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Published in the Livingston Enterprise on March 25th, 2008.

Biker receives startling introduction to country on the mend

By Jim Durfey for the Livingston Enterprise

I leapt from my sleeping bag with an exclamation which, a decade earlier, would have sent my mother scrambling for a bar of soap. In my haste to extricate myself from the bag, I tangled myself in my mosquito net and nearly pulled it and my bike down on top of me.

This idyllic camping site, in a fallow field just south of Cambodia’s border with Laos, was not living up to its promise of providing a good night’s sleep. With the pain of the stinger or mandible or fang still throbbing in my leg, I inspected the injured site for swelling while carefully sorting through my sleeping bag, searching for the creature that had proven such an effective alarm clock.

Nearby villagers had brought us firewood and stoked the campfire just before bedtime. We crouched about the fire with them, communicating in gestures and the few words of each other’s language we knew. They made warning gestures at the woods, feigning scared faces. Then they pointed to the fire: salvation! We should keep the fire going all night long.

Later we speculated, would the fire guard against wild animals, thieves, or an angry spirit? As ’sophisticated’ Westerners, we found it hard to accept their trust in fire. With my flesh still stinging, however, I looked towards the smoking fire pit and wondered if their ideas had not been more advanced than I had given them credit for.

As late as the early 1970’s, Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, was known as the “Pearl of the Orient”. It was considered the most beautiful of all the South East Asian cities, and Cambodian schools offered bilingual education. While conflict embroiled Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia counted on a peaceful and prosperous future. However, the war in Vietnam soon spilled across the border, and the country suddenly found itself embroiled in conflict with its own communist insurgency, the Khmer Rouge.

When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, they emptied it, and Cambodia’s status as a nation on its way to development ended. The new regime closed schools and executed monks, teachers, and anyone else with an education. In an attempt to return the economy to an agrarian one, they forced all citizens to evacuate the cities and live on strictly managed communal farms.

Some five years and three million deaths later, the Khmer Rouge no longer controlled Cambodia, but the damage had been done. Into the late 1980’s, political chaos reigned. Still today, Cambodia lags far behind the development potential it showed in the early 60’s.

While biking through northern Cambodia, we saw very few schools. The schools we did see often seemed to inculcate chaos more than provide the structure needed to impart basic knowledge. Students in white shirts and black trousers and skirts wandered aimlessly in perpetual recess. Later we learned that teachers, their salaries pathetically low, often waited until the afternoons to teach, when they held private lessons in their homes and charged additional admission.

My friends and I bike to gain a better understanding of the world. Mere observation aids understanding, but there’s nothing like interaction to bring you face to face with another culture. One of our tools of interaction is music. We haul a few instruments with us in a kiddy trailer we’ve dubbed “The Band Wagon”. Whoever has to pull the trailer for the day sweats more and enjoys the riding less. However, we play whenever possible, mostly to build connections with people through music, but also to justify the extra work involved with the instruments.

We decided stopping at schools we passed and requesting permission from the teacher to play would surely spread good will among the students and give us a better understanding of their lives. That’s how we came to stand one morning in a windowless wooden room that served as a school for some elementary school students in Stueng Treng province. Light filtering in from a doorway dimly illuminated the students, who sat attentively, but abuzz with whispers. The teacher gave them instructions in Khmer, and they were silent but giddy. They applauded after each of the several songs. Though they couldn’t understand most of the English lyrics, we biked away feeling as though we had at least made the day more interesting and perhaps given the students a different perspective on foreigners.

Despite its late start, Cambodia is now quickly rebuilding its infrastructure and social services, with much help from foreign aid. The mere presence of schools and students proves the progress Cambodia has made since the time of the Khmer Rouge. Thanks largely to tourism and new manufacturing jobs, the economy has grown quickly as of late.

So significant is the tourist industry in Cambodia that it is hard to ignore. Across the whole of South East Asia, in fact, I found tourists staring down at me from huge buses and inundating small-town guest houses. I never seemed to see them in temples when I visited, and rarely saw them at local places that offered the cheapest beer. Instead they stuck to the guest houses that play American music and have English menus.

What most foreigners don’t do, however, is sleep on the ground. Perhaps that’s because they’ve already heard about the ants. After I managed to extract the ant that had so rudely roused me, I went back to sleep. Four more times that night a different ant saw fit to protest my sleeping arrangement with a bite, and four more times I found myself leaping to my feet, more awake than I ever wanted to be. Perhaps the ants provided me with the same service our impromptu musical performances provided the students of Cambodia: spicing up a few hours of otherwise dull, but quite necessary time. I suppose I can only hope our aid was more enjoyable to receive and lent itself more to rebuilding than shock.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.