Cambodia Trois

Under the brightest of Cambodian morning skies, our three Malaysian Chinese princesses arrive. They are a little bleary-eyed after their early morning flight, but nevertheless game to begin their new journey into volunteering. My intrepid wife, and her not so intrepid husband, guide the three Chinese belles through the scooter/tuk tuk laden streets to our usual watering hole, at the rear of the old market, in Siem Reap. From there it is a short hop and a step to the gallery Colors of Cambodia, Mundull 1 Village, Sway Dong Kum Commune. 

The gallery has changed a little since our last visit. The front has been let to a company producing and selling striking black lacquer work, which augments the paintings by the Colors of Cambodia students, and teachers, nicely. There is a very nice art/craft feel to the building now, and many foreign visitors stream in to see both crafts and paintings. Of course the two Cambodian beauties selling the lacquer work only enhance the inherent attractiveness of the place.

We pick up Seney, a Cambodian artist and art teacher for Colors of Cambodia, and Sarouen, the gallery manager and tourist guide, and head for rural Siem Reap aboard slim, fragile looking motorcycles. Seney has the unenviable task of transporting my largeness, but he copes well, despite the mud sliding and near collisions on the journey to see the homes of the children we sponsor.

Firstly we head to Thai Zo school to pick up the Elementary School Headmaster (Director), as our guide, then off onto very narrow dirt tracks entirely unsuitable for any other form of transport save motorcycles, cycles or pedestrians. The houses of the sponsored children are several kilometers along the tracks, and too far for us to walk. For a while we travel adjacent to a muddily brown canal. Smiling Khmer children, their bodies immersed in water, gather blue water hyacinth and lotus seed pods. We travel on, over ruts, around holes filled with recent rains, past water buffalo drying in the sun, past white cows, their backbones prominent and past oh so many acres of tall paddy.

My wife has signaled a stop. We dismount. Me with a little difficulty, but Seney is patient. It is a photo op. We have come to rest at a rice paddy field, where a whole Khmer family are busy harvesting their crop. Despite their need to quickly gather the rice before too much rain falls and ruins it, they stop their work and allow us to take pictures. Husband and wife both pose for photographs, the children continue working. The wife demonstrates cutting paddy to my wife. She hands her a small scythe, and advises her with body language how not to cut her legs off as well as the rice. There is no major blood letting incident so we continue, having thanked the family profusely.

Despite a small detour - it is was when Seney and I lose sight of the others and continue in the wrong direction, we eventually arrive at the first of the homes for visiting. It all appears very idyllic. There are tall, waving green stalks of rice. There is a mid-blue of the sky and a wooden house on stilts in the mid-ground. It is a December morning, and cool. A photographer’s masterpiece. It is all practically meditative. The rural silence speaks volumes of simplicity and contentment, but we are cautious not to let that glimpse of paradise fool us into believing in ‘Noble Savages’, but rather of honestly diligent Cambodian peasantry.

Some of the houses we visit have electricity, many do not. All are simple wooden structures, some on stilts, some on the ground with earth as a flooring. Most have but one simple room for the family to do everything save cook. Cooking is performed in an outhouse - a lean too with a corrugated iron roof. Many are families of twelve, or ten, eking   out a living in the best way they can. They lay traps and catch fish, eels, crabs from the flooded fields, grow their own rice, vegetables, spices and herbs. For the one house with electricity, it is provided by someone else's generator, for which they have to pay. Colors of Cambodia assists those children of poorer families with their education, by giving them the barest of essentials for them to attend school, but cannot help them with the six kilometers they have to walk to school.