Children of the dust

Omar said, Down on mean street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Like Tran, she is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one good leg after finding a landmine on her way home from school. She is one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflict.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million landmines buried in 45 countries. It costs between $300-$900 to remove a single mine.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, Laos, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia is unused because of landmines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee. She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from their skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked through pristine rice paddies near her village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around her.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2. She never saw it coming. She didn’t die of shock and blood loss.

A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot her up with morphine. All the strangers and happy ghosts carried morphine. Standard issue. Grateful, she speaks the language of silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

June

June from Stockholm, Sweden visited Cambodia for a month. 36-years young. She was married for ten angry years to an African American from Atlanta. She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties.

She opened up. I don’t know what I’m running away from. I don’t know what I'm running toward. We talked about the amazing labyrinths inside Angkor temples, an allegory of her life.

One door closes and one door opens but the passages can be a bitch, whispered Omar.

She’d evolved as a willing victim of old manipulative lies from authority figures like family, husband, boss and friends in her life. How she’d believed old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others.

Her new day in Cambodia, this beginning offered her new opportunities for awareness and growth. To become authentic she’d face her fears and shadows or run with a hellhound on her trail.

I want to cut off all my hair, she said. It was long curling blond movie star mane quality. We went to a salon. She was nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off.

I feel lighter now, transformed, said June.

She altered her outward appearance releasing old anxieties. By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors as a complete symbolic gesture, June realized how she felt was more important than how her stone cold colleagues in freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path.

One day June went thirty miles north to experience a village influence on her consciousness. She visited My Grandfather’s House and the local school. What do you need, she asked. She bought them a water purifier. She purchased a battery so they’d have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from temples she stopped in a village and met some children.

The next morning she invited me to join her. We stopped at a shop. She purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We rolled through dry brown flat countryside past bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and talking. We were far away from the town filled with fat happy white tourists doing Angkor.

June talked a blue streak unloading her honesty, hopes and dreams mixed with anxieties and fears.

I feel good doing this. I’ve never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger. It was shit. Now that I’m in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I’m beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better.

We turned off a paved road onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home on stilts in a field. Half-naked kids played. Women and men sat in the shade. June met the kids and a young mother.

Here, she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and paste. For you. The kids and mothers were amazed. An 80-year-old woman, a former Apsara dancer, performed quick delicate hand movements. June copied her to the delight of everyone.

I’ll be back, she yelled as kids ran waving goodbye. Now I feel more fulfilled, she said.

We stopped in a small market village for ice coffee. Young girls selling colorful bamboo paper birds descended on us.

Buy something? Look at my things. June met Leaf, 13, in the 5th grade. Leaf learned English selling to foreigners at the temples after school. Leaf showed us her village home.

See you here tomorrow at 2 p.m., June said to Leaf.

I saw a leader in the girl’s eyes, said June as we rolled back to the city. Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow.

June had to modify her dream for the girl.

Let’s be practical, I suggested. Finding a Khmer English teacher for $1,000 a month is like finding clean drinking water.

The next day June bought a brand new pink bike for Leaf with a bell and basket. It said, NEW STAR on the chain guard. We went to a bookstore. She bought a whiteboard, boxes of markers, twenty English books, picture dictionaries and storybooks. We loaded them on a tuk-tuk and rolled to the village.

Leaf, her family and friends were waiting for June. They raise pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market and older sisters hustle male tourists hoping to find a boyfriend, get married and escape.

Here Leaf all this is for you, said June. The bike will help you get to school, temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English.

Leaf smiled. Thank you. Leaf jumped on her bike and pedaled through dust and broken leaves around the house. June spread the books out and kids explored images, words, letters and colors.

I feel really good about this, said June. Real good. I’ve made a small difference in a young girl’s life. I am so grateful. June had a humbling life changing experience.

That’s a good idea for a children’s book, said Rita.

Nature is what you can be and culture is what you are, said Leo.

One day on a toothbrush run June traveled along another dusty red road and stopped at a village shop selling soap, coconuts and bananas. A girl wore a t-shirt with a picture of a skull and bones.                                  

Danger! LANDMINES!

She wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling.

She said. Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 18 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have enough medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground. I’m really good at numbers. Talk to me before you explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places.

I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

June woke up in Cambodia, returned to Sweden and changed her life around.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Nam to Cambodia

By Omar

It feels soft here after the mercenary rush of Saigon, said Happy Ghost. Vietnam’s population is 93 million. Cambodia has 18 million. Vietnam is about hustle and money. Cambodia is about survival. Memory. Hope and work for a better future  ... heavy weight  ... no one talks about the past … memories are dead  ... gentle smiles and resilient people.

An emotional IQ level of -7 lives in Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Do the math. Perpetual adolescence is an epidemic endemic disease.

That’s what happens when you kill all the educated people, said Rita. It will take a generation and then some until we get our heads and hearts adjusted. It explains our reality and ground truth.

Vietnam is a smaller version of China and Cambodia is a small version of Nam.  

Vietnamese plant rice, Cambodians watch it grow and Laotians hear it grow.

What does this say about sensation and awareness in three separate cultures, asked Rita. Everything.

One day it felt great to put on solid walking boots at 0515 as narrow Saigon alleys stirred to life. How the gentle soul and metatarsal support pressure delighted the skeletal structure. Roll the bones. It’s a walking meditation … Posture … Alignment … It’s a long walk … Walking makes the road.

At 0600 Tan San Nut airport was deserted below a soft orange sky. Outside or inside a terminal we are all terminal cases. I met a Vietnamese woman, 60, widowed now for a year returning home to Perth after visiting her son and grandchildren. She shared pictures of her standing by the ocean, with friends when she was 38, with her son, at a party. She talked how she and her husband were farmers for ten years in Australia. How she misses him. How she remembers her son. She looked wistful and resigned to her fate. She’ll grow old with friends in Perth remembering.

In the departure area a woman working for the U.N. in Geneva and her boyfriend were visiting Cambodia for two weeks. She planned to visit her girlfriend, another U.N. worker in Phnom Penh, the capital. Agrarian. Rural. Her friend’s been there three months working on the trial of a Khmer Rouge leader.

She does admin work. She says it’s a real mess. The other international legal representatives bicker and fight amongst themselves. Nothing gets done. The trial lasted 1,001 years. It cost $100,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros for the Year Zero legal campaign. A lawyer said, it’s not about Justice, it’s about Procedure.

A Swiss woman in Siem Reap worked for the U.N. in various African assignments. She said, I went to a U.N. gathering in Africa. All they did was argue and promote their specific turf and agendas. The internal squabbling was pathetic. It was pitiful.

Imagine, said Rita, You live in Cambodia. One day you wake up. You have money and opportunities to provide everyone with clean water, free high quality education, medicine, safe well-managed shelters for orphans and abused women and all the essentials for everyone who needs it. NGO businesses scream. Shocking! They’d be out of work. They’d have to go somewhere else, like North Korea or Burma. The Cambodians would be completely empowered to run their own country free of outside influence.

Yeah, said Rita, Don’t hold your breath. Why learn how to fish when the fish is free?

Storytellers flew into Cambodia on a prop-jet seating 100 jaded travelers on the one-hour flight. Low and slow. Whir.

A caustic European woman said to her husband, Where are we flying today? Siem Reap? Oh how tedious.

Like thousands of visitors they’ll stay for two or three days in a guesthouse or four star hotel, hire a tuk-tuk driver and DO Angkor, eat in tourist restaurants staffed by bored, happy children pretending they are mature and sensible.

Look at all the people European tourists say, how sweet. They will tour 8th century Khmer civilization with their mechanical cameras, not their heart. They’ll dance under stars with lightning. Tourists zoom around and leave. We came, we ate, we drank, we toured, we slept, and we left. Hail Caesar.

We skimmed west over the mighty Mekong, brown snake rivers, rice fields, strong lush green land, water and islands with southern mountains looming through low grey clouds. The baby plane soared, floated, turning north over the Tonle Sap Lake. It is the largest lake in Asia fed by water flowing from Tibet through China and Laos.

All the way down to the delta, said Gravity.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

1st International Children's Conference

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.         

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

*

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about:

slave labor, hunger,

exploitation, corruption,

human trafficking

and the terrorism of economic poverty.

 “Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $96 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

Cambodian women making $190/month stitched garments for export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.

world photography day

Tibet

Laos

Burma

Indonesia

China

Cambodia

Turkey

Vietnam

Nepal