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Massive Gold Ship
I would just like to emphasise that this thing was freaking huge.I wrote all this ages ago and have been carrying it around on my laptop without getting around to uploading. I'm trying to get it all out of the way now in one big update binge.
So I am going to regale you with more amusing anecdotes from my project. After this I promise I will NEVER talk about it ever again.
I have been several times to see a mindbogglingly weird Medium who is in the process of building a number of vast, golden galleons out in the middle of nowhere. When I questioned him as to what the hell he was playing at, he told me the spirit of a dead monk instructed him to do so. Right. When I asked him when it would be finished, he told me it would never be complete, but will continue expanding until the end of life on earth. Ok.
It is quite hard for me to convey exactly how weird these structures are, right out in the middle of rural Cambodia, surrounded by palm leaf shacks. There are SIXTY people working full time on this thing. The doors are made from (doubtlessly illegally logged) hand carved solid wood
Ship
I still don’t think you have quite grasped the scale of it. 5 inches thick. Everything is covered in gold paint. There are dozens of Buddha statues made of solid marble. One might question where the funding for such a project comes from, given the current economic climate. Well apparently, it is paid for through donations the faithful make to the spirit of the dead monk, who is the sole architect of the project and will destroy all the buildings should something not meet his specifications.
The first two times I went to the temple the Medium refused to answer my questions, claiming that he has no knowledge and I would need to ‘ask the spirit’. The third time I was lucky. I told Dr S about the place and we popped in to visit on the way back to Phnom Penh, just so I could point and say LOOK AT THAT FREAKING HUGE GOLD BOAT! As luck would have it, the Medium was in the middle of healing someone, meaning he was possessed by the spirit, so I got to ‘interview’ the dead monk. Yes, I can’t believe I’m writing this. This isn’t the only time I’ve been able to interview a Medium while the spirit was in residence, so
to speak, but this was definitely the most interesting.
So I got to watch the healing take place. The spirit seemed to have the overly theatrical personality of a pantomime character. After dealing with the healing, he turned his attention to me. He spent a while cracking jokes in Khmer about the ‘Western Doctor’, then attempted to wow me with his supernatural abilities.
He said I get headaches. This would be a pretty safe bet for most people, but as it happens I rarely get headaches, unless I’m hungover. Unlucky. So then he said I am feeling stressed. Not true. Certainly not as much as I should be considering I am trying to write my dissertation in a Cambodian shack, talking to someone who claims to be possessed by the spirit of a dead monk, and I just ate a spider. I still wasn’t buying it, but not wanting to offend him, I smiled politely and made no comment. He then told me that when I first found out I’d been assigned to Cambodia I didn’t want to come here. Wrong. I wasn’t assigned anywhere, in fact chose Cambodia myself, after much deliberation, resisting my tutor’s efforts to
Neon
The lesser known New Rave Buddha ship me off to Africa.
Unperturbed, he continued. Grabbing hold of my hands, he stared at my palms intently then declared that I often fight with my boyfriend, but it’s always my fault.
What, entirely my fault, every time?
Yes. Always.
He’s clearly a shit medium.
He then dipped a sword in perfume and used it to write symbols on my head. This was to give me luck and prosperity, and stop me being cranky with my boyfriend. He really seemed to feel strongly about that.
Despite the fact the many worrying questions it raises, I quite like his weird gold boat. It has Buddhist, Hindu, and Brahmanist shrines within it, and ‘when the floods come’ people of all religions, so long as they are faithful, can come on board and be saved. There is also a separate boat for storing animals and another one for food.
I asked him if he’d heard of Noah’s ark. He stated blankly.
I am a bit concerned that some of the healers I have come across might be, well… a bit mental. My project is supposed to be based around determining what knowledge of mental illness
traditional healers possess, in the hope that they can be taught to signpost people with worrying symptoms to mainstream mental health services. With some of them, it's like the blind leading the blind. Only it’s the nutters leading the nutters.
I didn’t say that in my write-up, obviously.
One healer I interviewed was almost certainly schizophrenic. He is the only one out of all my participants that seriously worried me. He told me that his healing won’t work if the patient is using Western medicine, and so he asks all his patients to stop taking their medication before he will treat them. Warning! This is exactly what we are trying to avoid. He is also the one who uses magic tinsel to treat people. I was seriously worried about his mental condition. Now I know literally shit all about psychiatry, but some things he said set alarm bells ringing. The way he described his communication and relationship with the spirit was completely different to what I had heard from the other mediums. It is a voice in his head, it tells him what to do. It is relapsing and remitting. Sometimes the spirit is with him, sometimes he
Me, Team TPO and Weird Medium
Infront of obscenely huge giant boat. is himself again. He can’t call it at will like the other mediums. It is in control of him. The spirit told him to give away all his land and possessions. It banned him from washing for six months. The water would drain its power away.
So I thought this was weird, and not just the normal harmless kind of Cambodian weird I have become accustomed to. I told Dr Soddhi (the female psychiatrists from Phnom Penh) and Belgian Lady about him when they came for another visit a few weeks later. It turns out they had just seen a patient at the clinic in Kampong Thom who had come off their meds after seeing a medium from that particular village. They decided to stage and intervention, and we all pilled into the TPO-Mobile and drove out to find him. When I travel out to the villages I normally do so on the back of a motorbike, attracting little attention. Driving out there in a big white Toyota Landcruiser is a different matter. Children were actually running after the car, transfixed. I wish I hadn’t mocked the Landcruiser before, in Phnom Pehn. Now I see they use it for driving out to villages, I very much realise why it is necessary. At one point, a cow hit us. We were stationary and it came charging along the road and veered into us at speed, leaving a massive muddy arse print on one door.
The medium didn’t remember me, though it had only been 10 days since I last saw him. Not good! We all sat down in his hut. There was nothing in there aside from a hammock, a newborn baby in what appeared to be a cat basket and a pair of absolutely enormous speakers, hooked up to a car battery. We talked to him for a while. The psychiatrists agreed with my diagnosis. Giving him a stern bollocking clearly was not going to work, so they retreated to try and figure out how to deal with the problem. I never got to see how it turned out.
I’d like to point out that this guy had a huge cult following. He showed us several Khmer magazines with huge photo features on him. People were coming from all over the country to ask for healing from this man who in England would have been sectioned. A cynical atheist like me could easily cite this gentleman, and crazy boat man, as great examples of how even in this day and age, religion can build up out of nothing. But I would never do a thing like that.
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Jenniferious
Jenniferious
Truth will out
Don't you go smearing this medium just because you didn't like his insights. Do we argue Jenny? Yes, sometimes we do. Is it always your fault? Well I think it is. The medium with the giant gold boat thinks it is. How much more evidence do you need Hulse? Personally I want to buy the guy a drink. . . .