With each border crossing evrything changes, people's faces, the smells, traffic, food, currency and history.
Yesterday I visited the “Killing Fields” about 15klm south of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. I am only just beginning to understand the enormity of the trauma the Cambodian people have suffered only two decades ago…about the time when I was comfortably creating my utopia and young family, and following my ideals of living an alternative, subsistent life in the hills on the north coast of NSW. At this point in time many of us had idealistic expectations and choices of lifestyle. It seemed like our right.
Two days ago I bought a paperback, one of many offered to tourists wanting to learn more, from a young street girl with her box of books trawling the cafes and bars along the popular water front frequented by tourists. The story is written by a young woman who survived the horrendous Poll Pot regime. It is gob smacking!
As I sat in the back of the tuk tuk going out of town I was stuck by the smile of my driver when we caught each others eyes in his rear view mirrors. It would have been a fantastic photo, had I captured it. So I grappled for my camera to catch it again perhaps by chance. It was a beautiful moment and one I have come across many times in only the few days that I have been here. Amongst all the hustle and bustle of a busy, noisy, dirty, poverty stricken city these people constantly show a propensity to smile and be gracious towards strangers. It warms my heart.
I had my camera on my arm ready to try and find another magic moment but soon pulled into the entrance to the genocide museum site. As I approached the monument piled high with human skulls and bones I placed a flower and lit some incense as my heart sank deep into my chest. I reached into my bag to capture the moment but there was no camera. My precious camera……gone!. My camera that has been so much part of this journey as a constant companion and tool for communication and fun with it’s subjects. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t usually loose things….not my camera. It was a sentimental gift from my family when I turned fifty….NO.!!!!! Of course I ran back to my tuk tuk and retraced my steps. Then I lent on the wall facing the monument…the reminants of people tortured and thrown in to mass graves. Women and children beaten to death by hoes against ‘the torture tree’ that still grows on the site. The field is littered with pieces of their clothing as it makes it way to the surface again after being buried for twenty years.
My eyes where swelling and tears were running freely down my face as I my loss paled into insignificance. A sobering moment that I will hopefully always remember when I get too close to relatively unimportant or ‘precious’ events around materialism and comfort. I have so much to be thankful for.
I finished my sad walk around ‘the killing fields’ and sat under a tree to digest the events and sucked on a fresh cocoanut from a straw with the tuk tuk driver and other various interested Cambodians. We discussed the camera and the possible scenarios.
I had to get back in to the practicalities of course….Insurance ….Police statement ……and so the afternoon unfolded.
Three hours later I immerged from the complex but very third world experience. My thumb was coloured red from the ink that sealed the official document with my print. I couldn’t help but reflect on the “seriousness of the crime”. I was interrogated by four different policemen, each gaining in rank. I was taken from the initial concrete roadside hut (that in no way resembled a police station except for the two large sweaty men who hastily put on their official shirts when we pulled up), just around the bend from “the site”.
The poor tuk tuk driver who by his time had not been proven innocent by the policemen had his vehicle searched and five minutes later two more people arrived after a two way radio discussion in khamer over the air had broadcasted our troubles. Another two Cambodians on motor bikes arrived. One was young, smiling and English speaking (he turned out to be the museum guide) , the other was the observer and I gathered a police trainee. After again repeating the story about four or five times with Khmer conversations going every which way we were then taken to another stone and concrete building closer to the genocide site. Empty except for a table covered with printed vinyl and a cupboard. We were sat down around the table to repeat yet again the whole “complicated story’. Again I saw my story being mimed by mimicking my hands and gestures describing how I had my camera on my arm and had the case on the other, then had taken it off to put one inside the other (this proved to them that in fact I had not left it in my hotel room) and we went through how I had taken it out when I saw my drivers smile…and so it went on and on. The whole charade at this point felt like I was in a slow motion comedy movie set. I was quietly at peace with it all and wishing I had my camera to record it!
Then came the paperwork! My statement in English, then interpreted through the guide and written in khmer scrip by number three policeman. Trainee policeman eventually hoped on his bike to get four copies made somewhere, returned fifteen minutes later and then came the official certification handwritten on each copy, after which another top ranking policeman emerged from another room….more discussion, reading of scripts, questions and signatures and then he asked me through the interpreter what country I was from and how old I was!!!! Mmmm? Something was said by him. They all quietly and shyly laughed. “What did he say”, I said… “He said you don’t look that old!!!!” By this time it was turning into a mellow comedy fest in my mind.
The tuk tuk driver had long felt relieved when I adamantly had insisted that I was not making a complaint about him…and we both just wanted to get the hell on our way. Finally I was ushered into THE room where HE stamped each piece of paper twice ever so carefully and my official thumb seal completed the transaction. They handed me the original and kept three copies. Three hours late we slid back to the tuk tuk.
I couldn’t help but reflect of the farce ness of it all when only twenty years ago people on the same road had been herded in to similar official buildings and kept alive overnight only because they could not keep up with the slaying of so many on the same day of their arrival.
A very sobering day : 25th Feb 2008
