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