Sorry, but I think I just wrote a book. I’d grab a cup of coffee/tea for this one…
I’m sitting in our living room flat, on our somewhat uncomfortable and very much worn wicker couch. The ceiling fan is on full blast and my body is positioned just so, so that I can feel a slight breeze flow in from the balcony. I’m trying to think of the best way to describe last week’s trip to Pursat Province, in the Northwest of the country. All my recent memories of those four days of documentary filmmaking seem jumbled in my mind forming a huge headache that’s probably also do to slight dehydration.
I check back my notes, bullet points listed under DAY 1, DAY 2, etc. Then I remember:
DAY 1- Living Beyond Reach
I wake up in a small hotel room in Pursat Town. My boss, M.K. is in the bed next to mine. I’m conscious of how good it feels to have a somewhat decent mattress underneath my back. We’d arrived late in the evening the day before and after some Khmer food, had settled down to get a good night’s rest. After a breakfast of chicken glass noodle soup and tea, Vanoc (Driver), Director Kimsour, Samnah (Director’s Assistant/Cameraman), M.K. or Ms. Mary (film producer) and I (in this case, observer, producer’s assistant, and default photographer) clambered into our beaten-up metallic company van and headed down a bright mud- red road off of Pursat Town to the tiny village of Boeing Smuck, adequately described as “being in the middle of nowhere.” We drove for at least an hour, into the heart of Cambodia, picturesquely passing by water-buffalo carts driven by children. Over bends, bumps, and muddy holes our trusty van went. By the time we finally reached the Chief of Commune’s house, half of us were already covered calf-deep in mud, having pushed and pulled the van out of real pot-holes that would make winter driving in Chicago’s I-94 easy-breezy.
We then made our way to the train station— not much more than an abandoned building. You could more accurately describe the train station as the rail tracks between the only two small, local restaurants in the village, next to the vendor selling frog legs and packages of raw noodles and an open field. The train? To my delight, the train, known as the “bamboo train” or what Cambodians refer to as the “Lorry” or “Norry”— flat wooden boards atop wheels with a massive engine strapped to one end and a “train conductor” keeping it in check-- arrived just in time to whisk us off to another small village about 20 minutes away to where the provincial coordinator and head of the women's division for the human rights group Adhoc, Madame Ngeht was giving an educational meeting on domestic violence. Riding the bamboo train is about one of the coolest things you could ever do in Cambodia, namely because you feel the rush (and bumps) of the track right beneath you and the wind and country scenes become the drapes of your coach car on the one-coach, one-track rustic train.
When we arrive at our stop, three motorcycles take a boom pole, a large camera, and us to the village where we will be filming some sketches of the province and violence education in action. While the adults sit in the cool underneath of a house, I look around for a means to entertain myself and find some seashells strewn across the sandy floor nearby. I pick one up, turn it over my fingers and begin to outline a sun. The little girls surrounding me look down and each pick up a seashell, copying my drawing. Cambodian’s are good at copying. We then move on to stars, trees, and numbers and promptly this little band of girls has added a little exterior décor to the village. I’m glad I could contribute a lesson in sand drawing at this human rights community forum.
Another bumpy ride later, we’re back at the Chief of Commune’s faded yellow-blue painted house we later learned he had built himself when he was a carpenter. The Chief, wearing round gold-rimmed glasses and black boxers, smiles widely as he greets us and proceeds to put on his pants. Privacy doesn’t really exist in this country. Once he is fully dressed, he leads us even further into the country to Boeng Smuck village to visit the families of two young girls, Nai Vinn (11) and Phal Sophoeun (14) that were raped and brutally murdered a few months back.
Let me pause and explain WHY I suddenly found myself standing in a yard full of children, chickens, and garbage littered across a backdrop of emerald green mountains and darkening skies. The documentary film my company is currently producing focuses on violence and rape against children in Cambodia, and the root of that violence stemming from Khmer culture, history, and psychological, social, and political repression. It is no exaggeration to say that everyday when I open the Cambodia Daily or the Phnom Penh Post, there is at least one report on a child rape, murder, or trafficking in this country. While our film is very general, it does draw from the voices of victims and their families, and that is exactly why I found myself in Pursat in late July—to observe the making of a documentary through interviews and film sketches (i.e. scenes of daily life) so I in turn can help take the film and submit it to international markets for viewing and distribution.
The mother of the victims is beautiful, despite her shaved head (probably due to lice) and sad smile. Her cheeks hold a slight red tinge while her eyes drift constantly from us to the various children (all together four) that run around the yard. Her hand occasionally touches her round pregnant belly hidden beneath a bright yellow shirt. Two very tiny, straw packed and wooden raised houses shared the yard in which the children played and run stark naked in. The other house belongs to her sister, also the mother of the second victim. What is it like to have your daughters— two cousins, raped and hung from a tree? I hope I will never know because in that yard I see sadness and the struggle for survival. I watch naked children playing in the rain with a single plastic tricycle, and families worrying how to feed them and pay for the midwife that will deliver their new sibling.
I stand outside in the rain while M.K. and the Kimsour interview the family as they eat from a pan of white, nutrition-less rice. One of the children has taken a liking to me and says things to me in Khmer I can’t understand. The entire time I can’t decide if the child is a girl or a boy as I smile back at those intense black eyes. When the rain hits harder, and the adults shelter themselves underneath the houses as if we are gathering in a gigantic sand box, the children squeal with joy and continue running around the yard, undisturbed by the rain drops. They all take care of each other. When the baby boy falls off the tricycle the 6-year-old girl runs over and picks him up, shifts him to her hip, and in the meantime the next boy sees this as an opportune time to hop on the toy himself. The filming takes a long time. I stare out at the distant mountains and think of there are so many people in this world living off the main road. There is no road to reach them, and there probably won’t be for a long time. To survive poverty in a place where an NGO, the UN, or where barely the government (i.e. Chief of Commune) can reach you, is that really “survival of the fittest”? There is something unsettling about that, if that’s the truth. If there is no road one must be built and it really doesn’t matter who does it.
DAY 2- Hiking in Flip Flops
I think I hear roosters crowing. Can someone please turn them off? Wait, where am I? Ouch… My back. Hurts. Roosters crowing again, and just as annoying as last time. Oh yeah, I’m in Pursat, sleeping in the Chief’s house, next to my boss (again). Was I dreaming about getting ready to go out at Finny’s? High heels, blush, and hair that actually does what I want it to do seem so far away. I pat my hands around me and reach for my phone. 4AM. Nice… Aaand I’ll just turn over on this wooden table, I mean bed, draped with red mosquito netting and try to go back to sleep. I’m vaguely aware of the need to use the toilet, but push the thought back. I refuse to go in the white chamber pot the Chief’s wife placed in the room last night. I’ll wait for the outhouse in the morning.
Amazingly two hours later I’m up and I’m ready for a new day of filming. After brushing my teeth with a water bottle I dip a plastic red ladle into a ginormous clay rain catcher and scrub a touch of face wash over my face and then wrap a blue-green krama (checkered scarf) around my head. I can sense today is going to be a sweaty, messy day. We’re going hiking up to where the two girls were raped and hung. I push the thought back into my mind and focus on the hiking part, namely because all I have are my worn-out J-Crew flip-flops as hiking boots. Well, those and two umbrellas I swing over my shoulders. Just in case it rains- I mean, when it DOES rain, the camera will be safe.
The crew heads down to the end of the village, over the train tracks, past the first rice field, and turns right into the fields. All the locals are staring, and rightfully so. We make quite a show, one super white woman with hair that is (gasp!) not straight (Vanoc actually asked me to buy a comb… I had to explain it would be pointless on frizzy, curly hair), carrying two umbrellas slung over her shoulder and a bright blue camera swinging from her wrist and one Asian-Western woman outfitted in super bright red clean Keds sneakers with a lime green backpack that holds a bottle of Mademoiselle Coco Chanel on her back. Great. I’m hiking in Cambodia with Coco Chanel. It makes me chuckle, but I have to admit, the scent felt nice on my inner wrists this morning even though it quickly blended in with the less appealing farm smells. M.K. and I follow the Deputy Chief of Commune, a skinny man with a weatherworn brown leather face who led the search party to find the girls and cut them down from the tree a day after the crime took place. Ahead of us is Director Kimsour, wearing one of those round sailing hats that reads “ADVENTURE” in small print and Samnah, who dutifully carries the camera on his shoulder. Vanoc, our driver turned assistant who also turned sick last night, trudges along as well. I hope the Airborne I gave him this morning works on Cambodians. There are also three elderly, skinny, ragged policemen carrying AKs with us. I asked what they were, and they were simply “AKs.” The fascination of being led by armed personnel takes hold of me. I momentarily pretend I’m being led deep into the Congo and there are armed rebel militias nearby. The fantasy quickly disappears as we reach the end of the first fluorescent green rice paddy. I almost slip off the small raised path as Mary falls forward in front of me and lands in a bigger pile of mud. I catch a glimpse of something black swimming quickly away. Water snakes! No wonder she got scared and fell. I give a little shriek and quickly jump up onto the next mound. I look ahead and it seems for miles there are just rice paddies just like this one, each flooded to a certain depth, each probably full of black water snakes. “Just walk quickly!” Kimsour shouts from up front. Uuuuh, you mean, walk quickly in swamp land where there are snakes happily swimming about? Dooon’t think so. Nope. EW. I’m a girl, and I freely admit it. I don’t do snakes.
But after crossing one or two fields with disappearing paths that require Samnah to carry both Ms. Mary and myself on his back, I feel sorry for the guy. He didn’t sign up for this, and somehow I feel slightly imperialistic asking this Cambodian man to put me on his back. It must be the umbrellas that contribute to the feeling, even thought they aren’t parasols and aren’t opened and I’m not in a white-linen dress. My boss is one thing, especially since her shoes would just get stuck in the mud. I sigh and slip off my flip-flops, like the rest of the men, and tell myself to just look ahead and forget the snakes if I feel one slip by. Luckily my determination to move fast outweighs the speed of these slippery creatures and I’m able to reach the next trek of stable pink-white sand without an encounter. Good thing too because I later learned they were in fact not snakes, they were leeches.
The sand trekking soon turns into a run-in with a water-buffalo cart again led by a small boy. I think we were the last thing he and the water buffalo were expecting to see today. We finally hit rocks and thicker brush. The mountain! Or hill… I guess it could be considered a rocky mountain for Cambodian standards. There is no path up, nor trail, just crumbling loose rocks and spiky branches protruding from everywhere. We curse and wonder how on earth three men could lead two young girls to this area to commit their heinous crime and string their bodies up on branch, but then I see it. The tree. It’s menacing in it’s own natural way, with one crooked branch sticking out over the rest of the hill. The perfect branch for a hanging, if there is such a thing. The view is breathtaking though. It’s a juxtaposition and it’s a shame. Such a beautiful country with such dark secrets. The filming commences and I have to somehow quietly sit on a loose rock holding two umbrellas, ignoring the ants crawling all over my wet feet, while Kimsour interviews the police. The Deputy recounts how he found the bodies as Kimsour finds all the right angles for shooting this scene. Amazing the artistic thought behind the man at the very scene of a double-murder. I imagine myself taking part in filming expeditions all over the world. I break out of my fantasy and look at the Deputy. What must have it been like to look up from the bottom of the hill and see the unnatural sight of two young girls’ bodies waiting for you to cut them down?
Sometime later the rains starts to sprinkle down and before we know it it’s raining, and it’s raining hard. Up the umbrellas go to protect the camera and Vanoc opens up a rice sack he’s been carrying, revealing a bunch of heavy-duty plastic raincoats. I reach for one, pull it over and am disappointed by the length of it. How on earth did short little Cambodians get a hold of raincoats built for Vikings? Honestly. I bunch up the bottom of the coat and pull the heavy plastic above my knees. I’m going to hike down a wet rocky mountain clutching an over-sized raincoat, an umbrella as a hiking stick and flip-flops. If I don’t sprain my ankle, it’ll be a miracle.
Well, it was a miracle I didn’t sprain it, but Ms. Mary on the other hand, sprained her wrist after slipping and putting her hand out to break her fall. She winces in pain and Kimsour comes over to look at it. He must think it’s broken because he quickly pulls hard on it and she screams out in pain, tears flooding from her eyes. I guess he was trying to set the non-broken bone. It’s kind of hilarious, but I don’t say anything, just follow the policemen with their A.K.s and hurry along. They don’t seem to mind the rain. In fact, they’re stopping every time we come across a paddy worker and seem to be asking them about their crop. The rain soon subsides and the sun comes out and it’s hot. Here weather changes as quickly as it does in Chicago, except it only alternates between sun and rain, hot and humid and more hot and humid. By the time we get back to the village, we are stinky, bruised, sunburnt and uber-dehydrated. All I want is a cold shower and a massage. And maybe a mango-shake, preferably at a five star resort. I look around, sorry darling, that ain’t happening today.
Kimsour and Samnah disappear that evening to go interview the local schoolteacher and M.K. and I take a nap. Later the Chief’s daughter brings over two purple flowered sarongs and teaches us how to bathe with our clothes on. We bathe with a pan next to rain catchers behind the large outdoor staircase, aware that a few feet away there is a group of young Khmer men with bodies chiseled down by the labor-intensive work they do playing volleyball. They barely pay attention as M.K. and I squeal at the coolness of the water being poured over us. Being clean again feels wonderful and we settle down to chat in the “outdoor lounge” – dirt floor with heavy-lacquered wooden tables and chairs, and wooden boards plastered with Cambodia People’s Party posters and portraits of Prime Minister Hun Sen. The rain descends upon us again and fails to cease as night takes over. We are rained in, or flooded in a village in the middle of nowhere. Everyone is a little fed up by the exhaustion, the work and the mosquitoes. Arguments over how to get out of here and into town consume the night. Too bad we already drank our bottle of Chilean red wine last night. I’m sure the Chief could have used it tonight as he listened to the Voice of America on his short-wave radio and probably wondered who on earth the Taliban were, but more importantly how much longer he’s going to have to keep feeding his five guests from the city.
DAY 3- Van on Bamboo Train
It was decided early this morning that we’d put our on money on the bamboo train. The locals claim that they can get two lorries tied together and put our van on top of them, while we ride in the front of the bamboo train all the way to Pursat, or as far as we are willing to pay. The non-roads are flooded waist-deep anyways so it seems that putting a van on a bamboo board is the only option. Ms. Mary has her doubts, Kimsour is sure it can work, and I’m just excited I get to ride the bamboo train again. Some rice and chicken bits later, the villagers have strapped the car securely onto the lorry and we celebrate our departure by buying some raw noodles for the kids and handing the Chief a nice envelope full of riels & dollars for his kind hospitality. I doubt the village has seen this much excitement in a long time.
The train ride is gorgeous again and Kimsour makes our conductor stop several times so we can film. At one point, while another lorry unloads and reloads around us, we catch sight of some Cham (Muslim) workers in the fields, heads covered with long scarves and wide-brimmed hats. We follow Kimsour who has quickly taken off to film the scene and meet the workers. They’re shy, but smiley and agree to let us film while they break for a lunch of eggs and rice. They eat with muddied-clay fingers and drink from a single white plastic bucket filled with water. I can’t help but notice how they must be my age. The rest of the ride is slow, but breezy and I enjoy every minute of it. For an hour and a half, I’m free to let my mind wonder over possibilities of more National Geographic-esque adventures, and a life of filmmaking. Then I think of the girls and filmmaking turns into human rights defending. Too many tracks to explore, so I sit back and enjoy the one I’m on.
When we reach Pursat Town, some locals nearby help unload the van onto the street. I bet they weren’t expecting to see a metallic van stenciled with “Rock Production” and little lightening bolts come up to the crossroads. While the men work to get the thing off, I hear a woman yell at me. “You! Come Here! Where are you from, I want to speak with you!” I’m startled by the harshness of the voice, but even more startled by the fact that it is in English. I just spent two days in the middle of nowhere using broken Khmer, eating rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner and the English words are hurtled at me with such force, I’m caught off guard and turn around to see this super-skinny wrinkled woman without teeth. I answer in a question, as I often do here for no explicable reason, “America?” She stares at me and begins, “ I came to America in 1972 to San Francisco, I was there a year…” I just stare. I must be hallucinating from the sun. This stick-like wrinkled lady wearing a visor is smacking her gums at me telling me how she came to speak perfect English. I can see she’s eager to speak. I bet she hasn’t had a conversation in English for a while because the words tumble out proudly as she sits between her grandchildren. I laugh and we talk for a bit before I have to pile back into the hot van for the ride into town.
DAY 4- Voices of Victims
How do we fight for human rights? I have no clue. I’m sitting in the sweltering heat in a large room were the Adhoc conference on “discussions” between the police, local government representatives and victims on their grievances is taking place, trying not to fall asleep. I’m all for human rights but it’s so hot it’s hard to stay awake. Iced-coffee will be able in the back of the room soon and I’ll be sure to make a dash for a glass. A few rows ahead there are a couple policemen leafing through the pamphlet in Khmer and a row behind me there are nervous girls, smiling shyly at the foreigner freak. Somehow I know the smile I give back doesn’t quite convey what I’m thinking…“I admire you for speaking out in front of police and officials after your rape case was ignored by the same men.” For close to six hours we sit, sweat and listen patiently. I mostly half-listen to interpreter next to me. His English isn’t very good but I get the gist of the conference. Land taken forcefully away without reparations, rape victims crying into the microphone, a commune chief with feet twisted backwards (perhaps a bomb chemically-influenced deformation?) who isn’t receiving enough support from the government…. Everyone is angry, everyone is tired, everyone wants the justice system to work so they can go home and go on with their lives. The court prosecutor and clerk and some other officials listen, take down notes, occasionally answer their cell phones while on panel (phone etiquette is completely non-existent in Cambodia), and speak words of encouragement to the people. In my book that’s a lot of empty promises and lip service paid to society’s most vulnerable members. People are told to re-file their cases and grievances, hell to even go to the prosecutor’s house if they have a problem- “My house, my office, is open to anyone!” He tells them. In the end we get what we came for. To get interviews with the officials attending on their thoughts about the rape case we are following in Boeing Smuck. Most have never even heard that it occurred. Most say they see it is a recurring problem that must be dealt with. But what will they do? How can a country forced to hold a “free and fair election” by the UNTAC in the 90s, a country wiped out of an entire generation, a country being built by donor dependency and opportunistic Western and Asian greediness hold criminals in jail despite bribes that are paid to free them and without consent of rape victims? But each conversation is a development. In Cambodia, every step counts even if it’s a baby one. An open discussion like this would have never occurred ten years back. Everyone knows that impunity is the biggest threat to justice anywhere. I just hope the other girls present here today can continue their lives without fear that the perpetrators will return to their house one day and seek revenge for speaking out. They deserve more than that.
The conference wraps up and we head out back to Phnom Penh, racing back before night falls, before we can forget what we have witnessed this week and perhaps more determined to make the documentary a success. On behalf of the world, we at least owe the family of the girls in Boeng Smuck that.
