Stupas and Scaffolding

The temples of Phnom Penh are lonely places.

They lack the glittering tiles and gilded facades of neighboring Thailand.  They are painted in flat creams and beiges and are lost among the hasty construction of a developing city.'

Although ninety-five percent of Cambodians practice Buddhism, the majority of temples I have wandered into across the city are almost entirely devoid of worshipers.

When I lived in Thailand one could not walk a block in the city without stumbling upon a temple and, while the temples were packed only on major religious holidays, the temple doors were always open, and the insides always elaborately covered in red carpeting, murals and displays of towering gilded and wood carved Buddhas.  On any day there could always be found a few families or old woman bearing offerings.

But here in Phnom Penh the doors to many temples remain shut.  Gates have been erected around them, some locked.  The courtyards go un-swept and often double as extra storage space for dusty bags of cement and bamboo scaffolding for construction projects.

I have stayed for a time on the edge of one such courtyard, sitting on the worn wooden steps leading up to a young man’s shack.  The young man, who turned out to be a mechanic and repairman of sorts, had invited me to rest and we spoke briefly in my broken Khmer, while looking out through palm fronds on the cracked tiles, piles of debris and gilded lion statues.

This past December the New York Times ran an article analyzing the declining relevance of Buddhism in Thailand.  “The temples were once the heart of village life, serving as meeting places, guesthouses and community centers. But many have become little more than ornaments of the past, marginalized by a shortage of monks and an increasingly secular society.”

In Cambodia, the decline is far starker.

During their four years of genocide, the Khmer Rouge targeted – among other groups – monks, effectively exterminating almost the entire religious order.  They did away with wats as well, destroying most of them and converting the remaining few into arsenals, prisons and execution yards.  At the temples of Angkor, bullet holes have added a layer of violent carving atop the12th Century dancing Apsara reliefs.

Like many aspects of Cambodian society, temples are still in the midst of a slow recovery.  Thailand’s robust religious tradition never suffered direct attack and yet still religious relevance is waning with the influences of modernity.  It is hard to predict the fate of the temples of Phnom Penh.  It is hard to guess whether the bags of cement and poles of scaffolding filling the courtyards of pagodas will be used to repair the past or continue upwards, constructing more skyscrapers, storefronts and apartment buildings.

Source:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/world/asia/thai-buddhist-monks-struggle-to-stay-relevant.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Sorority Sisters

This is not your average college setting.  There are no raucous parties and no missed 10 am classes because a student sleeps through their alarm.

For the past two months I have lived amongst thirty-four Khmer college women.

These women come from all across the Kingdom of Cambodia, from Battambang province on the Northern Thai border and from Svey Rieng protruding out into Vietnam and from the province of Siem Reap, home to the jungle temples of Angkor.

These women were at the top of their high school classes.  They came to Phnom Penh to study in the hopes of becoming lawyers and engineers and doctors and midwives and business women.

My two Khmer roommates wake up at 5:30. They help clean the dorm, motorbike to the local market to purchase the day’s cooking supplies, or cook breakfast for their dorm sisters.  At 7:30, having been up for hours already, they are off to class.

Their fathers and mothers are the children of the Khmer Rouge, the ones who’s own education was interrupted.  These womens' parents are proud farmers, fishermen, bakers, market fruit sellers.  These parents, from across the twenty-four provinces, hold their daughters' education on a par with that of their sons – a view that is not yet ubiquitous.

After university classes, they return to our dorm for supplemental classes and informal conversations in the afternoons and evenings.

Late at night I hold classes on figurative language, creative writing, and, for the past month and a half – Shakespeare (more to come soon).

Four times a week two of the women select an article from the Cambodia Daily (one of two English language newspapers in the country) and create a presentation for their peers.  They do background research, boil down the main issues and try to solve issues raised by the articles.

They present this– often late at night –  to couches filled with their sisters.  And then they discuss. 

Near midnight last Wednesday my dorm room was filled with women preparing and discussing and organizing their presentations.  One of my Khmer roommates discussed the Khmer Rouge employees continuing demands to be paid their salaries with two others on the floor.  Simultaneously, three of us huddled around my bed analyzing the challenges that Japanese land investments in Burma pose to local farmers. .

Between classes, we laugh a lot.  I share American idioms with my dorm-mates and they teach me Khmer tongue twisters. I now know what to say if I ever see a pregnant spider spit poison in the forest.  (Ping peang pong penh pous pruah per penh prey.)

We sit on mats on the floor eating bowls of rice with a fried fish, or cabbage salad, or sauted chicken liver and chicken feet.  On occasion I have lent a hand in the kitchen – setting the gaggle of girls who came to watch (not believing I could cook for thirty-four) to chopping mangoes and red peppers and cubing hunks of pork.   Apparently the dish – despite all the dubious predictions – was a success. 

I stay up late discussing the Vietnam War with my roommate, and I wake up early on Sunday mornings to join in traditional Apsara dancing with a small collection of women. Together we bend our fingers back and contort our limbs into stylized poses.

The Harpswell Foundation created the Boeng Trabek dormitory, the first of two for Cambodian women, back in 2006.  Besides providing a living space and a small food stipend, the foundations hopes to cultivate critical thinkers and empowered women.

There are now eighty women in all spread over two dorms.

In all my time living, traveling and teaching in South East Asia I have never met a more intellectually curious and sharp-minded group of young women.

These women are smart, curious, thoughtful, confident and most of all unendingly hardworking.

But occasionally even they need to relax.  And so I attempt to infuse a little of the spontaneity of American college experience into the rigor of our Phnom Penh dorm. 

I have whisked the girls off to join in one of the outdoor exercise classes held on the public boulevards, we have walked the streets munching steamed corn, and once we adventured out into the night to attend a traditional outdoor Khmer puppet show performance.  

One night, a few weeks ago, I called a conference of all the sisters late at night for an “Emergency Meeting.”  Confused and curious they abandoned their studies and gathered, filling the couches and spilling out to sit on the floor.   

It was exam time and all the women had tests and exams and final papers.

“At my college,” I explained, “when we got to exam time, we often did something absurd and funny to take a break from studying and let our minds relax.”

I pulled out envelopes filled with clues for a scavenger hunt and for the next hour the dorm was brimming with shrieks and laughs and the pounding of many feet as women ran up and down the dorm in search of the answers to riddles.

There may be no bleary-eyed students or booze, but in the end they are still young women: even future leaders of a struggling nation need time to do something silly.

To Market, to Market

There is a mosaic of crushed river clams on the sidewalks and streets of Phnom Penh.  Hatted peddlers traverse the city pushing blue carts spread with clams tossed in chili, garlic, salt, sugar and sometimes lemongrass.

There is a congregation of clam sellers that park their cart on a side street in the slum where I live.  In the morning the sellers can be found sprinkling spices on a line of trays.  In the evenings the trays are parked again on the street.  A collection of half-dressed children chew and suck on leftover bivalves.

During the day the clam sellers push their carts along the streets.  The sidewalks are too uneven, with upended tiles. 

Instead sidewalks are used for impromptu food stands with stubby tables and foot-high plastic stools.  Sidewalks are for hammocks slung between trees.  And sidewalks are for barbershops – long lines of barbershops: a chair, a mirror propped against a wall, a table holding scissors and razors, an awning against the sun.  Halos of black hair clippings accumulate on the sidewalk tiles.

But the real business of the city happens in the markets.

The markets of Phnom Penh are crowded, low-slung affairs with dim lighting and narrow alleys between the sellers.  There is Russian Market, named for a time when Russians dominated the foreign demographic.  The market now hosts few Russians, but many tourists and trinkets to entice them.   There is the French-colonial Central Market, painted egg-yolk yellow with a grand central hall filled with jewelry sellers and extending branches of clothes shops, pillow stands, cooking equipment, cleaning supplies and curled and pinned wigs of fake, styled hair.

Hole-in-the wall hair stands are everywhere in the markets of Phnom Penh.  Lines and lines of women being shampooed, only an aisle or two away from mattress shops, soup stands, or meat stalls with intestines strung up like tinsel.

I have woken early to accompany my roommate on the dorm’s daily shopping expedition at our local market.   Bong Trabiek market used to be a lake, now it is a maze of half-erected food stalls with narrow aisles of broken tiles and mud. 

Slabs of meat and collections of hanging pig hooves.  Troughs of flopping silver fish.  The most exuberant ones successfully fling themselves out into the muddy walkway where they writhe until the seller notices and throws them back in the trough.  The process repeats.

We amass onions, eggs, peppers, chilies, two chickens.  I lean back to avoid a man carrying an entire pig carcass, its body cleaved in two with one bloody half draped over each of the man’s shoulders.

Where in other countries I might venture into the markets for the delicious aromas and enticing platters of food, I have found that the food here is not what draws me to the markets.

Guidebooks proclaim that Cambodian cuisine is subtly elegant – and it is if you can pay for the subtlety.   The food lacks the spicy kick of Thailand or the platters of fresh spring rolls and greens common in Vietnamese cooking.   There is slow steamed fish in coconut – Amok, and sautéed beef – Lok Lak.   But food prices have continued to increase at a rate faster then the rate of income.  Khmer meals, for those without wealth, center around heaping bowls of rice and a small piece of protein – perhaps a fingerling of dried fish or a couple cubes of meat.  Perhaps this is yet another residue of years of civil war and genocide, perhaps it is a sign of an imbalanced economy.

I head to markets for different reasons.  My favorite market is a hot twenty-minute walk up Monivong road.  BKK market – a microcosm of a market on a manageable scale. 

But if one wants to take on the market of all markets, one must head to Orssay.

Orssay is three floors tall, possible four – it is hard to tell with all the stairways and warrens of stalls.  One walks through vast blocks of sections at Orssay.  You are surrounded by only moto parts, then only by raw meat, then plastic bags of rice, then glittering red and gold Chinese New Year decorations, then drapes of silk, then hanging garlands of dried fish, silvery fish, chalky white salted fish. 

Stands are small and square and sellers string hammocks up and sleep suspended among their goods.

Orssay is a market for getting lost in.  It is for pointing at and trying multi-colored jellies bathed in watered down coconut milk.  It is for navigating between muddy puddles between buckets of squirming fish and bubbling lobsters.

 It is a market for conversing (through my roommate who acted as translator) with an old women selling dried meats who insisted that I was in need of a Khmer husband and gave me, in parting, a small brilliant-red curl of dried snake.  I am still unclear if there was a direct connection.