Sympathizing with Angelina

Feeling well enough to travel and eager to leave the stench of Siem Reap, I boarded a southbound bus to Phnom Penh. I had, however, payed an extra $5 for a bus with a toilet, just in case. Bus rides thus far have been extremely enjoyable for me. You can, at the least, witness rural life in these foreign landscapes. I feel guilty reading or sleeping during these times, thinking I'm letting the best of this education pass me by. It's a "salt of the earth" type of thing for me.

A (lengthy) digression:

Here's the thing about traveling in Cambodia. It's hard. As in, it's hard to handle what you see...as an American, and as a human. Cambodia is in the lowest 25% of the world's economies and is astoundingly poor. The conditions I saw on the bus ride from Poi Pet, on the Cambodian/Thai border, to Siem Reap were the worst living conditions I have ever seen in my life. But it gets harder when you get out of the bus, because Cambodia has a real problem with child beggars. These are kids that are filthy and you don't doubt that they're hungry and their family has no means, and they're everywhere. And here's the rub: it's hard to figure out how to handle it.

My first night in Siem Reap my friends and I were out to dinner, sitting outside. Now, a lot of kids are selling goods trying to make a buck. Sitting at our table we were turning away kids selling postcards, bracelets, and the such. One boy...I don't know, ten years old...was particularly charming. Most of the kids feebly try to sell their wares, knowing a scripted English dialogue to accomplish their task. This kid though was confident and was working his sales pitch. I had already turned him away once when he came back (they always do).

"Hey Mista, you buy postcards? Look, ten postcards, one dolla."
"No thanks."
"Why you no buy postcards? Ten for one dolla! Send to your Mother."
"It's all digital now kid."
"Hey you Mista, what's your name?"
"Joe." (It's just something I like to do.)
"Hey Joe, we play tic-tac-toe. If I win, you buy postcards."

So he finds a rock, draws a board on the patio, and marks an X in the corner. It being about 15 years since I last played, I throw my circle in a neighboring corner. I knew right away that I had made a fatal move and had been out-dueled in tic-tac-toe by a 10 year-old Cambodian street thug.


But that's one of the fun stories, because you often can have fun with them and so many of them are incredibly cute. But as I'm buying my postcards, another kid witnesses the exchange. He's not selling anything, just standing ten feet away, no shirt, no shoes. I do my best to ignore him, but he stands there forever and has tears running down his cheeks. Like I said, hard to handle. So I think I can sneak him a dollar, probably as much to help myself from watching him as to help him out. He takes it, runs off, and another, younger kid sees it and sets up camp feet from our table. And so I learned my first lesson in Cambodian charity. It's impossible to just hand out dollars to every kid that asks, yet you can't really feel good about yourself ignoring them. We tried to turn a blind eye to that kid, but he followed us on our way home. Six, seven, eight years-old, not sure, follows us by himself through the streets of Siem Reap at 10 0'clock, until he started wailing for a dollar and we couldn't take it anymore, so we gave him one.

And the real shitter is that it only takes a day before you're immune to them, and it's easy(er) to ignore them and brush them off, and even get annoyed with them. You figure out that a lot of it is coached and sometimes they're putting on an act. They've been told what English they need and what to say to Westerners to get a buck.

So, I cruise down to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. From what I understand, Phnom Penh was once considered the finest city in Indochina during Cambodia's golden years in the late 50's and early 60's. It served as an escape for diplomats and correspondents from war torn Vietnam. Now, I admit I knew nothing about Cambodia's history prior to this trip. But it's interesting and pertinent to what I've seen in my travels, so if you'll allow me two minutes to fill you in.

Cambodia just recently ended almost three decades of a civil war that began in 1970. But the worst of it came in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge overthrew the government in power. They were led by a man named Pol Pot, and his campaign was "Year Zero." Pol Pot planned to turn Cambodia into a peasant driven, agrarian cooperative. The Khmer Rouge abolished religion, money, material wealth, and pretty much all books, texts, and writings. They evacuated the cities, separated families, and "re-educated" people in the fields. The end result was approximately 2 million Cambodians killed between 1975 and 1979 through torture and execution. By design, most of the country's intellectuals were executed. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, but the UN granted the Cambodian seat to the Khmer Rouge until 1991. Twisted.
In Siem Reap, I saw the triumph of Cambodia's history in the temples of Angkor. In Phnom Penh I witnessed the worst. I saw the S-21 prison in the city, a high school overtaken by Pol Pot, where thousands of Cambodians were imprisoned and tortured. And I visited the Killing Fields, where prisoners from S-21 were taken and brutally executed, buried in hundreds of mass graves.

So, Cambodia is at a crossroads, so to speak. The country has only recently opened to tourism, and as of now the future of the country seems to depend on it. If there were no tourists, they would be in a lot worse shape right now. For such a recent, tortured history, on the surface Cambodians are happy people. Always smiling, always glad you're there.