Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were the days of the Water Festival here in Phnom Penh, which is apparently one of the biggest holidays here. The capitol city grows incredibly in size because people from all over the country and provinces come here to celebrate the holiday. Since I live within one block of the riverside, I was definitely smack in the middle of all the action. My street was actually closed off to traffic to make room for all of the people. It was truly an incredible sight. Every night there were amazing firework displays over the river, which I could see just by sitting out on my back porch since I’m up on the 5th floor (I KNEW there had to be some kind of benefit to having to walk up so many stairs everyday!). It’s been like the 4th of July here! Actually, I spent 4th of July earlier this year with friends in Washington, D.C. which, as you can probably imagine, was pretty crowded. But I have to say that the amount of PEOPLE packed in the streets near the river seemed to surpass the crowds in D.C. by a longshot – probably just due to the fact that there’s less space, so everyone’s squished together 100x more.
During the day there were boat races on the river, and in the evenings there were decorated boats, covered in lights paraded down the river. I tried to get a picture of the boats in the evenings, but because there were SO MANY LIGHTS on each boat, each picture just ended up looking like a giant fireball on top of the water.
There aren’t too many foreigners who stick around to experience the Water Festival, which was pretty surprising to me because I thought an event as big as this one would make all the foreigners come running with their cameras! There are just loads of Cambodians who travel from the provinces to be here for this. The streets are completely taken over by about 4 million people and I’m sure all the tourists are probably scared or something.
I went up to a guy selling corn at his little stand on the corner and when he looked up and saw my face he nearly fell over and afterwards started laughing & kept smiling because he was so surprised that there was a white person out there! I’m pretty sure he charged me twice as much for that corn than anyone else, so it’s not like I was getting any kind of special treatment or anything, but the corn was awesome so it’s all good!
But as I’m sure most of you already know, on Monday night, the last night of the Water Festival, there was an absolutely terrible tragedy just about 10 minutes down the street.
There’s a little island on a part of the river, called Diamond Island, where they were having a concert as part of the celebration and the best place to view the concert was from a big bridge nearby. The bridge was so packed that people could hardly move, and something happened (the police are still trying to figure out all the specifics, although it’s not a huge stretch to imagine HOW this could have happened… a gazillion people packed together on a bridge with no way out & one person gets scared that the bridge is collapsing… not a good situation!)…
The death toll from the stampede is now somewhere between 350 – 450 people, with just as many people hospitalized. A friend living in a different part of the city called to check on Noman first thing the next morning and that was the first we’d heard about it since we weren’t out there that night. I saw a video clip on the news and immediately started sobbing because all those people were only right down the street! And having walked down the riverside both Saturday and Sunday nights during the festival, and having experienced the amount of people there, I completely understood how something so terrible could have happened.
Please keep all the family members & friends of those who were in the stampede in your thoughts & prayers. Today has been declared a National Day of Mourning here in Cambodia and I’m sure you can find news segments on it all throughout the day.
I heard that there were over 400 monks at the bridge yesterday praying, along with over 600 other people.
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It’s truly a sad, sad situation . . .
And ironically enough, as today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., I'm being hit right now with a very strong dose of thankfulness... that in the midst of all of this, I'm safe and sound.
