Spirit of Bali

Grey is a shade you rarely find in Cambodia- lime green, lemon, orange, sand coloured pink, peach- from buildings to Tuktuks life is brighter. Perhaps the colours are a way to cheer up the steaming day and the lights to brighten the balmy night. Either way, it suits the nature of the people, especially the children we met in a Battambang orphanage, who took the digital cameras we bought for them with beaming smiles. The kids wormed their way into our hearts as we taught them photography, but there was one child I wanted to meet more than the rest, who already had my heart.

My partner says he saw tears in her eyes, all I know is she came straight to hug me this shy girl with her beautiful face, luscious hair and big brown eyes. I asked her to show me her home. Instantly she took my hand in her tiny one. The joy of first sponsoring Somnung came back to me in that moment. Whenever she could she held my hand, not a desperate grasp nor possessive, but the sort of hold that said, ‘You are here, you are real and I can touch you.’ She took me into the house, a concrete shell, cavernous and tiled. It reminded me of a prison cell, but it was hers and she showed it off with pride. The door to her room opened only halfway before it wouldn't shift anymore; a pile of stuffed toys sat in the corner and dominating the room was a bunk bed taller than me. I wonder how she gets up to the top, as small as she is. I ask and she just says, "Yes".
It is all she can say, and I hope she understands me. There is so much to tell but only body language can convey. It is enough, for now.

The kids took us to a farm where a family were harvesting rice for the Moon Festival. Their feet removed the husks from the stalk, then one child would fry the rice in a wok before two adults, like sweaty dancers, would pound it flat with rounded sticks.

“You come this way!” Somnung said, tugging my hand, holding it tight even though it's sticky with sweat. Picking two maple-shaped leafs she squeezed the sap of one stalk onto the other mixing it with water. Using a dry grass reed she dipped one end into the liquid and blew on the other. To my delight a bubble bloomed and broke off, floating in the air.

Talking broken English she showed me old and new rice, we saved each other from the unstable edges of the path, and smiled and giggled as though we could understand each other perfectly.

I have no words true enough to convey my happiness at wandering through the Cambodian fields with my ‘niece’.