Welcome back to Cambodia!

We have had a population explosion in Nida Villa. Turkeys increased by six! We didn’t even know anybody was pregnant around here until we saw the big Tom Turkey passing out cigars. If we had, the Capacity Building and Health Education Program would have strongly advised pre-natal care and birth in the local Health Center with attendance by a midwife. Now that this has already happened, we will concentrate on post-natal care, vaccinations, and advice to the mom about birth spacing. Fortunately everything went well. Mom and the little chicks are fine. Our happy villa is suffused by the warm glow of new arrivals.

We have been traveling again, although only for two days, this time to Battambang, which is a provincial city at the upper end of the Tonle Sap and capital of the biggest rice-producing province in Cambodia. Please consult the pocket map of Cambodia that I mailed to each of you, although admittedly only one per household.. We don’t have an unlimited budget, after all.

Why did we go to Battambang? No, not to see rice. The rice is all harvested. We went at the invitation of a friend who wanted to know the most auspicious date to start construction on her new house. She knows somebody in Battambang who can tell her this. Well, I wanted to see a person who would know when to start construction on a new house. I might want to start construction on a new house myself some day.

We traveled west from Siem Reap on a bus about 120 kilometers to a town named Sisophon (see map referenced above, section 6D). The road from Siem Reap to Sisophon is part of National Highway 6, a kind of Cambodian interstate. It is, alas, unpaved for most of the way between these two cities. Its design is based on the washboard model, so that you feel fortunate that you are in a bus that gives you padded seats and plenty of head room. From Sisophon, National Highway 6 continues west to the Thai border, but we turned south on the road to Battambang. That road was paved.

Our friend, who lives in Siem Reap, was coming from Phnom Penh, and we met her in Battambang. It turns out that we weren’t going to see the man about the construction date until the next morning, so we settled into our hotel and I turned on the TV and discovered that it had ESPN and–are you ready for this?–the AFC championship game between New England and Indianapolis was on live! How great is that? I saw the Colts come from behind to beat the Patriots to go to the Super Bowl. In Battambang I saw this! Then I watched the Super Bowl, which started at 6:00 a.m. Monday morning, here in the comfort of our little villa.

You may be wondering if I have forgotten that this is a blog about Cambodia. OK, you’re picture starved. Be patient.

The next morning we had to be ready at 5:00 a.m. We (nine of us) piled into our friend’s 4WD Land Cruiser and set out well before daybreak along another unpaved road deep into the countryside, passing large trucks carrying bags of rice coming the other way. I mention that not because you might be wondering what those trucks are doing so early in the morning but because we are well into the dry season now and all the mud on these dirt roads that I described in an earlier posting is now dust. Do you know how much dust a large truck on these roads leaves floating in the air to be caught in your headlights? Yes, you’re right: Lots. So much that you simply can’t see ahead. You know that even at this hour there are other vehicles going your way (not to mention more trucks coming toward you). Many are slower vehicles. Vehicles without lights. There are even pedestrians. And you can’t see more than five feet ahead. But we’ve all got our time, right? If it’s now, well, what can you do about it? So we rush on into the darkness, oblivious to what awaits us.

It turns out we came safely to a market just as light was breaking, and you will be relieved to know I got a picture or two, so this dreadful narrative will be interrupted by an illustration in just a second. This was a crowded country market that straddled the road, with vehicles of every description chugging up and down slowly to avoid all the foot traffic in the narrow passage between the market on one side of the road and the same market on the other. Eggs piled high here, tangerines there. Here is a picture of the road with vehicles and pedestrians between the market on either side.



You’ll see more of that strange looking vehicle in another photo, but note that it moves slowly and has no lights. Something to think about if you are roaring through an impenetrable cloud of dust in your Land Cruiser without regard for what might be ahead.

Another picture shows one of the large trucks that run up and down the road carrying rice and other things. It’s going to take a little while for this truck to squeeze through the market. The driver’s got lots of people and things in front of him that need to get out of the way. At least he’s going slow, so there’s no cloud of dust, and it’s daylight, so he can see.


Directly on the other side of the road, this woman prepares for a big day at the store. I wonder if she’s got anything on sale?



This gentleman is waiting for the return of his riders, whom he has brought to market. Notice the self-confidence, the swagger even? The cane is a very nice touch. He owns this country bus. It can hold at least 25 people, all pulled by one motorcycle. He will drive up and down country roads like this all day, taking on and dropping off passengers wherever they want. With volume, he can offer ridiculously low prices, which is the only way these people can afford to ride.


Speaking of low prices, you may remember that the Angkor Hospital for Children, in accordance with Ministry of Health policy, charges each patient 1,000 Riel. That includes, if necessary, seeing a doctor, getting a prescription, having surgery, spending a few nights as an inpatient. No matter how extensive the patient’s needs, the charge is 1,000 Riel, or 25 cents US, and even that is waived for patients who can’t afford it. The hospital is not a for-profit institution. It recoups next to nothing from the patients it treats. That’s why it needs your donations. There. I didn’t even show you a picture of a child, much less a weeping child, and you are reaching for your checkbook already. Thank you. I guess I owe you a picture of a child:


Whoops. That’s a tree. A strangler fig, I believe. Those are the trees with big roots that grab and tear apart the stones of the monuments at Angkor. Big tree, big roots.

Here’s a little Cambodian child. See that red spot on his chin? This kid needs to go to Angkor Hospital for Children! In those ragged clothes, he looks like his mom must be quite poor, but that doesn’t matter at this hospital. Did you know that most kids who go to Angkor Hospital for Children suffer from more than one thing? They may go in for a red spot on their chin, but the doctors find malnutrition and TB too, so they treat it all.


Speaking of cents, as we were a minute ago, you may remember that I told you that the US dollar is accepted everywhere in Cambodia as a medium of exchange. I have heard from a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer who recently visited and from reading an article in the Cambodia Daily newspaper of a scam that is taking place at the border where people make a land crossing from Thailand to Cambodia. According to the newspaper, the guides on the tour buses tell tourists that King Sihamoni is advising Cambodians that they should not accept US dollars but should favor their own currency. The guide also tells the tourists that there are no ATM machines in Siem Reap, which is where all the tourists are going, so the tourists better change their dollars to Riel at the border.

It shouldn’t be hard to put yourselves in the tourists’ shoes: first trip to Cambodia, excited about seeing Angkor Wat, the guide has been informative and helpful, the story sounds plausible (imagine, the king says this!). So you rush to the first money changer you see as soon as you walk across the border (the bus doesn’t cross the border). You don’t know what you will have to spend, so you exchange, say, three hundred dollars. You learn later, when it’s too late, that despite the staggering amount of 800,000 or so riel you put in your pocket, you should have gotten well over a million. I don’t expect that my affluent readers will make the crossing on land (unless, as a former Peace Corps Volunteer, your reputation rests on doing it the way the locals do it), but, sad to say, these things happen sometimes in Cambodia. I’m glad there are no scam artists in America!

Back to our trip to Battambang. Remember that odd-looking vehicle in the first picture above? Well, here it is with a better view. You see them all over in rural areas. They are mainly used to transport things–bags of rice, stacks of rice straw–although some also transport people, with or without the things.


Remember those Mad Max movies of post-apocalyptic Australia from twenty or twenty-five years ago? Here is another vehicle that seems to have been purchased from that film company:

And another. You wonder how they can keep these trucks working. Not with original manufacturer’s parts, that’s for sure.

This posting is supposed to be about getting a date to begin construction on a house, however, so let’s return to that subject. After the market we went in search of the man who could tell our friend when to begin. We found him in a rather nice house: Cement, two stories, some odd touches that you see here and there, for example a low ceiling in a stairway that makes you bend over lest you bump your head. We entered an upstairs bedroom used both for sleeping and for divining. While two children of the household played on the bed, our friend and several of her family members were instructed to prepare for the ceremony, which was to take place in front of a Chinese altar with candles, incense, vases, figurines, banners, fruit, and plastic plants.

Here is another view. This is in a bedroom upstairs, mind you. Though I don’t have a picture of it, the ceiling over the altar was darkened by smoke from the constant use of candles and incense.

This is the man who will divine the future for us. He was very specific in giving instructions, even going so far as to demonstrate where people should stand and how they should move. It reminds me of Cambodian wedding ceremonies, where nobody knows what to do. Do I put my hands here? Do I face this way? Do I bow to the senior monk first or just go down the line? Fortunately, Cambodian weddings are always directed by someone who has all the answers, and he sits next to the bride and groom to tell them exactly what to do. This man looks more like an aggrieved fruit vendor than a seer, don’t you think?

Here he is again lighting giant incense sticks. You can see where incense sticks are placed, in the little vase on the same table as the candles in front of the altar. Nobody ever seems to clean out the used incense sticks, which makes it hard to push the new ones down into the sand in that vase without breaking the sticks you are trying to push in. I do that all the time in pagodas, and there is never anyone around to tell me what to do with my lighted, broken incense sticks that I can’t push into the vase any more.

And here are the participants lined up with incense in hand, all stepping forward and backward in unison several times, just like he had shown them.

Finally, the last exercise involved three people in turn holding and then dropping on the floor two oddly shaped wooden pieces which you see the man in the middle here holding. From the way they fall, the seer divines an appropriate date for our friend to begin construction. That date, it turns out, is any time after Chinese New Year! And I slap my forehead and think: Well, of course! It’s obvious!

So we set off for home, all nine of us in the Land Cruiser, taking the paved road to Sisophon and then the washboard road, National Highway 6, to Siem Reap. Those of you who are thinking about coming to visit us overland from Bangkok will do well to remember that you have to come along this road.

That wraps it up, folks. Oh wait. I’m getting a message. About the little turkeys. Oh no! Are you sure? They’re not wandering around somewhere? Could they have slipped out through the gate? You saw one of the dogs.... Oh, my god. Picking his teeth with a little turkey feather? And there’s only four left? Folks, I don’t know if you understand what has happened here. I am deeply sorry to report that two of the turkey chicks have gone missing and are presumed to have been devoured. By one of our fluffy little dogs. We never would have thought this of the little fella. He’s quiet. Seems nice. Wags his tail a lot. Doesn’t bark much, and never threatened anybody. Seemed close to the other little critters. His name? Rupert. Rupert Wayne Roberts. Why do you ask?

January 8, 2007

[Editor's note: Today’s blog posting is a verbatim transcript of a lecture Mr. Richardson delivered to Tonle Sap University students and their parents on the special occasion of the third anniversary of the formation of Mekong Blogmeisters Associated. Unfortunately, a rather impertinent heckler, whom you have seen sparingly in earlier blogs, makes a more extended appearance here. Mr. Richardson has kindly asked us to present the transcript unedited on the grounds that all voices, even objectionable ones, deserve to be heard.]

Happy new year to everyone! We have been occupied for three weeks with our children and grandchildren, and I would like to report to you where we have been all that time. I know how often you wait beside the mailbox, pining for more news from your favorite blogmeister, so wait no longer. Here is the first posting in what promises to be an exciting and productive 2007.

So where did we go with our children? Well, after three and a half months in Siem Reap we finally went to the Angkor monuments to have a look. I know how visual you all are, so I will of course project pictures on the screen as proof positive that I actually arose from my hammock to lead the young members of the family on this expedition. Therefore I proudly present this first picture of the Angkor Monuments:

That’s not a monument.

What do you mean that’s not a monument? It is indeed a monument: to the creativity of man, to the hope that springs eternal, and to the power of commerce to drive human progress. Yes, it is dresses for sale. Beautiful, bright, colorful dresses. Dresses to perk up the doleful. To brighten the lives of women who simply can’t understand why their husbands will spend $10 a day to sit in a tuk-tuk, breathing foul polluted air and subjecting their sweaty bodies to a thick covering of red laterite dust, when they could easily have afforded an extra ten bucks to enjoy air-conditioned comfort in an enclosed car with a professional, smartly dressed, English-speaking driver who would have told them something intelligent about the history of Angkorian kings and the monuments they built.

Well, sorry. I don’t mean any disrespect to tuk-tuk drivers, many of whom speak fairly good English and know something about the monuments and–let us not forget this–work very hard to provide a little money for their families to eke out a hard-scrabble existence in a cruel world. They too can be acceptable guides.
So what do these dresses have to do with the monuments? The next picture should make this perfectly clear:

You see the dresses there, in what looks like a market, or more accurately a row of shops, with coconuts and cold drinks in ice boxes out front for sale to thirsty tourists? Well, for those of you who still don’t get the picture, such little shops sit across the road from or adjacent to all the major monuments at Angkor. The really minor monuments, ones that attract only a few isolated tourists simply because the monument was on some obscure list and the tourist has lots of time, will have, not shops, but children clutching trinkets (beaded bracelets, bamboo flutes) that some tourist might buy for his bratty little nephew back home. Commerce! You go to a monument, you buy a souvenir, or a dress, or a coconut (which they will quickly trim for you with a full-size machete–watch your fingers!--and neatly insert a straw for your personal use). You’ll buy something, because you came unprepared and weak and susceptible to their persuasiveness. You don’t stand a chance against these charming people.

You have to assume that people buy the things that are offered for sale here, otherwise the shops would sell something else, or would disappear. So somebody must be wearing one of these dresses somewhere, and somebody must be drinking a coconut, and somebody must be buying, for six or eight dollars, a guide book that has a high price marked on it I paid $8 out there for a book that I had already purchased in the states but forgot to bring with me. The price marked on both copies–the one in the States and the one for sale at the monuments–was $27.95. They look identical–same quality of paper, same sharpness and color in the photos, same stiff folded cover, same binding–but one was original and the other was a knockoff. I was later told I should have paid $5 for it. It is just remarkable what they can do by way of reproducing these things. Maybe what is remarkable is how much they charge for them at home.

In any event, I go into these shops and see junk I would never want, but I did buy a book, and others buy other stuff. The Cambodians who run these stalls are happy to oblige us. Despite my rant about the tacky shops on the way to Mt. Rushmore (you all remember that rant, don’t you?), I don’t begrudge these people the opportunity to make a few bucks off all the tourists who come to these magnificent monuments.

So now here’s a picture of a real monument:

This is taken from inside the outer wall of Angkor Wat looking west past the gopura, with the moon hanging low in the near distance. You may not have known that the moon comes closer to Angkor than any other place on earth. Genuine "double-blind"scientific tests have determined that the combined weight of all the stones that make up all the monuments in the concentrated area of greater Angkor exert a gravitational pull of their own, distinct from that of the earth, such that the moon, when passing directly over Angkor, dips noticeably out of its orbit in what is often considered by the non-scientific mind to be an acknowledgment of the genius of Angkor’s builders.

Did you say "dips out of its orbit"?

Moving right along, the next picture is of the grounds around the Baphuon, a temple within Angkor Thom which has largely fallen apart over the centuries. I am trying to show you some non-traditional views of the monuments, as you can plainly see.

All of those thousands of stones lying on all sides of the temple (which by their mere presence, even if not in the form of a standing temple, contribute to the scientifically verified gravitational pull of greater Angkor) were studied and tagged and numbered to identify their place in the fallen structure preparatory to rebuilding, but, alas, the records were lost or destroyed during the Pol Pot years and the tags and numbers are now all meaningless.

Excuse me, I’ve got a question.

Yes, by now you may be asking that important question, why do we call it "the" Baphuon? You may also be asking how, if the Baphuon is a temple and Angkor Thom is a temple, the Baphuon can be located inside Angkor Thom? Perchance you are also asking what is the difference between Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and Angkor Beer? Well, the answers are as follows: 1) probably for the same reason that we call that other temple within a (small) stone’s throw of the Baphuon "the" Bayon, 2) Angkor Thom is bigger, and 3) Angkor Beer tastes better. Let me explain.

No! Please don’t! Forget my question. Let’s just move on, for heaven’s sake.

Don’t be hysterical. I’ll move on soon enough. First, I don’t know why they call it "the" Baphuon or, for that matter, why they call the other one "the" Bayon, except that it doesn’t sound as silly as "the" Angkor Wat. Who would travel thousands of miles to see "the" Angkor Wat? Even the Angkorians knew there are no tourist dollars in that. Second, Angkor Thom means "big city." It is a huge piece of land enclosed within four walls about three kilometers long, making 900 hectares or...let me convert here for you–let’s see, 7 plus 3 equals 10, carry the 10, add that number over there–about 78,000 square furlongs. Today it is mostly field and forest, but when it was built it enclosed a city made of perishable materials, of which there are no traces today. Both the Baphuon and the Bayon and a number of other monuments are enclosed within the walls of Angkor Thom.

Angkor Wat means "city temple", or, if you like, "city monument." The walls of Angkor Wat also enclosed a city, although a smaller one.

I might mention also that Angkor Wat and the other temples here are not pagodas. They are monuments. Most monuments at Angkor were built in accordance with Hindu mythology to honor Shiva or Vishnu, and by extension the king or his parents, for most kings of Angkor held Hindu beliefs and had Bramin advisors. The Buddha figures found today throughout the monuments, along with the candles and incense that are used to pay respects to Buddha, are later additions. I would guess that Angkor Wat is a name given to this monument after the Angkorian civilization collapsed and Cambodia became largely Buddhist. A few of the monuments were built by Buddhist kings, but they are still not pagodas.

There is, by the way, and has been for a long time, a Buddhist pagoda within the walls of Angkor Wat. The monks in that pagoda historically have maintained Angkor Wat and kept it from succumbing to the jungle.
Now we can move on.

The next picture, taken in early morning before the sun broke the horizon, shows a great big date palm tree partially blocking the view of Angkor Wat.

You haven’t shown us a single decent picture of a monument. Just date palms and dresses and that ridiculous dipping moon.

Don’t be petulant. You want good pictures of the monuments, go buy a coffee table book. Here’s the best I can do: a picture of Angkor Wat in early morning without the date palm tree:

Speaking of trees, this next is a picture showing trees slowly destroying the wall around Ta Prohm monument.

You watch trees grow? How can this possibly be interesting?

Ta Prohm has been cleaned up a little, but it is the one monument that has purposely been kept largely in its deteriorated state so that the typical benighted American tourist, after getting off his air conditioned bus and spraying mosquito repellant on his bare legs, can see just what the jungle does to these monuments. Of course, if you go to this monument any time after 7:00 a.m. you will see nothing but Japanese tourists lining up endlessly to take pictures of each other right in front of the one thing that would make your own coffee table book a best seller if they would just get out of the way.

Ta Prohm is my favorite monument. It pays to get here early so that you can reasonably imagine that you are its discoverer stumbling across this strange and enchanting monument. Combined with the semi-darkness of the pre-dawn morning, the ubiquitous chirping of cicadas in the dark forest all around, and the absence of human voices (at this point, all you hear is the rumble of the first 50 buses bringing Japanese tourists to those little shops out at the entrance), you can imagine yourself in a different time, a different world. For about three more minutes.

Okay, I’ll slip in one more tree picture, showing a close-up of just how those tree roots dig in and grab and tear apart those heavy stone walls (please don’t show this graphic photo to the children):

You probably thought you’d never see that in your life. Well, I bring to you nature unadorned, nature demythologized, nature in all it’s heartless cruelty. You can see here, because of my careful selection of non-traditional photos, the forces of nature at work dismantling the proud monuments of man, crumbling them to dust, leaving no trace of this once-great civilization or the people who built it.

And now what you have all been waiting for: my grandchildren:


Why do they look like they’re afraid of you?

Well, Ha Ha, they haven’t seen me for months, you know, and I guess I’ve changed a bit.

They actually look terrified.

They’re not terrified. They’re just a little surprised. They thought they were going to Disney World after they got off the plane and they got me instead.

That would make them bitterly disappointed, not terrified. These aren’t your grandchildren, are they. They look like Cambodian kids.

I’ll have you know that my grandchildren are, technically speaking, Cambodian kids.

Not these Cambodian kids. Man, you’re a total fraud. Why did I pay 25 bucks for this lecture?

This next picture is of these same grandchildren of mine at play. They are sitting inside a commune office. Outside is the road going through the village and all the dust churned up by large dump trucks going back and forth.

Here’s a closeup of one of these kids, er, grandchildren. This picture is included for the sole purpose of importuning you to write a big check to FWAB.


We also went to Phnom Penh and saw the king’s palace, which I show you right here:

Next you’re gonna tell us you’ve been inside there.

We’ve been inside there, though, for the sake of full disclosure, we weren’t invited this time. He was out of town or something. The king, that is.

There’s a little park on a small hill within the compound of the Silver Pagoda next to the palace where I found this forlorn little Cambodian boy searching for something (truth? enlightenment?) under the watchful and protective gaze of several Buddha figures:

There’s something fishy here.

We drove one day to Prey Veng, a province to the east of Phnom Penh. Prey Veng turned out to have nothing of interest, so we ate lunch at what was probably the only restaurant in town and turned around and came back. On the way to and fro, however, we crossed the Mekong River at the Neak Luong Ferry. A bridge is under construction, but the ferry is much more interesting. One, it is incredibly crowded:

They pack cars and motos and pedestrians so thick I thought we would all sink and die before we got started.

A cause for celebration, surely.

Two, you have to sit and wait a while for the ferry to come before getting on, so you encounter the hoards of vendors and, unfortunately, child beggars, taking advantage of your forced wait. It is an opportune time for the intrepid photographer to get pictures such as this:

And this:

All that covering is meant to protect them against dust and auto exhaust and sunlight.

And photographers.

We also took a day trip to Oudong, a small mountain some 40 kilometers north of Phnom Penh which was an earlier capital of the Cambodian kingdom. Its long association with religious undertakings made it a suitable place for establishment of the king’s residence, for royalty and religion are linked in Cambodian thought. A number of wats and chedei (burial mounds) are found on top of the hill. The ashes of two or three kings are enclosed there. Here is a view from the top of the hill looking south across other wats below and the Tonle Sap in the distance.

And here, below, is a girl who didn’t flinch at the sight of my camera. She sat there for picture after picture, never changing her insouciant expression.

(Must...write...check.)

She doesn’t live in Siem Reap, but she would be admitted to the Angkor Hospital for Children if she could get there. No restrictions. My grandchildren would be admitted. After all–you probably don’t know this–the AHC functions as the pediatric department of the Siem Reap Hospital, so kids don’t go there, they go to AHC. See, you are learning so much, despite that crank in the second row over there.

We also visited Kep, on the coast. Kep was the playground of the rich and famous in the 1960s–fabulous villas, boat trips to the islands, parties with the cream of the diplomatic corps. It was destroyed during the civil war and the Pol Pot years. It is slowly making a comeback, but may not be able to compete with Sihanoukville, not far down the coast, which has bigger beaches and much more money being poured into it. At any rate, this is a picture of the resort as it stands now. Note the hammocks. Hammocks and a sea breeze: what more could you want?

Here are a mother and her child playing in the water of he Gulf of Siam at the beach in Kep.

Why all these pictures in silhouette? What are you up to now?

And here are two Cambodian children running out to the family boat in the evening in Sihanoukville. They may want to accompany the men on their nightly fishing trip. The girl is hobbling for some reason on bandy legs and, if you look closely, appears to need a cane just to walk. She’d probably love to run as free as the wind just once in her life.

There’s something wrong here too. What is all this artifice?

And finally, we walked way down the beach at Sihanoukville to see the fish market where the boats come in after the nightly catch. We came upon this house on the water’s edge.

Next to the house are dozens of fish and crab traps. On the other side, they sell snacks to the fishermen.

The fishing boats gather here in a small cove to unload their catch:

And here is an actual fish, to show you that they are not just wasting their time out there.

And finally, a traditional picture: a couple of boats sitting quietly in the water.

All the best to you until next time.

Forget it. I’m not coming again.

December 6, 2006

Hello Everybody,

First, some scheduling news. I know you are all lining up to come visit us, so here is when NOT to come. We will be home (California) from mid-February to mid-March, so don’t come then. We are also likely to be in the States from June 1 through August 30, so don’t come then. I know: that's the whole summer. But we will probably not be here. Our next trip home after that will be around Christmas of 2007. Other than that, we will be glad to welcome you to Siem Reap.

I thought I would show you some pictures from the last drama performance to be presented to villagers a couple of weeks ago. This time, we put on the show in the evening, the idea being, of course, to attract the adult members of the community. They will have finished work for the day, bathed and possibly eaten dinner, and would be ready to go out to a show, just like you and I might do. Except villagers don’t have the options we have. There are no restaurants out there. No McDonald’s. No take-out Chinese food. No movie theaters at the mall. Aside from a few roadside vendors who manage to appear at events like this, there are simply no options other than to do what they always do, and they wouldn’t have the money if there were.

Here’s the stage, built during the day. Next to it is a truck loaded with speakers. As you can tell, there was no lack of volume when the performance began. You can see that the truck is leaning toward the stage. The stage was built on the side of the road in front of an open field that sloped up to the road, giving people along the side of he road the opportunity to see over the heads of anyone in front. At least that’s what it accomplished, whether it was intended or not. On the other side is a swamp. Behind me, about a hundred yards up the road, was a health center. You can see the drum up on the stage. You will see it again later. As you remember from a previous posting, the drama has musical accompaniment: a fiddler, a drummer, and a guy playing a xylophone kind of thing.

Here, once again, is the curtain advertising the Capacity Building and Health Education Program. It says:

Friends Without a Border
Capacity Building and Health Education Program
Drama program to disseminate information about education and health
about preventative medicine and tuberculosis

This rather large household sits alongside the road just before you come to the stage. I would guess that this is a relatively wealthy household, given the size of the site, the fence around it, and the multiple buildings. On the other hand, it is thatch, not concrete, and it does not have a wood or metal roof. One of the things CBHEP does in the first year of the program is to get a selection of villagers themselves to produce a social map of the village. The map shows all the houses in relation to each other geographically, the size and composition of the families, the location of streams and other water, the relative level of wealth of each household based on judgments the villagers doing the survey make about the size and kinds of materials used to build the house, and other things. The map is used for a variety of purposes during the four-year program.

Another picture of the same house shows some of the livestock, at least two cows and several chickens. Everyone has chickens running around, including Villa Nida. At Villa Nida, they can’t get beyond the grounds of the villa, but in a village they can theoretically go anywhere. I see chickens big and small running around in the street here in town. I wonder how anybody knows which chickens are theirs. Is it possible that if you live close enough with chickens you recognize them? Anybody out there know about this?

Of course you will be thinking once again of bird flu, which has occurred in Cambodia and killed a few people who had direct contact with chickens. I don’t believe I have read about any cases in several months either here or in Thailand. I have seen reports of a couple in Vietnam and many in Indonesia. Cambodia is a nation of villages spread all across the country, and every villager in the country as well as lots of people in towns, even Phnom Penh, has a few chickens running around. Infected wild birds could land even in Villa Nida if they can escape the anti-wildfowl weaponry installed on our roof. (Note: I’m just kidding about the weaponry. I get comments from readers from time to time who think that I actually believe what I write.) While we don’t have weapons, we have trained our chickens to attack and kill avian intruders on sight. Anyway, as you may know, I am not worried about bird flu. If it evolves to the extent that it can transmit from human to human in my neighborhood, it will come to your neighborhood too. So there.

This picture has the same house in the background but shows actual, live people in the foreground. This is what villagers look like. This is what they dress like: women in a blouse, a "sumput", a long wrap-around skirt, and flip flops, and men, well if I had a body like this guy, I would go shirtless too. Hard, physical farm work does that for you. As we know from a previous posting, however, even a giant can be felled by an invisible germ.

Events like this attract vendors. I don’t know where they come from, but the whole store is attached to a motorbike, so they can come long distances. Some of these food vendors (there were four or five) came with more food than I thought the audience could possibly eat, especially because they would have to pay more than if they ate at home. I did not stay the whole evening, so I don’t know how well they did, but the audience turned out to be much larger than I thought it would be based on the daytime dramas I had attended. The vendors wouldn’t come if they didn’t think they could make money. You will notice that it is still light; you can see trees in the background beyond the reach of my flash.

Next is a vehicle driving through the smoke of cooking fires. This is a typical way to transport goods in villages here. It is also colorful, so people like me like to take photos of it. The oxcart, you will be interested to know, is practically unchanged since the time of Angkor. This thing appears to be made of nothing but wood and leather straps. Oxcarts carved on thousand year old temple friezes look exactly like this. They move slowly, but they carry large loads, and they are pretty stable. They can negotiate oxcart paths, after all. Come to think of it, they are the reason we have oxcart paths.

Here is another vendor who also arrived by motorbike and who seems to be exhausted from his journey. He is selling baguettes that he stuffs with several kinds of meat things. I say "meat things" because I can’t be more definitive. I ate one once, thinking it was going to be something other than "meat things," and it was OK tastewise, but I decided I shouldn’t eat any more "meat things." Another vendor was selling the same thing, so I bought just a plain baguette from her for 12½ cents. The baguettes here are generally very good. We have them most mornings at Villa Nida. Villa Nida gets really good ones from the market.

This woman is selling barbecued meat on skewers. Barbecued meat is obviously very popular in Cambodia. Her child is with her. He looks a little bored. He’s naked too, you may have noticed. That is not an atypical outfit for very small children in villages. Most of them at this age probably wear no more than a T-shirt. Where are the diapers, you say? Ha Ha Ha. Who asked that?

Here is another vendor, a woman selling barbecued chicken. Probably frogs too. She has a little charcoal burner to warm things up when a customer buys something. You will also see that she has a little oil lamp. It is getting pretty dark now. The trees behind her are illuminated by my flash. There is no electricity out here. The electric power grid simply does not reach most villages in Cambodia, which means it doesn’t reach most people in Cambodia. The natural state of things here at night is darkness. You may see a kerosene lamp or, as some of these vendors have, a small fluorescent lamp powered by an auto battery. You also see villagers walking along the canals at night with flashlights looking for frogs. They find them by the reflection off their eyes. I was in Bangkok last weekend and flew back here after dark. Less than one minute before touch down at Siem Reap International Airport, I could see only an occasional light below. As we drove into town after landing, we passed roadside food stalls that were lit by those little battery-powered fluorescent lights.

Not all the vendors sold food. Some had gambling casinos attached to their motorbikes. Gasp! And children gambled. Double Gasp! They were throwing small bills on the table all the time the wheel was spinning. The croupier (no, not that little guy with his eye on the wheel down next to number 82) swept up the bills the moment the wheel stopped and passed out to any winners one of the prizes hanging there. At least, that’s what I think was going on. You will be glad to know that I was incensed and I stormed away as soon as I realized that children were gambling.

And of course there was a vendor selling souvenirs. Mementos to remember this great evening. And people buying, as they will do. You know, you go to the beach and buy a little conch, or a pennant that says "Ocean City," which you quickly misplace and never think of again. I don’t want to give you the impression that these villagers were loaded with dough and were throwing it away on trifles, but my policy in this blog is to be transparent. I do not shade the truth. If these people have a compulsion to buy, well, who doesn’t? Who amongst us would throw the first stone?

Here is another oxcart. Note the man’s typical dress. Yes, I’m sure he’s wearing pants. Note the angry red eye of the ox on the right for having to pull this stupid cart all the time. And that guy keeps cracking his whip! You know, why can’t the chickens do some work from time to time? Just harness a bunch of chickens and the oxen can rest.

OK, here’s my last oxcart picture. For this posting, anyway. At least the oxen don’t look quite so angry. I’m thinking of publishing a coffee table book called "Man’s Eternal Friend: the Oxcart."

I assure you we are getting close to the end of this painful posting. This is a close-up of the drum, waiting to be struck. This looks like it has been passed down through the generations since Angkor. What a souvenir! I should have asked the drummer to trade it for a new one.

And finally, a picture of a small part of the crowd, near the stage. Mostly kids, but the kids sit up front, after all. I would guess there were at least five hundred people at this event, mostly adults. The evening time frame clearly attracted a large audience to our health education drama. More people saw the giant, and the pregnant woman, and the women with babies. They laughed at the slapstick and they learned about disease prevention. We spread a little knowledge, which is a precious commodity in this community. One of our great tasks is to overcome ignorance.

Our best to all,

Jim