Quite Random

Cambodia and death

A comment that gets made here occasionally is about how you could write a book on the Khmer psyche, maybe a bunch of books. I’ve heard it a few times and said it a few times. Ray Zepp compares Cambodia to a Russian doll (open one up, think you have it sussed and then there’s another one inside, and then another…). Too often the only response to the sheer weirdness of this place is to say ‘welcome to Cambodia’, with a smile of resignation.

Even setting aside the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the subsequent famine and civil war, people still die needlessly here every day. Few Cambodians wear crash helmets, many ride small motorbikes, and cars and trucks give no quarter, so fatalities are a daily occurrence on the roads. It’s a sad fact that, riding to work on highway number 6, somewhere along the way you’re likely to see either the immediate aftermath of a collision, or nothing more than broken glass, a pool of blood, and scattered shopping. In an English class a short while ago I gave the students the beginning of a story along the lines of ‘today I was walking to school when…’, expecting them to use their imagination and write whatever came to mind, no matter how strange. One did - the rest of them all wrote about witnessing a crash between a truck and a bike, one even talking about the motorcycle driver’s brains being scattered on the road. It’s just a fact of life here. People will refer to this person or that person having died as easily as if they’d described them having gone to the shops. You can’t judge people for having that attitude to death given what has gone before, and I don’t pretend to know nearly enough about this place to understand how grieving works here.

We just ran a session with the young adults as part of their personal, social and health education course, talking about reactions to change and loss, and they used lots of words like ’sad’, ‘tearful’ and ‘heartbroken’. They’re aware of the words, so I have no reason to believe the kids are any more emotionless automatons than any other Khmer, but I was aware of a fine line between helping them talk about their emotions and programming them to react to loss in what some people might see as a more appropriate way. It would be, apart from anything else, incredibly patronising to tell these people to react in a certain way when they have already dealt with loss and deprivation I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Nevertheless, if people can articulate their feelings they’re less likely to bottle them up, and bottling up is something many Khmers do very well, until they release the pressure by beating their wives, children and dogs.

You often pass funeral processions if you’re in the vicinity of a pagoda. A column of people walk slowly with the deceased maybe carried upon a large float. Funerals, like weddings, appear to vary widely in their opulence or size depending upon the income of the family. Some richer people may be buried for a few years before being exhumed and cremated. If a richer person commits suicide, their house (assuming they killed themselves there) will be destroyed. A suicide by hanging I heard about recently happened to a family that weren’t well enough to knock down the whole house, so they knocked down one wall of the room where it had happened. Friends who taught at the school where this person had worked were a little shocked when they arrived for class and asked what game the students would like to play, and one of them, with a glint in their eye, suggested hangman.

In a way, reactions to death here are quite refreshing. People may grieve in private but you don’t often see Cambodians crying about anything much - there seems to be a bigger reserve of cool, or maybe a desire to maintain dignity. Compare that to the histrionics in the West when Diana Princess of Wales died or people’s preoccupation with ignoring death unless it’s in CSI and happening to someone else, and you’ve got to ask who’s acting more strangely. Maybe here there’s just a recognition that with death and difficulty a part of everyday life, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to be wringing your hands and wailing.

All the news is new and approved

I get to see the news every so often, not that often. The TV news is CNN or BBC World, so it’s quite US-centric, or in the case of BBC World a procession of B-team news readers and dull-as-ditchwater business reports I swear not a soul watches, interspersed with adverts for Rolex watches and how nice it is to do business in Bahrain. The advert about Bahrain made me laugh. A lady who runs a school here told me she left the school she’d run in Bahrain after she’d been called ‘infidel whore’ for about the millionth time.

The news here has been focussed on the food crisis. in Thailand, people have been working all day in their rice paddies and then staying outside at night, all night, just to guard their rice in case it is stolen from the fields. It is too precious. In Siem Reap, food prices and gasoline prices have gone up, even the contraband gasoline that you buy from Johnnie Walker bottles at the roadside. A short while ago the World Food Program dropped off a huge shipment of yellow peas at a school because there was no rice available, and then even worse turned up the next day and took it all away saying it had been a mistake delivering it there in the first place. Friends of mine who are working there were asking me if I knew any good recipes that used yellow peas, as the Cambodians didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with them.

Iain posted a link to a story on the Guardian website about the sale of Cambodian land to foreign property speculators - as much as 50% of the whole country has been sold off to Russia, Korea, China, the UK and elsewhere and people who thought they had legitimate property deeds have been booted off their land by the police and military. It has been doing the rounds and people have been talking about it, but it is a sad fact that we get this kind of news from media in the West as it is buried here. Though Cambodia is ostensibly a democracy, criticism of the government is not tolerated and many Khmers are very careful about what they say for fear of reprisals. When Global Witness published a report about illegal logging in Cambodia they were unceremoniously ejected from the country, and government officials who speak out about corruption are moved to jobs guarding lavatories in remote areas. There are elections coming up in the next couple of months, but the chances of the ruling elite losing power are slim to none, and even if they did, talk is that it would be contested, violently if need be.

And to think with the clear, fair democracy we have in the UK, people actually voted Boris into power.