A visit to Siem Reap

As I travel out of Phnom Penh, the landscape takes on a vastly different appearance from the city: flat lands of rice patties with scattered palm trees reach towards the horizon where the round bellies of mountains look like grey-blue shadows against the sky. There are often silhouettes of people against this backdrop - kids walking from school in their dusty blue and white uniforms, lost in their own worlds singing, skipping and finding various things along their path to amuse themselves with. People walking along the ridges between the rice patties, walking cattle home, plowing fields with an ox-pulled plow.Women sitting under grass roofs to stay out of the sun selling fruits and breast-feeding their babies. People in the swamps collecting snails...hammocks and more hammocks.

My first night in the town of Siem Reap I head out to the old market. Walking about, I literally stumble upon a small concert being put on at the land mine museum. This museum is a large room with white walls and white tiles, light up with fluorescent lighting. The man that runs the museum, a Cambodian, has spent a number of years going into the jungles around Siem Reap and de-mining the region. On one of the walls is a quote of his "I want this country to be safe for all Cambodian children". Children and their parents who have suffered amputations because of these land mines which were planted during war times are putting on tonights play and concert.

The orchestra is a group of young boys who play traditional Khmer instruments. The actors are the kids and the adults...they play young Khmer Rouge soldiers (who were often kids) and prisoners (who were often young people as well), crying mothers, teachers. It is a very organic experience - there is no set boundary between the stage and the audience. No great effort is taken to disguise that they are playing roles - they change character while on stage. And somehow this make their performance more real and penetrating. I think it feels real because they are playing out pieces of themselves- they are acting out something that is a part of them. The little ones, 4 maybe 5 years old, are also a part of the play and they move in and out of the scenes or the audience and become the connection between the past and the present, the reality and the acting. Through the skits and songs, these children tell the story of their country... stories that have left remarkable marks on their bodies - missing body parts which were blown off by land mines which were scattered through out the country side and jungle, planted with the intent to hurt the inocent.

The next two days I spend visiting the Angkor Wat temples. They are stunning, unkept, raw, frozen in heaps of tumbling rocks, sunken into the jungle; tree roots of the spung tree have coiled themselves into and around the rocks. A symbiotic relationship seems to have developed between the jungle and these monuments - the trees live of the moss that grows on the rocks of the temples.

As the group of tourists moves away, the jungle comes back to life - lizards crawls around on the tree roots and temple rocks, numerous butterflies flutter about, sounds of birds become distinct as voices become echoes in a distance. Their is a sense of sinking, of calm and stillness.

As with most spectacular places, they look nothing like the pictures on postcards or in books. Their sheer size is breath taking and reality enables you to see a dimension that is never quite captured in pictures. These temples are majestic and calm, unphased and unmoving. Many of the exquisite carvings have been washed away by the elements but the expansive foundations remain. THe carving that are still present are layered, intricate and endless. A number of carvings have been hacked away by robbers to sell these artifacts on the black market somewhere.

I return to a few of the temples and realize that you take them in in layers - there is so much involved and so many aspects to draw upon and absorb that one walk through only teases the curiosity.

On the Saturday evening, I go to a cello concert, given by a Swiss doctor who has established 3 private, NGO children hospitals in Cambodia. His nickname is Beatocello. Between pieces he talks about the health condition of children in Cambodia - it is bad. He expresses his frustration at the fact that as the world becomes consumed with SARS a couple of years ago, which effected (not killed, but effected) less than 1000 people, 9000 children where severely ill from Denge Fever and nothing - no media, no money. He provided the reasons for this imbalance: children, especially poor children, do not have power, they do not have any lobbying power, they have no voice in the mainstream media. He talks about the fact that the West comes in after conflicts and wars that it supported or caused as acts of charity. The work that needs to be done by western countries should not be acts of charity rather they should be an obligation, an act of justice, after what is left from these wars. He picks up his cello and plays another piece by Bach.

A day prior to my arrival in Siem Reap there was a hostage taking in one of the international schools here. A group of bandits (young Cambodian men) came into the school and demanded $1000 and a car (so they can get to Thailand). Before all was said and done, a Canadian boy was dead. Bronwyn, my flat mate here, was very effected by this event...her thoughts are in the next blog.