In Four Acts

These stories simply are what they are. They are the ones you would hear as you drifted into Phnom Penh and found yourself in a familiar watering hole swapping yarns with your friends and colleagues about your friends and colleagues. These are some of the best I have collected since I have been here, and I have transformed them into writing in order to explain our world a little better. While writing these stories, it has occurred to me that someone reading these might not think of Peace Corps volunteers in Cambodia in the best light. I would counter this by declaring an affirmation in our humanity. We do an immense amount of good work in this country, and it is my firm belief that this work is both effective and a proper use of US government resources. But while our work is wholly altruistic, it is important that we are not angels. We have failings, some of which are mentioned here, but these should be viewed not as a reflection of what we do but rather part of the colorful world in which we live. Take us as we are, both the good bits and the bad. While based on real events, I have changed the names of the people in these stories to protect their identities.

In Punching A Backpacker

We loathed the group of people known to the world as the "Backpackers." One look at them and you would instantly know why. They wore dreadlocks, beards, ragged clothing, and exposed far too much skin than decency permits in a foreign country where people pride themselves on personal appearance. As a rule, the requirements for one to be a backpacker were simple: one had to own an oversized backpack stuffed with an excess of clothes, and one had to dress incredibly badly. In the tourist cafes and national monuments, they put their feet everywhere as if the world were their personal footrest. They were also constantly drunk or taking drugs of some kind, lost in a man-made fog unaware of the risks that they were taking. Consider the example of one I saw in Siem Reap town the other day: one white male, aged approximately nineteen to twenty one, who was wearing yellow sparkled shoes with purple socks, shorts with holes in them that revealed underwear, no shirt, large sunglasses, and a miniature fedora. As he was walking down Sivatha Street, he held a two liter bottle of Angkor Beer. His friends were dressed in a similar fashion. I cannot imagine what Cambodians must think of these people. How shocking they must look! I feel embarrassed just thinking about them.

It is true that we were also foreigners, but we lived here. We had jobs, spoke the language, and lived in villages scattered across the country. Our collective self was Lawrence, and this was our Arabia. The respect shared among us for the people was not shared by the grungy monsters which teared through the guesthouses in a haze of cigarette smoke and empty beer bottles. Yet, admittedly, the women were attractive. Bare shouldered European women were not a common sight in our lives, and among crowds of them it was impossible to not catch yourself staring at them. Dave said it best when it came to these situations, "There is too much eye candy here." In a way he was right. After a few minutes of staring at them, you felt miserable at your own loneliness and prayed that you could soon go back to your village far away from temptation.

B. had actually punched one in the face. It was terrific story the way she told it. With a beer in hand and exaggerating the way her opponent talked, she kept us laughing and on edge at the same time. The way it happened was that she visiting Laos with her sister during the New Year in April. The custom there is that during the New Year people splash buckets of water on each other in a grand water fight that lasts for days. B. was touring Louang Pahbang, and had been doused by little children all day long as she walked to and from the various Wats around the city. At the end of the day, she and her sister showered and went out to dinner. On the way to a restaurant, she was spotted by a group of drunken backpackers. Enthused by the local custom, they were happily splashing other people as well as themselves. Spotting B., one of the girls came over to douse her. B. raised her arms and started saying that she was tired, had just taken a shower, and was on her way to dinner. The female backpacker laughed at her excuses, and started to raise the bucket of water. That was when B. said, "Listen, bitch, pour that bucket of water on me and I will punch you in the face." The girl, to her misfortune, did not listen to such a stern warning. She dumped the foul smelling Mekong water all over B.'s head and freshly laundered clothes. B. let the water pour over her, closing her mouth and nose. When she wiped the few remaining drops from her eyes, she opened them and struck the girl across the chin with a powerful right cross (At this point in the story, B. would ball up her fist and demonstrate how she gave the drunken girl a big whollop in the teeth. We would beg her to continue). The female backpacker went sprawling into the street. The man friend of the backpacker came over from the group and started yelling at B., but she shut him down right there and then. "Listen, you're both drunk, you're not a part of the culture and your being really disrespectful. So why don't you stuff yourself and go sober up!"

B. would finish the story with triumphant applause from all of us. All the things that she had said to the pair she had run into in Laos were the things we had wished we could have said to the collective group of backpackers. Whether we would have punched somebody over the water is another matter.

B. probably had more balls than all of us.

The Oldest Profession

C. had been with prostitutes. That is what most people said about him anyway. Nobody knew for sure how many times he had gone to them, but the stories about the man were almost limitless. With each repetition new details were added until nobody knew anything about it expect that he was one of those guys.

Not that he was the only one, and not that the ladies were hard to find. Prostitutes were numerous all over the country, lurking in the dark corners of dancing clubs or trolling the streets looking for customers. They wore high heeled shoes, heavy makeup, and skimpy dresses, and they groped prospective customers when they could. If I saw a group of them on the street, I would do everything I could not come within grabbing distance. Travelling foreigners went to them easily enough. A bunch of us were getting drinks at a bar once and watched a woman take home a foreign man every hour on the hour. We cringed, and swore that we would never stoop that low. C. had, though. I imagine he had never truly fathomed the reasons from staying away from the working girls in a country such as this: the legal ones (you could get fired), the sanitary ones (HIV was here, so was a range of other STD's), or the moral ones (whichever ones you claimed to have). Either the man did not think about any of these, or he ignored all of them in the pursuit of a greater desire. The former seems more logical. I cannot envision who can still go to a prostitute having carefully thought about the hazards of it.

No one talked to him about it, so no one knew exactly all the things that he did. Despite all the stories, D. spoke up once or twice about him. "I don't see that much of a problem with it anymore, now that I'm getting older," he said once. "Ugly men need love too." Was C. that ugly? I cannot remember his face that well. He was not particularly handsome, but not unattractive. D. had his own run in with the ladies of the evening, but he was different. We all felt sorry for him. He was feeling lonely one night, and met a girl who told him he was gorgeous and brilliant. He took her home and did not believe her when she asked him for "two hundred dollars American, American." But he would not pay, refusing to believe he had been duped. He left the guesthouse in a hurry and caught the nearest tuk tuk in the street, thinking that he had given the girl the slip. K. can tell the story better than I can, so I will tell it in her voice: "So he's in the tuk tuk, right, and he thinks he's gotten away from this girl who he has just found out is a prostitute. He heads to the office of this NGO he knows, thinking that he can hide out there and kind of just lay low for a while with the internet and the air conditioning. But this girl follows him all the way to the front gate, and she's about to make a scene right then and there. Of course, he does not want this girl to come and follow him into the NGO and destroy his reputation, so he yells at her to go away and gives her all the cash he has in his wallet. Only then does she go away." D. rested his conscience for a day and then told a few people what had happened. Those people told a few people, who told a few, and that is the reason why I can write that story today.

When C. left to go back to the 'States, even more stories came out about his nefarious liaisons. One made us laugh pretty hard. The volunteer that replaced C.'s position met someone who used to hang with him before he went back. The man said to him, "Hey man, you're pretty cool an' all, but I used to go get drunk and f&*k hookers with C." The interesting thing was that other people who knew C. never knew about any of the stuff he did when he would come to Phnom Penh. No one wanted to tell them either. The fine young man that they knew and worked on projects with retained his reputation.

His legacy was forever split between those who knew him, and those who had heard of him through story.

P.P. Fear & Loathing For R.

The health hazards were numerous, almost too many to count. You would get some kind of horrible stomach infection, and spend days lying on the bathroom floor puking out your guts. Crying on the phone to the medical officer to come and save you, you would pass the time miserably wishing you had never been born. If the threat of that was not enough, there were the mosquitoes. The nasty little vampires gave you all sorts of fevers, not to mention the dangerous ones. Twice on the dreaded dengue and you could wind up with a plane ticket home and a note saying, "Don't come back!" You would think that someone in our position would avoid doing the things that increase your risk of getting sick or injured. You would think that, but you would be wrong. Human beings are so surprising like that.

Whatever it was that was going on in R.'s life was anybody's guess. What we did know was that the demon that drove her was terrifying. It made her blind to what she was doing to herself, as well as how it was affecting other people. What it was she was doing was something called "high risk behavior." In the dancing clubs over by the river where people get shot, raped, or beat up, she would go out and pick up men without telling anyone where she was going. She also drank too much, and took any kind of substance that was passed to her without a moment's hesitation. It was the latter that eventually got her fired.

I could tell it was coming. You could see in the way that she came late to meetings, by her expression that read "Could you please repeat the question?" She also let things slip a little too casually. A group of us were out to dinner one night to an Indian restaurant near Yugoslavia Street and Psar Orussey when she began telling us about the kind of weekend she had had. The story became even more fantastic as she went on, and I cannot even tell it without conjuring up her voice. "So...like my friend and I were like at this club. And there were like all these girls around [she mentioned later they had no clothes on] And they were really chill, and were really happy that I spoke Khmer. And we were all doing 'shrooms."

This was just too much for me. "Where did you get 'shrooms?"

"Oh, some guy...?"

The story of how R. got fired was spectacular, even though no one exactly knew what the details were. She had started off at a bar, as usual, and things had progressed in the evening to the point where she had had too much to drink. This was not the first time this had happened. There were rumors that she had been banned from Equinox because she had passed out and thrown up all over the front bar, all over the expensive bottles of Grey Goose and Fine Scotch Whiskey that the French people loved to sip slowly while holding their cigarettes at arm's length. Her friends dutifully followed her throughout the evening, but they were tired of picking up after her, holding her hair as she threw up in hotel toilet bowls, and making sure she slept on her side so she would not asphyxiate in her sleep. On this particular night they resolved to simply put her in a tuk tuk and send her off to her hotel. From the bar, they carried her limp body over to the big plush seat of a tuk tuk and told the concerned looking driver to take her home. When R. awoke, the face of the night guard of the hotel and the driver were peering over her. "Time to go home!" they told her. R. wanted to sleep in the tuk tuk instead. The details at this point of the story are a bit fuzzy, but one knows that R. was belligerent enough with the hotel staff for them to have called the Peace Corps office at something like four in the morning.

One can only guess at what happened next, and what was said at the meetings behind closed doors. I imagine a lot of words like "conduct unbecoming a Peace Corps volunteer" were thrown around, and "if you have a medical issue such as substance abuse this is not the best place for a good recovery." But was America a better place for a recovery from drugs?

In any case, R. found herself floating home on an airplane thousands of feet above the earth. That's the moral of this story, if you can call it one.

K. And The Kampuchea Romance

K. had started dated a Cambodian man, and F. hated her for it. It was pure and simple as that. K. was previously involved with F., and the two of them had hit it off pretty well during the beginning period of their service. F. had hoped that it would last, but when K. told him she was dating a Cambodian man he could hardly contain his anger. It hurt his pride enormously. Here was this tall, muscular, handsome, American man, the pinnacle of masculinity, being rejected for a Cambodian man more used to the hard life of rice farming than the MTV and hot dogs of his newly acquired American girlfriend. They did not speak to each other from then on, nor did they manage to look each other in the eye. F. and K. might as well have been in the 7^th grade for that matter. And they carried on this way as if this was perfectly acceptable behavior for two people in their mid twenties.

Despite F.'s feeling's about the whole matter, relationships between Host Country Nationals (I love the way that the government gives names to things) and volunteers were not that uncommon. It simply happened to a few people here and there, and in some countries it happened more than others. In Cambodia, the people who made them work were usually women, which made sense if you thought about it within the context of the culture. A Cambodian man had free reign to do pretty much anything he wanted to, whereas the women were restricted in most of their social movements. The man could go to prostitutes as much as he wanted, drink as much as he wanted, and father as many children as his bank account would permit him to. Having an American girlfriend probably was probably not that big of a deal to him, although not without its awkward moments. One our language teachers during the training period told us a story about meeting a western woman in a dancing club, and what he thought of western kissing (Cultural note, Cambodians do not touch on the mouths when they kiss. They merely sniff each other on the cheek. In general, physical contact between the sexes is very limited) He said to us, "In the club, I am dancing, and a western woman pulls me over from my friend and starts dancing very close to me. I don't know what to do, so I dance close with her! Although it is very dark, I can see that the woman is very beautiful and has big red hair. I like dancing with her, but then she grabs my head and pulls me to her face! Suddenly my mouth is on her mouth, and her tongue is sliding around my own. [We restrained ourselves to keep from laughing when he got to this point] It was awful! I felt so helpless and disgusted, but I wanted to keep dancing with her because she was beautiful. She kissed me again like before she left the club." After hearing that story, I began to have a lot of respect for any Cambodian man willing to embrace the peculiar dating habits of Americans. It must take an awful lot of courage.

An American man who dated a Cambodian girl was quite different. In this situation, all of the customary rules applied. This made it less like the concept of "dating" and more like a "courtship," in which both families were involved in every step of the way. The man also had to have every intention of marrying the girl he was interested in, and precede knowing full well that if the marriage did not work out the girl would be disgraced for the rest of her life. I found the whole process daunting and stayed away from the whole thing, but others went through with it. The one man I knew who made it work proceeded with proper Cambodian customs, with chaperoned dates, astrology predictions, and the whole shebang. Theirs was actually a neat story. They had met each other while working at a school for the deaf, and both knew American Sign Language. While each of them knew rudimentary forms of each other's native languages, they mostly used their hands to communicate with each other. Cute, isn't it? But I never found out what their married life was like.