Cambodian Heartache

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Cambodia rips your heart out. And just when it's laying there quivering on the pavement thinking nothing more could more happen some corrupt official runs it over with a brand new Caddy.

It's been almost 30 years, but the Khmers haven't been able to escape their past. The effects of the Khmer Rouge's 1.7-million-person genocide are felt in the struggling economy and the blast of a land mine. The Khmer Rouge wiped out all the people who were able to make a contribution. Even anyone who had glasses was considered a threat to Pol Pot's whacked idea of a perfect society. Cambodia is left with a poor, uneducated population and a government interested only in lining it's own pockets.

In the country's capital, the S-21 prison still looks like the school it originally was before it became the infamous headquarters of the Khmer Rouge torture operation. With the yellow and white checkered floors of the classrooms it's easy to imagine little chairs and desks and eager students running along the outside corridor, giggling in their crisp white shirts. But instead, a solitary metal bed stands in for the desks and the shouts of joy are replaced with echoes of screams. Lashings with electrical wire was a favorite of Pol Pot's men.

As I stood in one of the "interrogation" rooms, I suddenly realized the dark spot on the tile under foot is from blood. This place is literally stained with horror. (After WWII we swore - the world swore - never again. And yet we let it happen many times again. We're letting it happen right now. Somehow genocide isn't enough to propel those who can to act. Identifying it, wagging a finger and saying it's wrong seems to be enough to placate the world's outrage. Too bad Darfur lacks resources other than humanity).

The mug shots of the dead - only a dozen of the 14,000 prisoners survived S-21 - and the one-legged men pedaling down country roads and the countless kids living on the streets is hard to take. In Kampot, this little provincial town near the coast, a little street girl timidly approached me. She was hungry. I took her across the street to a fruit stand a bought her a sliced mango. Every time I saw her thereafter she would skip over to me, smiling and chanting "Thank you! Thank you!" I was crushed.

Despite having one of the largest concentrations of NGOs and significant contributions of international aid, no progress is being made in Cambodia. None of the money coming into the country gets past the officials. I sat and watched a government building the other day. Three officials came out. Two got into Lexuses. The other a bright red Cadillac.

*****
Three of the masterminds of the Khmer Rouge brutality will be tried soon for their crimes against humanity. The NY Times ran an interesting article a few days ago about the man who took the mug shots of those to be killed: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/asia/27cambo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Say Cheese!

SIEM REAP, Cambodia - What is it with all the tourists who want their photo taken in front of everything?

Everywhere I go it seems I have to politely hang back while some idiot tries to look cool posing for the camera. And oh man, if you get caught behind a Japanese tour group - you wait hours while everyone takes their turn playing model.

What do people do with these photos?

I pity the poor folks back home who are subjected to the boring slideshow. Here's me giving the peace sign in front the Emerald Buddha. Here's me raising my glass of beer outside the Heart of Darkness bar. Here's me pointing at the big carving in the Anchor Wat temple. Look how big it is compared to me! He he.

OK, some I get. Like sitting on the toe of the largest Buddha in Thailand or petting a monk's pet tiger. Even the repetitive photos of arms around the tuk-tuk driver or guest house owner. Those I understand.

But I just don't get the motivation behind the others. So many times they pose in front of something stationary and inanimate. It's never an interaction with the place (same way as they travel, I suppose, but that's a whole other rant). Do tourists feel a need to prove they were some place? How does it capture what they saw and felt and experienced while traveling? And do they put those photos in frames around their house? No, probably just on Facebook or MySpace.

I simply don't feel the need for any of that. At the Taj Mahal one of the greeters followed me for five minutes trying to get me to stand in front of the magnificent building while he took a photo of me with my camera. Everyone else obliged happily, clearly oblivious to the fact that they would be tiny little dots in the massive landscape.

I take photos of the people around me. I try to find the moments that say something about the culture. My smiling face is mostly irrelevant. Maybe I'm just a photography snob. Maybe when I get home and show my family and friends the photos I took, they'll nod politely but wonder why there aren't any of me pretending to hold up a falling temple.