shop women gets nervous, after three meters she shouts a different price after her. Rathana keeps walking, until the price is down where she wants it to be. Then she comes back, pays and takes the bag with her. That is the way to do it. In my opinion this takes long years of practice, but Cambodian women really have the skill to to do it. They also love to compare their groceries, talking about who made the better deal for the fresh mangos.
Phnom Penh can be a frightening place, full of fortune tellers, herbal witches and tuc tuc drivers that are shouting at you and grabbing your bag, trying to charge you more money than you would need to drive on a train from Munich to Augsburg. Tuc Tuc drivers can earn a lot of money when they speak decent English. As the education system in Cambodia is still so bad that nobody who is completing it, is really competitive on the global market and nations like Thailand and Vietnam lie far ahead, most English speakers work in the tourism sector, mostly as tuc tuc drivers. That is why some of the tuc tuc drivers have really good English skills, but can’t read a map and don’t know anything about the city. They have no idea where they are going to, when it is not the royal palace or the S21. They are coming from the country side and try to earn a living. There is no license needed and who is doing a good job, can save up enough money to eventually open up a shop. Some of them begin to be very creative when it comes to collecting customers. They speak some sentences in German, French and Spanish and shout them when you are walking past them. One once said to me: “Ein Tuc Tuc Fräulein?”. Another tuc tuc driver had a sign in his hands saying: “I won’t shout at you, follow you or annoy you in any other way, but if you need a tuc tuc, I’m right here.” Every tourist shop sells a t-shirt that says: “No tuc tuc today”. The tuc tucs are a great example that shows Phnom Penh can be both, heaven and hell. It depends if you can find your way around, know some people and look at the right places. Then the air polluted, skyscraper front can suddenly turn into an idyllic place, full of art, music, fashion and creative ideas.
I went to Phnom Penh last Friday and met Vichka. It is so nice to have her, as she lives in Phnom Penh since five years and really knows all about the city. Additionally I am just half as scared when I am driving on her motorbike. Her flat is in an apartment high up in a skyscraper and she has a large balcony from where you can see the whole city. For the first time since I got to Cambodia, I went to the cinema. Vichka persuaded me to watch a horror movie with her, “The Boy Next Door” and I basically screamed the whole movie through, what reminded me of why I normally rather watch Disney films. Before we went home for dinner we visited an art gallery (what I really, really missed too, as I am an eighteen year old girl that deliberately decides to spend her free time going to the museum) and then we went shopping for groceries. I stepped into a real supermarket with air-conditioning and loudspeakers, advertising the latest discounts. Vichka went for the section with the meat and I reluctantly followed after her. It was like going in an aquarium; everywhere I could see fishes in the most shining colours bubbling behind their glasses. Not only fishes, but crabs and tortoises, too. I couldn’t stop Vichka from buying some frogs that were on sale, but at least the tortoise stayed behind the glass. Apparently frogs taste just like chicken.
I visited Buntha when I came home from Phnom Penh, and we tried the 30 day Youtube yoga challenge. It was pretty hilarious. We both sat inside her house on a mat and tried to out our limbs in the weirdest positions, laughing so much that I was sure we trained our abs more than anything else. The next day, I realized that I couldn’t stand up anymore. I had sore muscles everywhere, it hurt so much I was positive I would have to spend the whole day in bed. Only with pure willpower I managed to get up and face the daily challenges. It has gotten better, but now, five days later, I can still feel it. Yoga is torture.
On Sunday I met Sopheak, because she invited me to come and visit her family on the countryside. Her sister would get engaged. We left Takeo at around four o’clock in the afternoon and squeezed in a little bus that was so stuffed that I just can’t describe it. Just so much: I was basically sitting on a (living) duck. When the driver dropped us off, we waited for one of Sopheaks cousins to pick us up. On our way to the house of Sopheaks parents, I had to stop three times at several houses to meet all of Sopheaks relatives. Every time I had to sit down, eat and drink something and answer all kind of questions about myself. They wanted to know if my parents were as tall as me, if I was married already and why I didn’t eat any meat. Just the usual inquiry. When we arrived at the second house that belonged to Sopheaks great uncle, their neighbors had just killed a dog and roasted it over the fire. I couldn’t sit there and watch that, it was just too horrible. Additionally the dog was rather skinny and wouldn’t offer much meat anyway. I get that they are poor and why should it be okay that we eat rabbits, pigs and cows, but not dogs? It’s just that I am used to dogs being treated as dearly loved animals and not food. Sopheaks aunt asked if I didn’t like dogs and preferred cat. Sometimes situations are just too bizarre. When we arrived at the house of Sopheaks parents, we were apparently just half an hour away from the Vietnamese border. And there were really Vietnamese ships secured on the harbour of the little river. This might be the most uncommon way to get over the border as a tourist. There were so many mosquitos around me, I felt like I wouldn’t have any blood left the next day. I got everyone to laugh when I said in Khmer “Mosquitos love me, but I don’t love them.”, “Mu srolaing knyom, bondtai kynom meun srolaing mu.” We all slept in the kitchen on the floor and when I asked Sopheak where I could get water from, she said I should just use the brown rain water from the jar. Well then. The next morning I woke up from the smell of food. Everyone around me was still asleep, but Sopheaks mother was cooking some meters next to our sleeping place. I got up to see if I could help her and when I looked in the pot, I saw that she was cooking ants. That was too much for me. Frogs, dogs and ants in less than two days? I turned around and tried to get some more sleep.
As soon as the first guests arrived, we all went upstairs and placed trays with fruit and rice, just as smoking sticks everywhere. Then the monks came to bless the engaged couple and their hands were intertwined by ribbons. Everyone had to come afterwards and offer the couple a donation. When I was sitting in the crowd, listening to the monk chanting, several elderly women came and began touching my skin. I tried to ignore it, while the smoke of the joss sticks was filling my nostrils. Little children were crawling over me and the sound of the monks chanting was filling the air. The beauty of the atmosphere during these ceremonies is special. It is like you can feel the holy spirits personalizing in the smoke that is curling in the air, laying a mysterious atmosphere over everything you can see. Everyone seems to be in a state of inner peace, murmuring the words they know since many years. These processions give them a feeling of identity and belonging. It is even more powerful to see all these people connected through their thoughts, history, tradition, fates and bloodlines, celebrating together because they believe in the ever returning circle of life, the karma and dharma. It is something magic. And no terror regime could make the people forget and give up these customs.
A big problem in Cambodia are the mines. They are still lying around everywhere and nobody can be sure that it is safe to walk aside the tracks. Sometimes there are signs that say that mines are around and you bring yourself in life danger, if you overstep the border. Everywhere in Cambodia you can see people that have missing limbs. There are just so many mines, too many for the organizations that are busy with removing them. With the little the government is doing to clear the fields, they have no chance against the amount that is still hidden in the landscapes. The most horrible thing is, when it is child victims that you are seeing. Their future is so determined by their disability. A new movement opens up more and more centers for mine victims, where they can learn a job that serves the community, but only a very small percentage of people have the luck to join one of these programs. Some people even moved away from their homeland after the war, as it was just not safe for them there anymore. As bad as the situation is, it gets better. One thing that the mines brought to the country, is the prevention of the rain forestation. Nobody dared to walk far up in the mountains, or the jungle, that is why the nature there is still pure and untouched, the flora and fauna still of an incredible variety. You can find tigers, sun bears and gibbons in the wild nature, more species have survived than in most of other development countries.
We finally finished the Cinderella play this week. It was a long process of getting the children from reading to acting, making Cinderella loose her shoe and the fairy swing her magic wand, but in the end it worked out. I was glad to having made two different casts for the play, meaning two queens, two kings and two stepmothers, so that they could help each other and develop a kind of competitiveness, when they see that their counterpart already knew all the lines already. My next project is going to be a reading group. I already have one with older children with whom I meet up every week, but this time I gave all the 28 children in my class from 5 to 6 a different book, that they need to prepare in one week. They have three questions that they need to answer: “What is the story about?”, “How can you describe the main characters?”, “What can you learn from it?”. I want them to stand in front of the class and hold the presentation, speaking free about the book. This is something they would never actually do in school, what’s they reason why it is even more important that we are doing it. Being able to read a book and talk about it, can be a skill so precious, it teaches you about life itself.
We continued with our cooking workshop, making pancakes with banana. They looked so delicious and fluffy, I wish I could have eaten them all. I don’t know what is the secret of pancakes, but they seriously are much more delicious than crepes and this is a fact. Next time we are going to make spaghetti, I promised.
I dedicated the last week, to clean up the Learning Center and sort the books in the library. It might be a Sisyphos work, but well… the cooking books were in the science department and everything else was pretty much the same messed up pandemonium. The longer I am working for Bookbridge, the more I am convinced that it is actually not a good idea to donate English books to the Learning Centers. For instance, the way the books are brought into the country (with containers by ship) is very bad for the environment. Then most of the books (for example Shakespeare or Jane Austen) are far too difficult for the children to read. And not only these examples, many books are simply not fitting for the children that come into the Learning Centers. I am very happy that we got a lot of Khmer books in the past months what changed the atmosphere in the library drastically. The children are beginning to actually sit down and read, rather than look at the pictures and start to borrow the books. More and more children from the surrounding villages come to make library cards and the lines in front of Rathanas desk are getting longer on a daily basis. I know that in my library in Germany, there is one shelf for books in English and that’s it. After the Khmer Rouge killed nearly every person in the country with education, there nearly are no parents left that teach their children about the joy of reading. They don’t grow up reading, have no books at home, nobody who is reading bed time stories to them. It is not natural for them to just begin reading. And surely not in English. We also should not forget, that they didn’t only have to learn a whole new language, but a whole new alphabet what makes it even more difficult. How wonderful is it though, to see the children coming to read? That is all we can really ask for and when they begin to read easy books in English (maybe even on their own) then we should see how special this actually is. In my opinion we should replace the eight shelfs with English books with Khmer books and offer one shelf with English books instead. And we should buy them in Cambodia to support the local market.
I wonder sometimes, how so many people can live on the same earth, smile the same way, cry the same way, have a heart that beats the same way and seek for love and happiness… yet we still pretend to be so different from one another. I have learned, that there are many more resemblances than differences between humans. We live between heaven and hell and some of us might turn their face to the wrong side of life. We should show everyone the same respect, help and support each other, rather than make things so much more difficult than they actually are.
captivatingcambodia 