A busy day

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As promised, some photos from last night's performance.

Today I took what turned out to be a fairly long tour, The Villa Siem Reap Hotel's "Make a Difference" tour. It was me and a couple from Hawaii, so there was plenty of time for conversation. We began at Artisans d'Angkor's silk farm and craftperson training site. They do some really beautiful work there and I've been happy with the silk items I bought in 2006. Although Cambodia used to have a silk trade, during the Khmer Rouge period the mulberry trees were chopped down and the silkworms were eaten. Replacement trees and larvae have been reinstated. The training institute focuses on talented youth, often rural, often with little education.

We next stopped at the Khmer Ceramics and Bronzes Centre but I didn't see evidence of bronze work, and it was pretty lackluster. I'll presume that because it was Sunday there wasn't a lot going on.

We then tried to go to Trailblazers, an NGO that makes low-cost bio-sand water filters for communities, but it was closed. We did get to see one of the filters in action at the orphanage later in the day. The Villa has a donation board for water filters, or you can donate on the Trailblazers site. At $45 a filter for initial set-up, it's a very cheap way to make a big difference in a community's health.

We then visited Caritas, a Catholic relief organization providing services to poor people with diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria.

We had lunch at The Villa Siem Reap, a hotel very close to my hotel. The Villa employs many staff trained at Sala Bai hotel school just a few buildings away, offers tours, promotes responsible tourism, and donates a percentage of its income to local projects.

After lunch, we first visited a local market, then stopped to buy school supplies, oranges, and cookies for the orphans we were going to visit. We made another stop at Swai Thom monastery ("swai" means "mango"), then went on to Cambodia Orphan Save Organization (COSO), an NGO founded by a Cambodian. It's about 12 kilometers from Siem Reap in Sras Srang North Village. The children were very sweet, holding our hands, kissing our arms, and dragging us around to show us their dormitories. They performed three dances for us, and we fed them cookies and oranges. I asked about adoption and the staff did not understand me--probably, the concept is strange. The kids were very engaging and I would have liked to spend some time with them actually teaching and doing group counseling.

I'm reading Bizot's The Gate, a memoir of the author's imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge. Like Pin Yathay's Stay Alive, My Son, it differs from the narratives of people who were children at the time. Bizot often analyzes the politics behind his captors' actions; people who were very young at the time don't. If you're taking my professional issues class in the spring, you'll have a chance to read Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge.

About half of today's Cambodians are under the age of 20. Above them is a missing generation, the people who died during the Khmer Rouge period (about 1 million killed directly, another 2 million killed indirectly by starvation, forced labor, exposure, and preventable diseases). As a nation, Cambodia does not talk much about this period in the mid-1970s. Because the subject is not broached in their textbooks or by their parents, many young Khmers don't believe the civil war and genocide actually happened.

Why so little discourse about the Khmer Rouge? For one thing, Asian cultures are sensitive to loss of face, or causing others to lose face. This internal war is humiliating and I assume it's impolite to make too direct reference to it, though tourists are cut some slack. This isn't just a Cambodian approach. If you're in my winter youth and family issues class, you'll read a summary of research showing that Japanese Americans who were kept in U.S. internment camps during World War II usually haven't told their children about this experience, and if they do, it is typically an extremely brief conversation.

For another thing, think for a minute about talking with a Cambodian over around 35-40 years old. Who do you think you're talking with? My guess is that you'd assume that the person was a victim of the Khmer Rouge. While this may be true in broad sense, remember that it's also likely that the person was a Khmer Rouge cadre. There were people who believed in their cause, people for whom it was expedient to side with the Khmer Rouge, people who were sympathetic without being members, people who were pressed into service (Bizot describes this happening to two of his co-workers), and children and youth who were raised in Khmer Rouge culture. A child who shot an intellectual when he or she was 10 may be turning 40 this year. I haven't talked with anyone who has said they were Khmer Rouge, yet clearly many people in Cambodia today were. The explanatory materials at Cheung Ek (the Killing Fields) hold the Khmer Rouge responsible not only for genocide, but for the corruption of the nation's youth. Families were divided; children were put in separate children's camps to be indoctrinated. I would think that the question of who did what in the war also contributes to a great deal of reticence to explore too closely or reveal too much.

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Tomorrow: Why are all the pizzas so happy?

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Photos

With the children
COSO orphanage

Apsara dance
COSO orphanage

Bamboo dance
COSO orphanage

Coconut dance
COSO orphanage