Greg Mellen: February 2008 Archives
In Siem Reap we had the chance to have dinner with Bill Housworth and Eugene Targus. They are doctors at the Angkor Hospital for Children, which has worked with Davik Teng, the young girl with the hole in her heart who we have been following.
Housworth is the new director of the hospital, although he has been a part-time volunteer over the years.
Over dinner, we had an interesting discussion about some of the challenges of providing health care. Angkor Hospital for Children is run by a non-governmental or charitable organization that relies on donor support for most of its work.
Housworth says the hospital sees about 110,000 patients and its 50 beds are almost always at capacity. Much of the work done is educational and preventative and the hospital has a limited budget for technology.
I asked Housworth if a heart-lung machine, the kind needed to provide open heart surgery, was on his wish list. He said, "sure" but it was unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Housworth then described some of the issues the hospital has to deal with.
"There's an ethical question of how we allocate resources," Housworth said, noting that it is much more cost efficient to fight diarrhea and malnutrition.
"That will affect the most lives," Housworth said. "But the other side is the donors" who the doctor noted would rather see their money spent on curing HIV and fixing hearts, because they are sexier.
I am a traitor. Too often I am appalled at the often brutish, oafish nature of my countrymen and somewhat ashamed.
While Jeff and I were walking through the magnificent and eerie Ta Prohm ruins, we saw a group of 20-something men walking right past a "no entry" sign so that their friend could take a picture.
A worker at the complex grabbed the sign and shook it, saying "Can't you see the sign?"
The men just ignored the man and grunted something in German and went on clicking photos as if he had never said a word.
Later, I saw the same guys walking along the tops of several walls, again ignoring posted signs.
As I reflected on the interaction, I wasn't sure what surprised me more, the brutish behavior or that a Cambodian, usually the most placid and nonconfrontational people, challenged them.
That he was so rudely ignored made the conflict that much more disappointing. I really wanted to see the Cambodian guard kick the Germans out and show that certain behavior is universally unacceptable. But I suppose change comes in degrees.
While at Ta Prohm, I overheard a guide telling a group of tourists about a scene from Tomb Raider that was filmed in the spot. That piece of information seemed to be highly interesting to the group.
Ta Prohm is best known for the massive fig and silk cotton trees that grow through and on top of many of the structures. The roots of some of these trees are several feet across and look like dripped wax.
But it is the star power of Angelina Jolie, the star of Tomb Raider, that has turned Ta Prohm into possibly the most popular attraction at Angkor Wat.
I'm all about experiencing the local culture, really. I've hung out with the beer serving girls, I've sung karaoke in a brothel – all in the name of research. But the other day I was introduced, well nearly, to a cultural component I find hard to, um, embrace.
On a recent outing to a beer garden, I went into the bathroom to find several guys at the urinal receiving neck massages and back rubs provided by male bathroom attendants – not that there's anything wrong with that. Maybe it helps with flow.
One rather excited looking attendant spied me, but I was able to avoid him with a shake of the head. I did, however, take the proffered hand towel on the way out for a couple hundred riel.
As we have mentioned in earlier posts, driving in Cambodia is sort of like organized pandemonium. Lines on the roads are merely suggestions, stoplights are optional, the horn is a major tool of the road. It's cool as long as someone else is at the wheel.
Imagine our surprise when we learned that they actually teach some of this stuff. While passing through the city of Battambang we spotted a driving school.
I wondered what some of the course might be: Four-Lane U-Turns 101; Wrong Way Driving Methodology; Theories of the Physics of Braking.
-- Greg
The other day when Jeff and I were at a mall, a teenaged girl rather boldly walked up and rubbed the belly, then ran off to her friend with peals of laughter.
And then today, the waiters at a restaurant gave me a nickname "Big Fat." This time, it was Jeff who was falling down laughing.
-- Greg
I read somewhere that there is an internal logic to Cambodian traffic. I don't know about that, but I have noticed one consistency. Driving in Phnom Penh is a little like driving on snow and ice. The rule is that you can steer and maneuver, but don't ever hit the brakes.
--- Greg
I have noticed, too, that many of them have developed relationships or sorts with the patrons. Recently a Belgian man and the book selling girl got into an argument about how many books he had purchased over the course of a week.
--- Greg
Photographer Jeff Gritchen is the technophile on this trip. He just finished talking to people at the office on his computer with its video camera connection. I guess at first the picture wasn't coming in well. I think he may have started a new Verizon catchphrase, “Can you see me now?”
-- Greg
On Tuesday, Jeff and I are waiting outside the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh while inside Peter Chhun wrestles with bureaucrats. Chhun, the executive director of Hearts Without Boundaries, the non-profit working to get Davik Teng to the U.S. for critical heart surgery, has spent the better part of two days trying to clear the way for Davik and her mother to travel.
As we stand there, we meet Daniel Rin. A 23-year-old from California, Rin is waiting for his brother-in-law, who is trying to get a visa to travel to the U.S. Rin isn't hopeful about the chances of his family member.
“Out of 50 people who go (to the embassy) I'd say about two (get visas).”
Rin knows firsthand how difficult it can be. Rin traveled to Cambodia to get married. He is now embroiled with the embassy trying to get clearance for his wife to accompany him to the U.S. Rin got married two YEARS ago and has a 4-month-old son. He has no idea how long it will be before his family will be able to return to the U.S. Together.
One of the reasons Rin says he can't get his wife to the U.S. is because she lacks a sponsor who can help assure financial stability. Normally, a husband is the sponsor. However, although Rin has a job awaiting him in the U.S. when he returns, he can't document earnings and thus, he says, won't be accepted as a sponsor. He also says he has to redo health and police certificates for his wife.
Rather than displaying anger or outrage, Rin just seemed to adopt a very Cambodian mien of resignation and vague hope that as some point everything will work out.
In the meantime, he and his family scrape by at their home in Battambang Province, surviving on money sent by relatives back home.
How much of the blame belongs with Rin for not aggressively pursuing his case and how much belongs to the often imperious and impregnable embassy is hard to know. However, combined with the struggles Chhun faced, despite having raft of correspondences and documentation, Rin's story underscores the hurdles Cambodians and even Cambodian-Americans face. No matter how legitimate or pressing their needs, Cambodians often hit a bureaucratic wall when trying to reach the U.S.
As Chhun successfully emerged with Davik and her mom, there was an impromptu celebration.
After awhile, I turned around to look for Rin. He, and I expect his brother-in-law, were gone. Judging quietness with which they slipped away, I can only guess they had been turned aside yet again.
-- Greg
In Cambodia, our world continues to constrict. The sister city relationship Long Beach has with Phnom Penh plays it out daily.
As Peter Chhun, executive director of Long Beach nonprofit Hearts without Boundaries, sits out in front of the Riverside Cafe on Sisowat Boulevard, he is met by two Long Beach compatriots. One is a former leader at the United Cambodian Community who has relocated to Phnom Penh. The other is Chay Chhon, who came to Cambodia for surgery, of all things. He too hopes to resettle in his homeland after more than 30 years in Long Beach.
Every day in different ways, Long Beach connections play themselves out. Earlier in the day, as we are hanging out by the U.S. Embassy, Chantha Bob, who is part of our group, just randomly bumped into two people with Long Beach roots. One is a patron of Sophy's Restaurant in Long Beach, where Bob works, and another is an old acquaintance. All these connections made in just a day. And so it goes.
-- Greg
The idea of “socially responsible” tourism is catching on in Cambodia. While Angkor Wat continues to draw tourists for its majestic splendor, Phnom Penh for its hip Euro-Asian vibe and nightlife, Sihanoukville for its pristine beaches and sunsets over the Gulf of Thailand, there is a growing list of tourist groups who want to do something to help the many in this country who are suffering and destitute.
A growing number of Non-Government Organizations are sponsoring holiday trips in which tourists can help build schools or deliver goods to the needy. At the airport in Taipei, we met a man who donates money to a group that helps rescue children who eke out livings scrounging scraps of metal and glass from the dumps on the outskirts of town. The man was going to visit the group and a girl he helps to sponsor.
Near our hotel in Phnom Penh there were several ads touting good deeds that can be done. At an Internet cafe, was a poster urging tourists to visit and bring goods to several orphanages nearby. Another store proclaimed all its proceeds went to benefit a local NGO.
Such things won't change the fortunes of Cambodia. But they are a step in that direction.
-- Greg
Today we took a field trip to the notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison. Formerly the main interrogation center for the Khmer Rouge, where as many as 20,000 prisoners questioned and tortured before either dying on site or being shipped to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, Tuol Sleng has been converted into a genocide museum.
This was my second trip to the museum and it was as chilling the second time as the first. Today, Tuol Sleng remains very much a work in progress. As Jeff Gritchen and I toured the grounds, we found abandoned in a stairwell what looked like an abandoned moldering pile of clothes that appeared left from when the facility was being used for its evil purposes.
Seeing those clothes, looking as if they had been dropped off yesterday, reminded me in some ways how, even 33 years after the atrocities began, the Cambodian genocide remains barely beneath the surface. Like the bones that still filter up from the shallow graves in places like Cheoung Ek, there remains an immediacy, or perhaps a timelessness, to the horrors that exists to this day.
A Cambodian woman served as our tour guide and told us about her experience, being marched from Phnom Penh to Battambang province in the far western stretches of the country. She and her family walked for months before reaching their destination, passing the dead and dying along the road. Those were among the 1.7 million estimated to have died between 1975 and 1979, when Vietnam ousted Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. After surviving the forced march, our guide said her father and older brother were taken away and killed anyway.
Prisoners at Tuol Sleng were forced to admit they were CIA or KGB operatives, though it is unlikely any ever were. They also were forced to implicate friends, family and loved ones who were likely to become victims as well.
Several years ago, I had the chance to talk to one of the interrogators at Tuol Sleng who admitted the guard knew victims were lying. But in a way the interrogators, many of them only young teenagers, were victims too – forced to inflict pain and report findings or become among those being tortured. It was a perfect circle of evil from which none escaped unscathed.
The Khmer Rouge has an obsession with picturing their victims and their own. But for the identifying hats the KR guards wore, they were virtually indistinguishable from many of their victims. Many wore faint smiles, looks the teetered on disbelief.
There is a new display at the museum that was interesting. In pictures and text, it details elements of the lives of many Khmer Rouge cadre leaders and combatants. It is a touching display because it reminds us that in many ways they too were swept up in history and sent down a path they could never imagine.
I don't know that there are any epiphanies to be had from touring Tuol Sleng, just an overpowering sadness that comes with the realization of what hides in the dark corners of the human soul.
--- Greg
Sometimes, it's best not to know. While walking along the sidewalk the other day, I saw the following menu item at a sidewalk cafe -- “bubble and squeak with applesauce.” I thought of stopping to ask what it was, but decided it was more fun to imagine.
-- Greg
We had our first meal in Cambodia at a cafe called Khmer Saravana, which touted its cocktails and pizza. Yeah, pizza. Another sign noted Khmer, Thai and Europ foods.
The menu was as multi-cultural as the signs promised, featuring cocktails ranging from Singapore slings to pina coladas to tequila sunrises. The foods ran the gamut from BLTs to Caesar salads to pasta dishes. Of course, we didn't travel halfway around the world for BLTs.
Thankfully, Chantha Bob or Bobby as he is called, ordered a Cambodian feast that included prahok ktieh, a dipping sauce of fish paste, spice and a bit of pork. We also had the amok, a curry with fish paste, coconut milk and chicken, bowls of snou chouk, a soup with prawns and chicken and water cress with oyster sauce. Oh, yeah, and DaVik and Peter Chhun's daughter split a pizza with ham and pineapple.
From the it's a small world file. As Peter, Bobby, Jeff and I were chatting before our flight took off. I asked Peter if he had ever heard of Phil Brady. My dad and Brady had worked closely together in Vietnam under the guidance of John Paul Vann. Both left 'Nam in the late '60s. My dad worked in Thailand and then moved to the United States with the family. Brady went on to become a well-known war correspondent.
The man who held the camera and filmed Brady for many of his stories from Southeast Asia? Peter Chhun.
“Phil Brady gave me my first job with NBC,” Peter exclaimed.
--- Greg
For the next two weeks, photographer Jeff Gritchen and I will be traversing parts of the countryside and blogging along the way while also working on longer stories. Our guides are Peter Chhun, 61, an NBC producer and Chantha Bob, 41, a waiter at Sophy's restaurant in Long Beach.
Peter was a cameraman for NBC and covered the wars in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in the early 1970s before communist forces prevailed. Chhun was on leave when Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and was spared being swallowed by the atrocities that followed.
Bobby wasn't so lucky. He was just a child in Battambang Province in the westernmost part of the country when the Khmer Rouge took over. Bobby's father was a somewhat prosperous farmer who was taken away by the Khmer Rouge. A horror Bobby witnessed. Although Bobby, his mother and several siblings made it to the U.S., the war and continuing skirmishes after the Vietnamese invasion kept the family from reuniting and half of Bobby's family is still in Cambodia.
Both have and abiding belief that they were spared so that they can come back and make a difference.
--Greg
The Last time I visited Cambodia, Ambassador Roland Eng talked about the high return rate of those who visit the Kingdom. There is something about it, he said, that draws people again and again. A gentle stillness of the spirit, which is wonderfully at odds with the pell mell whirl of activity in the city of Phnom Penh. Perhaps it is the smiles. Or maybe it is the aching need of these people.
I thought it would take a rare incident indeed for me to ever return. Little did I know. And here I am, back in the Kingdom, reacting to the call of a child. Davik Teng has never laid eyes on me. I am as foreign as all the wondrous sights she will soon see. Davik's story is what has lured me back. It is a rare chance and a hopefully rare and wonderful tale that we will tell in the coming weeks. But for now, suffice it to say that Cambodia calls us. Its song as gentle and bell clear as ever.
---- Greg
