Dr. Siri Paiboun's mother told him, "There's always someone worse off than you." Siri adds, "unless you are Cambodian... " which sounds rather harsh. But in the 1970's, this was probably true. We can't really discuss this with Siri since he is a fictional character of Mr. Cotterill's, but I think Siri would now agree that Cambodians have reached a better place on the road to a more hopeful future.
Long ago, in the older Vientiane, Laos, I remember riding our ponies to the fringes of town where there was a leper colony. What a strange term that is - as if the people with leprosy, missing fingers, toes, and parts of faces had chosen to explore and settle outside the city... Anyway, that was in my mind one of the definitions of true poverty. Ceylon gave me another unforgettable visual image - the kids missing hands, standing begging on the street corners of Columbo. Our taxi driver told us they were deliberately maimed to make begging more productive; that was 1970.
Real poverty is here as well in Cambodia at the Tonle Sap Lake floating village of Chong Kneas, but there is change in the air.
I grabbed this photo from the web. Chong Kneas is about 30 minutes south of Siem Reap, and is a floating village of Khmer and Vietnamese people. There are about 170 villages like this on the vast Tonle Sap lake, with roughly 180,000 inhabitants. Chong Kneas consists of about 5,800 people in 7 villages, according to the information in the tourist building where we got our boat.
In the photo, you can see the river flowing into the lake in the distance.
The ecosystem of this lake is unlike anything in North America. Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, and shrinks and swells again according to the monsoon season. During the dry season, as we are seeing it, the trees are showing more of themselves, and the stilt homes have more precarious porches. No safety inspectors here, people need to use common sense. 
With the water low now, the pollution at the river mouth area is obvious. Motor oil, trash, and a multitude of bacteria exist here, along with a paradise for bird life, 200 species of fish, crocodiles, turtles, and other reptiles. The lake provides Cambodia with over half its fish supply. Our dinner the other night probably came from here, which did make us think about the visible pollution. Sometimes you just have to not think too much. 
Dry season means some biking and soccer for the kids! And here is the Chong Kneas school, reached by a ramp from the road. It will rise considerably in the summer monsoon season.
Here the kids are hanging out during lunch break. We stopped next door to get our craft, which will take us down the river through the village. We'll get to the lake eventually. The journey takes a while during dry season. The lake will grow from only about 965 square miles to an immense 4,630 square miles during the summer rains. 
The larger craft on the right is what we traveled in. The surrounding small boats with families are plying their trade, which is based on the quest for the American dollar. We were offered soft drinks, food, crafts, and photo opportunities with snakes.
The presence of the Catholic Church and Rotary Inter-national was a common sight. There were Church store buildings and places of worship, all floating. There were cemetaries also, on the low lying islands in the river. They must be underwater half the year.
On down the river, to the lake. We stopped part way at a "buy stuff" double decker boat, and we had a good view of the neighborhood.
And here are the ubiquitous Coracle Kids. Very deft they are with the steering of their bowl boats, while handling the snakes at the same time.. I wasn't sure if this child was giving us a peace sign, or asking for two dollars for the photo op. Or is it two dollars to buy a snake? Two dollars is a whole lot of money here... some of our questions are simply going to go unanswered, I think. Like, how could we get a snake home? Or is it supposed to be lunch?
As we cruised down toward the lake, we had a chance to talk to our guides. Over and over we heard that the number one goal was to get an education. Learning English was seen as an essential step toward success, since that's the path into the tourist trade. Cambodia's natural beauty and antiquity will make this nation's wealth grow. Aside from the obvious attraction of Angkor Wat, there are also the beaches to the south. This is an area I'd love to see next time! Snorkeling and diving on the southern coast is a whole other world of potential for the nation. Ecotourism in the northern forests will be one more realm of possibility, but only if the illegal logging devastation is controlled, and UXO and bandit danger are mitigated. That takes money and time. People are poaching illegal hardwoods because they need to feed their families, and Cambodia is still on that long road to recovery.
Did I mention the photo opportunity with crocodiles?
Finally, we can see the lake ahead. It's like reaching the sea. The sky becomes vast, and we think about what a storm would be like out here. How would these buildings stand up to a big wind?
It was nice to see the huge sky, and the air was clear of diesel.
The view from the deck was beautiful. We could see many family homes floating nearby, taking advantage of the clearer water and fresh breeze from the lake. As we had gotten to the lake, the restaurant craft was on our right - this cell tower was on our left. Not many places had land lines, and electricity was often generator driven, but cell phones are everywhere. Leaping over older technology makes sense here, and is a lot cheaper.
Our restaurant kitchen on the boat. I have a feeling this is where we caught that bug, but there's no way to know. Could have been anytime in the last week, really. The food was nothing to write home about, so I won't. We were just more tourists to these folks, a universe away from their reality, and we all knew it. A bit humbling.
On the way back I snapped a few more shots. The embankments along the river farther inland were perfect for motorcycles, and we saw a lot of them. The motorbikes were more important than stable walls, evidently - without transport, you can't get to a job in Siem Reap, or a clinic. And who has money for both gas and building materials?
As we disembarked from our river craft, this group of young fellows were hanging out having lunch and a few beers. They were amused by us, and a bit derisive, I suspect. It was clear from watching our uncomfortable guide that these guys were making a few jokes at our expense, but we took no offense. It's got to be really weird to have tourists from another hemisphere come to see your village as if there is something strange about it... if I were in their shoes, I'd probably be resentful and bitter. After all, most of those bombs laying about the place were made in the good ol' USA. But astonishingly, the general Cambodian attitude seems to be forward looking, positive, and hopeful, at least as far as this naive American can tell. We were only communicating with those who had learned some English, of course, the people actually doing better economically now. So I don't really know the attitude of the tens of thousands still impoverished. But hope is in the air, and God knows Cambodia deserves it.
This final shot from the coach ride back reminds me of my school bus ride to K6 in Vientiane, back in the day. Rice paddies and haze, where water meets the sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment