City of Ghosts
People say that ghosts haunt the bridge over the river; that it's not safe to cross at 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. Our guide in Siam Reap shared that many Cambodians won't live there -- too many hungry ghosts from the Pol Pot era. Driving around the chaotic, dusty back streets of Phnom Penh in a tuk-tuk, Elaine and I could feel it in the air -- something unsettled and lawless. And yet, Phnom Penh is also a city of wide, beautifully landscaped boulevards that resemble the avenues of Paris built in the French colonial period. There is something eerie about the combination of the impact of Pol Pot and the French. This is the city of the killing fields, with skulls piled to the sky in a stupa in memorium, and clothes still rising through the dirt in the fields where mass graves have yet to be uncovered. In Tuol Sleng, the prison museum, the walls are hung with hundreds of photos of the dead, catalogued by their torturers with the same twisted conscientiousness of the Nazis. The photos represent but a fraction of those who died. All of the Cambodians we met had lost family members during those terrible years.
Out of this history of colonialism and evil has emerged a country without infrastructure -- the folks we visited shared that there is no government to speak of, no health budget, and corruption is the norm. The country's health infrastructure is run by the UN, the French, the Japanese, the Belgiums and many others. Many schools and children's progams are run by foreign governments or NGO's. People sponsor street children, paying to send them to school to try to secure a brighter future than the garbage dumps for them. There are foreign workers everywhere. In the short time we were in Phnom Penh, we ate more Western food than I'd eaten in two months in Thailand.
Phnom Penh is also a city of opportunity and refuge for many who need or choose to leave their former lives behind. Sitting in a bar overlooking the river, talking with American deportees and expats from around the world, we could have walked into a scene from Casablanca -- American and Cambodian rock and roll playing in the background, talking about times past and new beginnings -- it seemed almost as if time had stopped. The ghosts were quiet for a moment, whispering only in the breeze.
Out of this history of colonialism and evil has emerged a country without infrastructure -- the folks we visited shared that there is no government to speak of, no health budget, and corruption is the norm. The country's health infrastructure is run by the UN, the French, the Japanese, the Belgiums and many others. Many schools and children's progams are run by foreign governments or NGO's. People sponsor street children, paying to send them to school to try to secure a brighter future than the garbage dumps for them. There are foreign workers everywhere. In the short time we were in Phnom Penh, we ate more Western food than I'd eaten in two months in Thailand.
Phnom Penh is also a city of opportunity and refuge for many who need or choose to leave their former lives behind. Sitting in a bar overlooking the river, talking with American deportees and expats from around the world, we could have walked into a scene from Casablanca -- American and Cambodian rock and roll playing in the background, talking about times past and new beginnings -- it seemed almost as if time had stopped. The ghosts were quiet for a moment, whispering only in the breeze.
posted by Lori at 9:34 PM
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