The Greatest Thing

Development in Cambodia: WHAT A GREAT THING!!!

First, we'll widen the roads. It's okay, we'll just cement over the greenery so that we can fit more cars.Cars are great because they take up more space and pollute the environment. Yay!
Second,we'll invite fast food chains to introduce their wonderful cuisine. Now you can eat in Cambodia like you do in America! Don't worry about the local restaurants, they'll just lose business to the yellow arches down the road. Then, people can gain unhealthy amounts of weight because that's a sign of increased GDP!
Third, we'll invite multi-national corporations to clear-cut the rain forest and pollute the rivers. But don't worry, it'll provide jobs for masses of people who would otherwise be working outdoors (what a drag!). Now you can sit down all day, and not have to get any exercise. Plus, factories are great places to work! The managers never abuse the women and the factory--with its big cement walls and smokestacks--is quite  humanizing.
Fourth, we'll fill the television channels with American pop culture. Now Khmer people can ditch their traditional music, whiten their skin with moisturzing cream, and practice self-colonialisation! I mean, come on, culture isn't very important. It's only what makes a country unique, and empowers the people.

Yes, development is a great thing. Why have paradise when you can have a parking lot?

The Wanderer

    I have trouble sleeping at nights. Sometimes, I'll get up and go to the porch outside. It's peaceful at these times. The only thing I hear is crickets and the occasional truck that clips down the highway. I imagine what these trucks are carrying; perhaps resources from the jungle that have to make their way to Phnom Penh in the early morning. Maybe I'll take a book--I'm reading To Kill A Mockingbird--but last night it was simply too dark to summon Boo Radley into my imagination. Not a person is awake. The Khmer people go to bed at 8:00 and get up at 4:00 to tend the fields. So, at these times , there's a thick hush that abounds in Pursat. Not even the town drunk is pacing about. Even he is asleep.
      The space between dusk and dawn is a time of serenity, when people move slowly, as if the first stars in the sky require one to decelerate. As the chirping crickets and scolding geckos begin their hum, a willful paralysis enters the villages and cities, making its way through the bedrooms, beckoning those who are slow to slow down. Movement finally halts, and a national rest sets in, only to be broken when the sun, once again, begins its journey up the sky.
Time finally stops, fading away like an eyelid that flutters and finally closes.
      Foreigners are immune to this force of nature, but many choose to accept its call. Humans aren't simply creatures of habit. Some things are inherent. A person is born with a sense of time, and they carry this with them wherever they go. There will always be a certain resistance to this rhythm, a piece of something that lingers within.
Thus begins the wanderer's journey.
       The wanderer in the night is alienated from time. Like a single snapshot, nothing changes. Every detail, every star in the sky, every ripple in the pond, solidifies its existence. The wanderer knows these things like a person knows a photo after the thousandth viewing: the crook of a smile of the angle of the light. It's a knowledge that the swiftness of  time could never reveal.
The alienation, the loneliness of the wanderer, feels as placid as the time that refuses to pass.

Maybe this will be the Cambodia I choose to remember, a time when there was no time, those nights when I wandered lonely as a cloud.