Giving in Cambodia

Champagne coconut and enchiladas were served in Viva Mexico as the electricity outage forbade me access to the internet, okay, that's it, right then I knew that I was back in Siem Reap, amidst drawling and drooling Americans. That and the grease-ball in the green tee-shirt, Mid Western American accent and the Khmer child bride, all hiked up on frozen Margaritas and pawing at the smiling waitresses seemed all too familiar, and all too Siem Reap, Cambodia.

The whirring electric fans had eventually given up their battle with the Cambodian winds. Grit flew through the open restaurant. Fans eased to a stop. Lights went out, and somehow the traffic got much much noisier, but my artist wife had soldiered on, sketching, and my step-son diligently, addictedly, watched Manga on his mobile phone.

Winds brought rain, and what rain. Straight falling great goblets of cooling rain, bouncing happy rain,  glad kamikaze rain dive bombing tuk tuks. It was Gene Kelly dancing rain, splattering on sidewalks, bringing melancholy memory. It was a writer's rain, but it was my wife drinking the Angkor beer, not me. The writer's rain sank its teeth into my consciousness, biting chunks of still throbbing thought, tearing off morsels of what could have become morose memory, but didn't. The absence of alcohol and my good sense at not drinking at lunchtime gave me the edge. The Writer's rain was, after all, just rain which slowed to a mere drip. The clouds were still grey, but what could have been a tour d' force became nothing but a damp sarong and a vague memory of a dream and dancing with a blonde.

There was a distinct absence of either Frida or Diego at Viva Mexico. Posada and Siqueiros too were noticeable in their absence, as was any reference to silhouetted skulls, skeletons or any of the paraphernalia of The Day of the Dead. Instead green phallic cacti graced orange walls where fake giant geckos raced after unimaginable insects. It was all a little Quentin Tarrantino, with a dash of David Lynch Blue Velvet, and a whole shake of Siem Reap tourismo, but I enjoyed the quirky delights of pseudo-Tex Mex. But I couldn't get that bloody Beegees song out of my head "..........and the lights all went down in Massachusetts......" 

The very next day, and early morning black coffee at Viva brought us the Siem Reap June quiet. After the night's deluge, the ever present Cambodian dust had returned, and with it the heat. It was an early start. The ever smiling tuk tuk driver was champing at the bit to transport us to Thai Zho School. No pigs on motorcycles this time. The roads at 8.30am were curiously quiet as our vehicle tried to evade the growing number of holes in the road, and mostly failed.

Siem Reap was expanding like my waistline. Thai Zho school was gratefully adding buildings to house the growing secondary population of students. The school needed laptops as well as buildings and injections of cash. That trip we were able to provide another donated laptop, the second so far, with the promise of a third in September. The teachers are in need to upgrade their knowledge, and the school, and begin to move into the 21st C, at least for file keeping and other purely necessary tasks. The great god electricity still evaded most of the classrooms, cooler air was provided only by windows with bars and no glass. Occasionally the swinging wooden shutters slammed in the breeze, blocking the light, making the audience of students outside, jump.

The new Colors of Cambodia teachers aided one teacher in directing students to paint key chains for children's sponsors, and taking Polaroid photos of sponsored students both for record keeping and to share with sponsors. As the day grew hotter I began to wilt. Lack of sleep will do that. I desperately needed a caffeine boost to offset the tiredness. Age can be a bugger some times. I silently prayed for class to finish. I knew that on the trail back there was a small coffee stall, there we could indulge in small shots of the local sweet muddy coffee, espresso style.

As I wrote, a small Khmer child in a remarkably dirt stained white(ish) shirt peered over my shoulder, at the tablet. He and I were both silent. I smiled, turned my writing towards him. He looked, and walked away. Then, suddenly, there he was again, watching as I stabbed the keys with one finger. I had no idea what he was thinking, whether he had seen an iPad before, if what I was doing had any connect with him other than his curiosity. The school was remote and the children's families very poor. Hence the sponsoring in the first place. There was a disconnect, me with my iPad and he with his down-at-heel school uniform. I felt guilty for the minute amount of affluence I had. Sitting at the back of the classroom I was an alien observer. My role had been to record, in still and moving images, the interaction of  Colors of Cambodia with the sponsored students. Can recorders ever remain detached.

Nighttime brought Margaritas, Pimms and the eager cry of "tuk tuk sir", amidst a quite subdued Siem Reap street scene. A day of teaching school children, and the visiting of senior monks in monasteries was behind us. It was a productive day, a day of meeting old friends and peeking into the future, ever so slightly.  A day of guidance and earnest deals struck, a day, perhaps, for the betterment of mankind, or at least those 135 children we help Colors of Cambodia sponsor in Siem Reap.

The off season in Siem Reap is barely bearable. Tourists are at a minimum and the air noticeably cooler. Evenings and night are devoid of the raucousness of the high season. That is when all and his uncle are drunk, loud, and displaying the less decent side of what passes for human nature in tourist towns. My welcome Pimms brought to mind sunny days at Wimbledom, strawberries and the dull thud of racket on ball. A complete contrast to the bloody mosquito filled air of that most popular city in Cambodia. But my Wimbledon days are long since gone as I pondered my expatness in a bizarre mentally linen suited Denholm Elliot sort of way, all mopping brow and dreams of an England that never was.

Piling up years blinds you (literally) to the questionable delights of the local young female population. Not in any Ginsbergian way, no meat denial, no Zen of gayness. But a saving grace gracefully growing older. While it is unquestionably true that many Cambodian young women are attractive in that Apsara, high cheekboned, long black hair way, age in its wisdom inoculates most of us elder males from that particular virus of wanton lust. Maybe it was a sublime Thomas Mann moment. Perhaps I needed a beach and deckchair to appreciate the beauty before me, while two shapely young Khmer young ladies dangled their equally shapely legs in a water-filled trough for small fish to nibble at. I remained largely undisturbed, except to the fact of the number of other feet which may have graced those troughs and whose DNA might have been digested by those very same fish.

Morning hardened, and came, ejaculating a brand new day into the world. Hendrix sang 'if a six turned out to be nine'. In my bleary-eyed, not so cool air-con Cambodian morning I mistook six for eight, shot out of bed and, while evacuating last night's food, I fumbled my iPad to discover my error. I wondered why the alarms had not gone off. Only I was left alarmed, as others remained asleep.

It was to be our last day, that trip, in Siem Reap. We needed to buy ground Vietnamese coffee, as you do and, for that, to breakfast early and rouse our tuk tuk driver from his slumber too. We had a second visit to the school, more Polaroid photos to take and more data to collect visa vie currently sponsored students.

Inside that last sweltering classroom, sweat ran from my arms as I typed. The weather was spoiling for yet another tyrannous downpour. I sat at the back of another class, as my wife and her son distributed paints and key chains for another group to paint for their sponsors. The sky constantly greyed, the heat inside rose as the air stilled. Overcome with the internal heat I went outside to find a breeze, sat in our tuk tuk, gathering my wits and feeling a little less faint.

June, though a wetter month, was nevertheless swelteringly hot. Our driver, taking pity on this old, large, white man brought a most welcome bottle of cold water. As I let the coolness slip down my throat, there was a veritable deluge of children as the morning school session finished. Those children who had bicycles swept upon them to charge from school, those who didn't flip-flopped their rubber slippered ways along the dirt road that led from the school. Bicycles of all colours, including 'Tomorrow's' white which, incidentally, was a ladies bike being manoeuvred by a very small boy, exited from the builder's yard which the school had temporarily become. All over, bicycles had sprung into action amidst mothers on small motor scooters collecting their tiny children, three-up on their machines. I didn't notice any Italian thieves, but steady pumping sounds emanated from the builder's machine promoted a snooze. I closed my eyes...

Exiting Siem Reap airport, security staff uncommonly surly. Nary a smile broke, no eyes lit. Belts and shoes taken, passports scanned at X-ray belt, once happy Apsara dancing, lotus positioned graceful people grunting, stressed. Maybe the price of tourism is too high.  

In Quest of Kuala Lumpur's Museum of Ethnic Arts

The city was Kuala Lumpur, the market was Central, the day sunny and a Friday. It was morning and our students, some parents and teachers, eagerly mounted a big yellow bus (not taxi) and trundled towards the city and its paved paradise. Students and parents twittered like birds at the back of the bus, for most of our brief journey and, having circumvented the wearisome traffic, we finally alighted at Pasar Seni (aka Central Market). 

Central Market, which is hardly central and really no longer a market, was originally named the Big Market (Pasar Besar), and had been a meeting place in Kuala Lumpur since its inception in 1888. The current freshly painted building was built in the time of the British (1937), in a rectangular Art Deco style, and has grown from a genuine meeting place to an over blown tourist trap, replete with severely hiked prices and quickly made ‘antiques’. But Kuala Lumpur’s main Central Market was not our destination, its annex was.

Having taken the obligatory group photo, all fake smiles and bunny ears, we herded our young teen flock around the main thoroughfare of Central Market, past psychedelic lampshades made of hardened plastic and figurines of red behatted Chinese Cultural revolution icons. We stopped for a desert which was, seemingly, unavailable (as we were too early at 10.30am). Instead we bought ‘antique’ postcards freshly Photoshoped and dot matrix printed. Then we leapt merrily up the stairs, not to Bedfordshire but to the second floor of the annex, to pay our respects to all things vaguely tribal.

Leonard Yiu, the proprietor, curator and chief collector for the Museum of Ethnic Arts was unable to meet with us on this occasion. Leonard was probably halfway up some long forgotten river in Indonesia seeking El Dorado, Atlantis or the lost continent of Mu with Professor Challenger and Allan Quartermain, making our bus journey seem a tad less than heroic. Nevertheless, going into Leonard’s museum, officially called Art House Gallery, Museum of Ethnic Arts (lot 3.04 & 3.05) was like entering into another (lost) world.

A stern Indonesian wooden statue greeted us, all pointy breasts and big ears. The label indicated that she was of a ‘goddess’ from Nias Island, but she was obviously having an off day, or maybe resented the intrusion of our school children into her relative peace and quiet, as her mouth scowled and her eyes were less than friendly.

Masks galore filled ancient wooden boxes, walls, showcases. Yellow and red seemed to dominate, though a couple of very white masks had been made to represent the intrusion of the white man into tribal lands and culture. Those masks were not terribly flattering, but gave our group of Chinese school children a double-take and a damn good laugh. Many masks seemed Balinese, with the characteristic bulging eyes or long pointed noses of demons, perhaps a remnant of the Ramayana plays. I thought I saw a Hanuman (Monkey God) mask, but it was brown instead of the characteristic green or white, and there was no label.

Our Sarawakian guide pointed out various shaman accoutrements lurking in the museum’s shadows including, yes you guessed it, yet more masks. Masks are a big thing amongst the indigenous peoples of Indonesia, though many now are made to be sold to enquiring tourists. 

One smaller girl was a little fascinated by postcards of half naked tribal women from Borneo. You could see the questions framing themselves in her mind, “why don’t they have clothes of their tops” or “Isn’t this a little pervy” etc. But I carefully explained the difference in cultures, and that in many other societies it was as natural for them to wear less clothes as it is for us to wear more. Her frown and wry smile held some doubts. Luckily there were no photos of Papua New Guinea (Kombai or Korowai) penis gourds.

The pièce de résistance was the iniquitous carved monkey skull, which our guide held up for the children to be in awe of. The skull grinned a ghastly grin, all long browning incisors and hollowed eye sockets. It was gruesomely held aloft by a rattan handle, which only seemed to add to the overall macabreness of that particular object. And, like all good things it had to come to an end.

The children had a very brief insight into the worlds of the indigenous tribes still inhabiting Malaysia and Indonesia; tribes who had subsisted there long before the children’s Chinese ancestors had appeared, or the Malays who now profess to lay claim to a land they have, in fact, only borrowed from those who have a much earlier claim.