Poisonous Trees

There is still blood on the floor.

Thirty-four years later there remain splatters and smears that have seeped into the floor tiles of the classrooms.

The former secondary school occupies most of a block in a residential neighborhood, in the center of Phnom Penh.  These days the blocks surrounding the school are lined with cafes, hole-in-the-wall convenient stores, a cupcake shop, a pink bubble-tea shop and a Korean travel agency.

When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 they converted the school into their most notorious prison.  They renamed it Security Prison 21 (S-21) and, over the course of four years, they imprisoned, tortured and killed nearly twenty thousand people during the years of genocide.

Today Tuol Sleng prison is a museum and testament to the past.  In Khmer, Tuol Sleng means “Hill of Poisonous Trees.”

Today, January 7^th, is Liberation Day, the day that the Khmer Rouge fell to Vietnamese forces.  Today also marks the start of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.  Anniversaries depend on your perspective.  In past years I have heard that there have been celebrations, even parades, at the towering mauve Independence Monument.  Celebrations are subdued this year as the former king, Norodom Sihanouk has recently died and currently lies in state for a February funeral.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum lacks the typical accouterments of a museum. There are no display cases, no descriptions.  For the most part, the rooms are left as they were when the Vietnamese discovered the prison, drawn by the stench of rotting corpses, on January 8^th 1979.

The first floor of Block A contains warped metal cots.  The second floor: empty classrooms.  The top floor is the same as the second, though school blackboards remain on the walls.  Room after empty room, tiled in ochre and cream with hazy orange walls. 

The repetition and the crowded emptiness is oppressive.  The mind becomes unmoored into a sea of imaginings.

And then in the last room on the third floor: a bloody eddy of stumbling footprints.

 Block B holds rows and rows of photographs.

The Khmer Rouge was methodical.  Prisoners were given a number and forced to sit for photographs.

Men. Women. Grandparents. Babies. Most stare solemnly.  Some appear confused.  There are a few faces turned away, their eyes looking stubbornly to the side, in a final act of resistance.  Only a few have the daring or the energy left to give the camera a defiant glare.

Room after room of faces. Unending.

Block C was for the common prisoners, the farmers and laborers.  The classrooms here were divided – shoddy cells constructed of brick or wood.  Crude doors were knocked between the classroom walls.

There are four classroom blocks, each three floors tall.  They are set around a large yard that now contains palms and jackfruit trees and the white-washed, raised graves of fourteen final murders.   A now-grassy area that was once a playground and once a yard for conducting torture. 

When the Khmer Rouge tired of torture, they smuggled the prisoners of S-21 out at night and trucked them out to an orchard outside the city called Choeung Ek.   Here they lined the prisoners up and clubbed them to death.  They did not shoot them:  Bullets were too expensive.

Two years ago my dad and I traveled out to these Killing Fields.   Past the gate stands a towering stupa of skulls. 5,000 skulls in total.  There were more bodies, perhaps as many as 10,000 but many skulls have been crushed and many more remain buried. Past the stupa you can walk in the crater-filled orchards.  The depressions are not the result of war bombs.  They are the excavation of mass graves.   When it rains bones emerge from the earth.  Femurs, molars, the jigsaws of a cranium.  Clothes blossom too.  Ragged edges of the traditional checkered black and red krama scarves, the former sleeves of shirts, a two year old’s flounced jumper.

At some point, thirty years from now maybe as many as fifty years from now, when the monsoons come, bones and clothes will cease to sprout from the ground.  Then there will only be the stories and recorded memories. The horrors of history will then no longer be so abrasively palpable.

It has been thirty-four years to the day since the fall of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.  The abandoned streets of Phnom Penh are filled once again.  The roads are clogged with traffic, restaurants line the riverfront; construction projects are omnipresent.   There are bustling universities and tour buses full of tourists.

There are also beggars – blind, missing arms, missing legs.  Cambodia has one of the highest rates of amputees in the world, a result of an entire countryside seeded with landmines.  There are countless victims of PTSD across the country, most who remain untreated.  How could there not be after thirty years of war and four years of genocide?

My students are the next generation.  They wake up early and study and stay up late and study.  They hope to be lawyers and doctors and businesswomen, fulfilling dreams their parents were denied. 

Their parents are the children of the Khmer Rouge.  They suffered interrupted educations.   They were four and seven and twelve during the genocide.

 My students and I talk of Pol Pot over dinner, sitting along the balconies in the afternoon sun, crouched over bowls of soup in the market place.  The primary schools and high schools of the country cover the subject with a cursory sweep. All of my students have family stories – of starvation or slaughter.  But many of their own parents remained tight lipped.  But not all.

At dinner one night, while extracting meat from between the bones of a river fish, one of my students talks of her family.

Her grandmother survived the genocide.  Her grandfather did not.  Her mother was four at the time and remembers very little.  She remembers being hungry, but not knowing why. 

My student never met her oldest uncle.  When he was twelve the Khmer Rouge wanted him to become a soldier to fight the Vietnamese.  He nor his mother (my student’s grandmother) wanted him to join.  And so the Khmer Rouge killed him in front of his mother.

“She cries when she talks.”

It is Liberation Day, and the girls at the dorm are up early doing an intense cleaning of the entire building.  As the sun rises and dries the balconies one of the girls points up at the sky. 

A cloud of balloon clusters, ribbons fluttering, floats overhead.  “They are from the celebration.” One girl explains.  “To celebrate the end of the Khmer Rouge,” adds another.  “It’s like a second birth.  A new beginning.”

The balloons float over the apartment buildings and the canal and the markets and the coconut trees heading south out into the province, until they are only specks in the sky. 

Gilded Bananas: or How I danced in Front of 300 Cambodians

In a traditional Cambodian wedding the bride changes her entire outfit upwards of seven times.

When we first arrived at the wedding in the village of Ko Ki Thong, the bride was wrapped in silver silk: a silver sarong, a beaded silver bodice and satin silver heels.  Not to mention a silver necklace, large gold anklets, bracelets and earrings and a pearl studded tiara.

An hour later, the bride appeared to have been painted green.  The sarong, bodice, even the satin heels looked the same, except they were now a brilliant lime.  An hour after that, she was a vision in yellow.  By the time eating had given way to dancing, the bride had exchanged traditional Khmer for a billowing white gown.  By 10 pm dresses were abandoned all together, and the Bride danced the night away in jeans and a striped shirt.  She did, however, keep the tiara in her hair.

                                          

In the country less than a week, I found myself preparing that first Saturday afternoon, for a wedding out in the countryside.  My roommate Houng’s cousin was marrying and I was to be one of three western women in attendance.

To be specific we did not attend the actual wedding ceremony, only the extended reception and party.  But not even Houng could tell me precisely when vows had been exchanged – the party was the main event.

From the start we were a spectacle. Our car’s arrival at the reception was recorded on film, our presentation to the Bride and Groom exhaustively photographed.  We came early and were ushered past a line of colorfully dressed men and women and through a palm froned archway hanging with banana bunches spray-painted gold and silver.

For weddings and other major celebrations, Khmer women wear a silk sarong folded in the front and an elaborately beaded, gilded and lace-sewn bodice.  Everyone visits the hair salon for crimping, spraying and curled extensions. Although I had too little time to be fitted for a dress, I did submit to large quantities of purple eye shadow and fake eyelashes. 

Khmer wedding celebrations follow a particular pattern.  First there is food: plates and plates of steamed fish, fried chicken, grilled chicken, cashews, boxes of raisins, freely flowing beer, orange soda and sugary iced coffee.  Elaborately made up women wove between the tables distributing rice, while men did the same with cans of beer.

At our table Houng’s uncle sat across from me and monitored carefully the quantity of food on our plates, encouraging and then admonishing us with a waggling finger to take more.

Soon after we arrived, an oxen drawing a wood cart equipped with a generator pulled up and the live band -- with dancers, strobe lights and a perfumed fog machines -- started up in full force.  From then until early in the morning, Khmer music blared.

As the sky darkened the tables near the stage were pushed aside, all except one that sat in the very center. Around this table at least a hundred revelers danced.  Khmer dancing does not respond to the tempo of the music, rather it exists at one slow stately speed: A few steps forward a few steps back, much twisting of the hands.  The continual sway is like the lapping of seawater on the beach.

As the night progressed so did the intoxication of the men, who became more persistent in their attempts to persuade us to dance.   Rather than decline one just to be asked by another, I befriended Houng’s young cousins. With ten small children circling we made our way into the throngs on the dance floor.

While the men had no success cajoling me onto the dance floor, Houng somehow succeeded in convincing me that I must dance on stage.  I’m still not quite sure how this happened, but I am susceptible to the silly adventures that come with being a tall white American in South East Asia.  So there I was at 10 pm, dancing on a wedding stage in perfumed fog and strobe lights in front of 300 Khmer. 

Hours later, we slept under mosquito nets in Houng’s house.  The house, like most in the countryside was raised on stilts with one large room where everyone slept together.  The bathroom, which housed one hairy tarantula, was out back, surrounded by a collection of water urns for bucket showers and dish washing.

The next morning was for lounging, for eating noodle soup at the local market down the road and for playing badminton in the yard with the collection of kids who had adopted me the previous night.  Time at the stilt house in the countryside grew lazy. There was a second breakfast (hobbit style) of forest chicken – grilled and chopped by Houng’s grandmother – and of course large bowls of rice.  When the kids tired of badminton, they went in search of wildlife, returning to the yard with an endless collection of crabs, one snake and a cat.  The crabs became instant pets with impromptu leashes made of string secured to their claws.  The snake was prodded.  The cat smartly ran away.

We stayed as long as we could, relaxing under the shade of the house. In the end though, we needed to return to the dust and bustle of Phnom Penh.  And so we made our goodbyes, piled into the car and headed back to the city.

Tuk-Tuk, Madam?

By my calculation, since I’ve moved to Phnom Penh I have been in fifty-seven near-accidents in city traffic.  This is a conservative estimate.

I am not a stranger to the chaotic roadscapes of Asia.  I have waded into the rapids that are the Saigon streets – ten to twelve lanes abreast. I have snaked my way through the busting avenues of downtown Jaipur.

When I first arrived in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand two years ago, I found a general disregard for any variety of traffic regulation.  I documented with amusement the varying interpretations of traffic lights and stop signs and the liberal understanding of the purpose of sidewalks.  None of this, however, prevented me from hopping on my own motorbike and joining the driving experiment.

Here in Cambodia I am more ambivalent.

Succinctly put, Phnom Penh drivers make those of Chiang Mai appear law-abiding and demure.  Drivers here appear to believe they are steering the Knight Bus from Harry Potter, with the magical ability to squeeze through the tightest of spaces.  They do not.

And yet still they try. They accelerate and weave James Bond-style through rapidly narrowing gaps between a motley collection of motos, tuk-tuks and SUVs.

Sidewalks are unashamedly employed as extra lanes, and corner gas stations double as access ramps for perpendicular roads without having to wait for a green light.

Besides the cars and bikes and trucks and motos and tuk-tuks, the streets of Phnom Penh are filled with an entire produce markets on wheels.  There are flocks of chickens strapped to motos, and bags of rubbery plucked chickens in bags. There are towering bags of cabbage, stacks of eggs, bundles of eggplants and protruding poles of sugar cane.  There are large wicker baskets of mangosteens that sink on either side of the bike, extending the width of three motos strapped together.

In the weeks that I have been here, mostly I have ridden on the backs of motos.   They are cheaper by half, than the cushioned, canopied and wood carved tuk-tuks.  The increased danger of course may not be worth the cost.

As in New York or London, one never needs to search out tuk-tuks or motos.  They lounge on every street corner.  “Tuk-tuk, madam?” “Moto, moto.”  Their profusion on the streets of Phnom Penh is explained two-fold: it is a product of the imbalance between available jobs and city population, as well as the ease of becoming a chauffeur. If you have a moto, you have a job. 

The lack of barriers to entering the profession comes with tradeoffs.  In London, want-to-be cabbies must first learn “The Knowledge” – memorizing 320 routes, and upwards of 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks, to any of which passengers might request transport.  In Phnom Penh an aspiring cabbie need not know any streets or any landmarks.   A passing knowledge of the city is desirable, but beyond that it is often up to the passenger to navigate the journey.

I have yet to decide whether I will join the fray.  I continue to weigh the relative safety and stupidity of being a passenger versus being a driver.  I take motos when I must, and I inevitably clench my teeth the entire time – a fact that some passing moto drivers have noticed and laughed at.  If I can, I walk -- although sidewalks are haphazard. 

Perhaps, if I decide to get a moto of my own, I can start offering rides as well.  In the mean time, I’m practicing up on my Khmer driving vocabulary. 

Under Construction

Phnom Penh is being built at my doorstep.

Saws, wood sanders and hammers are the white noise of our alleyway, tucked into the southern tip of the city.  The alley is near what was once a small lake.  The lake is gone, recently drained, filled and built over.  On Western maps the lake still exists, they have not yet caught up with the rate of construction.

Phnom Penh used to be referred to as the “Pearl of Asia.”  The Vietnam (or American) War and the Khmer Rouge have dulled its luster.  The city is caught in the in between: dilapidated colonial grandeur, glitzy new skyscrapers and the low-storied growth of a developing nation.  Construction sites are everywhere.

From the balcony of my dorm I can watch the progress of five-story cement facades  criss-crossed by sapling scaffolding.  Construction workers double as trapeze artists along the roofs.

Craning over the balcony I can make out the alley’s carpentry shop below the coconut palm.  Men and women crouch over elaborately carved wood furniture, heavy bed boards and boxy chairs.  I pass the carpenters on my search for motos and tuk-tuks at the alley’s mouth.  Often I see the smallest of puppies playing in the sawdust.

Our dorm is set amidst apartments, primarily two story hastily constructed structures with exposed cement and jutting wire crossbeams.  The most active apartment is directly across from us, five stories and set with curved balconies that would not be out of place at a 70’s style movie theater.  In the early evening shirtless men spend long hours on these balconies, in between the hanging laundry.  They talk on their phones or lean over and watch the alley below.

In the alleyway, children, ages one to twelve, play.  The kids congregate on a parked tuk-tuk, or pedal wobbly tricycles, or shoot at each other with plastic gold automatics.  When I leave the dorm I am greeted with a chorus of “Hello” “Hello” “Hello.”

Farther down the alley, is a warren of slum dwellings – narrow alleys and lopsided structures. I have found tucked into a corner, a neighborhood temple that looks like just another cement construction until you get up close and peer through the grate and find Buddhist murals.

Outside our dorm there are two hole-in-the wall hair salons (quite literally).  I have spent an hour in one watching my roommate have her hair teased and sprayed and curled.  And I have submitted to heavy amounts of purple eye shadow and half inch lashes for the occasion of a wedding.

There are house fronts up and down the alley that double as storefronts.  On tables they sell everything from pre-wrapped sandwiches, to coconuts, to bottles of soy sauce, to whole glistening fishes beset by flies. A few stalls compress stalks of sugarcane, mixing limes in the juice and serving it in plastic bags with a straw – a Khmer to-go mug.

  

Food carts meander by at unpredictable hours hawking buns, bananas wrapped in sticky rice, and most commonly – salted and roasted eggs on a stick.  The man driving the cart plays a recording on-loop. “Eggs delicious eggs – they are hot, they are nice, they are delicious.” Even the singsong voice sounds heat-wearied.

In the evening when the sun dips behind the new construction, the street fills with families and neighbors dragging circles of plastic chairs into the road.  The men go shirtless and the small children pant-less.  It is not uncommon for small boys to run down the streets completely bare.

Our alley is a workspace, a playground, a communal living room.  By late evening though, the dust settled, the neighbors retreat into their homes and the on-and-off electricity.  Grates are pulled down and locked.  The symphony of a growing city – the saws and sanders – ceases. 

I like to stand on the balcony at this time – ignoring the hum of mosquitos, taking in the fleeting quiet, the slight breeze. 

And then clattering into the night a lone man walks down the now deserted alleyway. He carries two sticks in his hands and plays out a beat of taps - a delivery boy for the midnight snack attacks of the neighborhood.  Soup, noodles, dumplings – all of these he will seek out and deliver for a fee.  He disappears into the gloom of the alley, his tapping following in his wake.  Rat-ta-tat-tat, Rat-ta-tat-tat.

Four Electoral Votes

We were racing against the clock.

With an hour and fifteen minutes before the close of elections in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, we took to the cars and the streets.  We abandoned our staging location, grabbed walk packets and lists of sporadic voters and charged out into the dark for our final Get Out the Vote effort!

We tore down dark rural roads scanning mailbox numbers. When we reached a house on our list, the older woman accompanying me would zoom in to the driveway and I would hurdle out of the car and up to the door.  “We are just making sure everyone has voted.  And offering rides for those who haven’t.  Have you voted sir?”

For the last two and a half months, I suspended my life as a teacher, trading it for life on the campaign trail.  I moved up to New Hampshire and set up as a full-time, unpaid fellow with Organizing for America – President Obama’s grassroots campaign.

Four years ago I volunteered on Barak Obama’s campaign, but in a more limited capacity.  I was still in college. I canvassed and phone banked on holidays and during the final weeks of the election – on evenings in between paper writing. 

But this election, with no hard commitments, I wanted to do more.  Why? Simply put: I believe in the president.   But I also have a deep conviction that, as an American --  as a citizen of a country where I have the power to be involved in the political process and the possibility to effect change -- I have an obligation to participate.

And so, I traded lesson plans for walk packets.  For two months my life took on a new routine: hours of driving around rural New Hampshire, walking up drive ways and into trailer parks to talk to voters, then back to our office for yet more hours sitting on the floor making phone calls to more potential voters.

I canvassed the house of a 75-year-old Irish priest who invited me into discuss politics in the rectory, and I knocked on the door of a 19-year-old girl who had never considered voting before we talked.  I traipsed up a long driveway to a dilapidated mobile home and spoke with a grizzled, beer-bellied man with no shirt who politely refused to share his political leanings.

It wasn’t easy.   There were days when I canvassed for six hours alone, in the rain – going from silent home to silent home, leaving behind a wake of literature.  There were nights when I made 250 phone calls.  I would be cursed at, lied to, hung up on – not just by Republicans, but also by Democrats fed-up with the political season.  We would spend hours prepping canvassing packets and then be told that our targets had switched and we had to scrap our work and start afresh. 

But there were also the volunteers who worked with us week after week  -- as the leaves changed colors and then fell, as the air went from crisp to biting.  There was the sixteen-year-old high school girl who was a powerhouse on the phones, who admitted that her grades were slipping as a result of being at our office for so many hours a week, and who in the same sentence brushed that concern aside with a simple “This is more important.”  There was the 84-year-old British woman who had been a nurse in Boston and spoke bluntly about watching women die on the operating table from back-alley abortions in a time before Roe v. Wade.  She and an older gentleman would sit near the windows and, between phone calls to voters, reminisce about life under FDR.

For two months I listened to stories – from men, women, old and young.  I listened to worries, concerns, hopes, fears and dreams.

In the end, all of our hours of canvassing and phone calls came down to one day – November 6^th 2012. 

It came down to how many people we could encourage to vote.  It was a numbers game.  But it was also, on the ground, an individual game.  We arranged rides to the polls for elderly people.  We followed up with others to ensure that they registered at the right polling location.  These were men and women that I had grown to know over two months, whose doors I had knocked on, whose stories I had listened to.

Each vote was a story.

A week before the election one of my volunteers canvassed the house of a man with a minor criminal record.  A town clerk told him that he could not vote because of this record. Checking, we found that New Hampshire law disenfranchises only those still serving time or those convicted of voting fraud.  We returned to his house to tell him so.  At 6:30 am on Election Day he called my boss to thank her and say that he was off to the polls to vote for the President.

During that last hour of the election, as we sped along the back-roads of rural New Hampshire looking for final potential voters who had yet to make it to the polls, we swapped stories in the car.   The older woman with whom I was driving told me that she became politically active at a young age.  When she was fifteen, she proceeded to tell me, Dr. Martin Luther King came to Boston.  Skipping school, she wore her Catholic school uniform and joined in the parade. As they marched down the streets of Boston, older men began ushering her to the front, until she was, in the end, walking hand in hand with Dr. King.

Hours later we, all the staff in the Concord office, crowded into an unheated room in our office to watch as the polls come in,.  We fretted as we refreshed our internet browsers incessantly.  Around 10 pm, they called NH for the President. 

The election was still to be called. But we in New Hampshire, with our four precious electoral votes, we had done what we set out to do.  There was champagne, hugs, tears and a little dancing.  

And then, finally, we went home to sleep.

President Obama has another four years to help move America forward.

The campaign is over and I am heading back to the classroom.  I miss students, I miss teaching.  But for all the worry, stress, frustrations and pure exhaustion of the last two months I would not have had it any other way.  It has been my privilege and my honor as a young woman, and a young American, to work for my President.

There is still work to do. 

But I can now return to the classroom knowing that I have a President who has my back and has the back of my students.