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A good night’s sleep in a hotel to avoid the Khmer wedding (which went on for three days) and your whole perspective on life can improve. That and sitting at the top of a mountain today watching pond skaters, fish and dragonflies arsing about in the sun.
It doesn’t take much to make me happy.
There’s a wedding going on about three houses down. It’s half eleven at night, most Khmers go to bed around nine, but this could go on all night. The music is so loud that I can feel the vibrations coming up through the house and up my chair. Earplugs will do nothing as the vibrations still keep you awake, so the only other options are to stay awake and watch some TV cursing these people, or take an elephantine dose of sedatives. I only have herbal Nytol, so it’s telly and cursing.
Khmer weddings go on for maybe two or three days – the richer the families, the longer the wedding, and they are characterised by the amount of noise they create. You can hear them a mile off. Literally. And they can start at 4:30 in the morning. A marquee tent is erected, tables laid, and speakers big enough to embarrass the Rolling Stones or house a small family are added. The wedding up the street even has tannoy speakers at the top of a pole to broadcast various chants, speeches, and what sounds like the catterwalling of an insane woman. I don’t pretend to get it, I just want to sleep.
Having a cold in Cambodia seems a bit like having heat rash in England in November – just doesn’t make sense. That said, I do, and I’ve love some Lemsip around now, but I’m not sure if they do it in the shops. A lot of Cambodians get cupped if they get a cold, that’s not for me, and other than that tiger balm is seen as the panacea for all ills. I guess I’ll do some tiger balm and get some multivitamins. Hot whisky is suggested a lot, but alcoholic drinks are suggested a lot all over town on a regular basis, so I’m not sure whether it’s a genuine cure or just another excuse to get drunk.
My mate Steve gets here this weekend smack in the middle of Bon Om Teuk or the Water Festival, about the biggest festival of the year in Cambodia, a celebration of the bounty offered by the great lake Tonle Sap and the reversal of the waters into the Mekong at the end of the rainy season. I’ll personally take the roads not being a pot-holed nightmare as a good enough excuse for a party. The main celebrations are in Phnom Penh, but there will be boat races here in Siem Reap as well, and walking down the river bank after work this evening I saw several crews practising their strokes in their beautifully maintained long boats. On Saturday on the Siem Reap River it’ll be like the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Except nothing like that.
It all sounds innocent enough. Operation Christmas Child “is a unique ministry that brings Christmas joy, packed in gift-filled shoeboxes, to children around the world”. Over the past 10 years, 24 million shoeboxes have been delivered, making it the world’s largest children’s Christmas project. Every US president since Ronald Reagan has packed a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child. In the UK, thousands of schools, churches and youth clubs are doing the same. Some will fill their boxes with dried-out felt tip pens and discarded Barbie amputees. Others spend serious money on the latest GameBoy or Sony Walkman.
But what many parents and teachers don’t know is that behind Operation Christmas Child is the evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse. Their aim is “the advancement of the Christian faith through educational projects and the relief of poverty”. And a particularly toxic version of Christianity it is. This is the same outfit that targeted eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and was widely condemned for following US troops into Iraq to claim Muslims for Christ.
The evangelicals who like to giftwrap Islamophobia | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited.
My friend Nick has received a barrage of protest letters after writing an article in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner about Operation Christmas Child. His article is a lot less strongly worded than the one above, and the one above was written by the vicar of Putney, The Rev Dr Giles Fraser. Nick expressed disappointment that there were so few letters of support for his article – but he can’t be surprised. Zealous god-botherers are bound to get steamed up and writing letters if anyone buggers about with their warm-and-fuzzies, and most people who agreed with it couldn’t be bothered to write and say so, even though they should.
So I’m working in a developing country – Siem Reap’s slick bakery cafe, free wi-fi and numerous bars are an island of affluence in a country where most are below the poverty line and earning less than a dollar fifty a day, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever and TB are widespread, and, well, you know the rest. Samaritan’s Purse shoeboxes have already already been delivered to Cambodia. It’s bad enough that a child in one of our classes at the Sangkheum Center the other day was found looking up ‘Sin’ in the dictionary after being given a copy of The Book Of Hope, now I dread the prospect of these boxes showing up, containing as they do more evangelical literature, aimed at converting children to Christianity. As mentioned in the article above, this is partly achieved through bigoted statements about other faiths, and partly through bible study courses after the children receive the gifts.
A video on the Samaritan’s Purse website features several dewey-eyed god-botherers talking of Operation Christmas Child giving gifts of unconditional love, but it isn’t unconditional love when you bribe children into adopting your belief in God with a cuddly toy, any more than it is when you ask a poor person to pray in exchange for food. If the gift is so unconditional, give it with no strings attached. Donate money to an aid organisation, come and help, do something more useful and sustainable than sending someone a teddy bear in a shoe box, and feel justifiably warm and fuzzy – but no-one has the right to force a particularly bigoted and pernicious brand of the Christian faith down children’s throats, even if it is giftwrapped.
After my first English class this afternoon, one of my young adult group handed me a glossy but cheaply produced booklet, the Book of Hope. They had been given it at high school this morning. This book contained pages of advice with titles such as Love, Sex, Health, Career, and Addiction. These are themes that may be playing on the minds of teenagers, so your timing, sir, was impeccable, and providing the book in English and Khmer was particularly thoughtful.
It’s just the way that you interspersed all of this advice with passages from the Bible that disturbs me.
A page on sex juxtaposed with The Sermon on the Mount – do you think maybe this is likely to lead to confusion? What is the relevance of a discourse on holiness to the sexual education of these people? Trust an evangelist to try and completely fuck up people’s heads with biblical passages rather than giving them any useful advice on some of the most intimate areas of their lives.
The dictionary in the back of the booklet was highly amusing, however. A is for Abraham. B is for Baptism. C is for Commandment. I particularly liked H for Herod, K for King David, and S for Sin. Useful, relevant English for the modern world.
To be fair, brazenly handing out chunks of bible is not half as sneaky as the tactics of some evangelist groups, like free English lessons for poor kids that are little more than sermons, or my favourite, asking Khmers to pray in exchange for healthcare or food. You’ve not sunk that low… have you?
So let me inform you that should you come anywhere near one of my classes with your literature, unless it is part of a fair and balanced religious studies curriculum (which we are planning), I shall be happy to suggest you shove your booklets where even the holy light from your Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t shine.
I have now conducted several listening exercised with my group of young adults, all aimed at enhancing their listening skills and understanding of English. This has been accomplished through the use of some of the finest music known to man. So far, we have listened to
All nice simple songs. The idea is very simple – write the lyrics to the song on the whiteboard, but miss out a word or so in each line of the song. You play the song once, then see who can fill in the blanks on the whiteboard. They’re getting better. An unexpected result of this listening exercise, which happened when I put the first song on, was that the kids started singing along, and carried on singing after the lesson had finished. It’s a bit surreal when a Cambodian kid is walking around with a big smile on his face singing “Say You, Say Me”.
I’m going to do my best to protect the kids from hip-hop, which in most cases barely resembles English and will confuse the hell out of them. Khmers don’t need to start calling each other bitches and motherf***ers any time soon – the worst insult I’ve had from a local so far is ‘pig’.
I was part of a blessing ceremony the other day for a friend’s new hotel. Got covered in water and jasmine flowers but it was all very nice. One thing about Buddhism means I couldn’t do it – all that time on your knees. I’d need reversible legs.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
