Mr.Tuk Tuk

A metallic Cambodian loudspeaker spoke, Now here this, The tuk-tuk is leaving in five minutes, Departing for points unknown, A massive short celestial event known as YOUR LIFE will depart in five minutes. 

You are advised to assemble all the necessary documents, certified seals of approval, water, invisible guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on...you will visit the Mind-At-Large on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you, And a glossy greasy Laughing Planet guidebook with heavily creased pages. If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light or 186,000 miles per second you will discover a new sense of perspective.

You may be surprised or traumatized depending on your perception to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing the temples. You will DO Angkor. Get the t-shirt. Check it off your list. Less is more.

Please conclude all private and group discussions, disagreements or arguments with your fellow travelers to ascertain your destination. Talking time is finished. 

The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. For starters he will lose his job and have to return to his small distant isolated village where he will plant rice and provoke white cows with socialist Marxist production tools to pull the plow through mud.

The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to become a tuk-tuk driver. If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family will starve to death. This is a common problem here. Death by starvation. If you survive you win. 

If he dies you will be held in escrow. (Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment)

A tuk-tuk river driver has an easy job. An easy life. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. He makes $15-20 for the day. 

The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $2.03.

Not a single woman in Siem Reap is a tuk-tuk driver. There are 3-4 women tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh. They are as rare as clean drinking water, sanitation, hospitals and schools. Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guest houses. They are the guest and you are the house. 

Your house has many symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious lives breaths-laughs and dances where it reveals inner vision. Clean all your rooms. Take out the garbage. Explore your diverse rooms. 

Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff. You are the housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols and nothing.

A woman doesn't work as a tuk-tuk driver because: 

-it's too dangerous

-it's inappropriate

-it's foolish

-they lack the education, intelligence, drive, initiative

-they haven't broken free of deeply ingrained social and cultural stereotypes: a woman's place is in the home, producing offspring, taking care of kids and the elderly, washing, cleaning, and cooking

-their family will kill them with love and affection

Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish 9th grade. She married and stayed at home. She produced children in assembly line operations with the highest quality control standards known to modern medicine and umbilical chords.

It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers. Tisk, tisk, tuk, tuk.

Your mother was appointed to have you.

2% curiosity

greetings,

2% are awake.
98% are asleep.
this is an unpleasant fact.

today is a happy day in paradise. paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. they are ecstatic. they are laughing and running and playing and planting and harvesting and breeding and working and dying.

they blast red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks into a black sky celebrating the end of the genocide regime. someone sings, the wicked witch is dead!

it's a brave new world. except for four old dying relics on a very expensive show trial for genocide between 1975-1979 when 1.7 million people died. they deny their role. not me! i was only following orders. like the chinese gang of four. how quickly people forget. the media likes this distracting fact.

numbed silence. traumatized and anesthetized.
send in the clowns. send in the politicians and bankers. same-same but different.

paradise survivors are happy because they are alive. they started over after Year Zero. everyone now has food, clean water, medicine and socratic educational opportunities in an NGO world to rebuild their culture. it will take another generation, or 60 years given the average life expectancy to recover, revive and renew life. 

today alice in slumberland, a human pretending to be an (economically) depressed teacher said, you should just blend in. during a genocide people who asked questions disappeared. they vanished. they became extinct. asking questions was not allowed. asking questions now is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. dangerous people ask questions. people who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to intention and incentive and robotic daily comatose existence. 

intention and incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho.

a priori theory without facts or thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity is a male land mine survivor without legs. they live on ground zero. they sit near a pagoda waiting for random charitable kindness from strangers.

where are the female land mine survivors? maybe they are dead and gone. maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their needs. 

questions are forbidden said asian teachers, officials and social control mechanisms. ask at your peril. anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a question is shamed or silently beaten into silence. fear is a great motivator, forever and a day. conformity breeds conformity. 

curiosity is fatal. curiosity kills more humans than war and disease, lack of medicine and starvation.

metta.

mediocrity and cold hard survival

laughter and joy

I am a seller, said the Ice Girl

Greetings,

As dawn light savored green jungles along rivers a young Banlung woman-mother, one of many, cut ice. She sawed ice into manageable chunks as glistening elements dripped their moisture into delicious red dust. Red dust is stirred by countless women sawing and sweeping in front of their red dust covered wooden shuttered doors. Up and down the red dusty street.

Ice slides into blue plastic bags. Four foot long blocks of ice are loaded on the backs of antique battered black and red motorcycles driven by delivery boys wearing dusty baseball caps with glittering golden stars. Women in front of their shops open large orange plastic boxes to hold fresh clear frozen ice. 

Ice lives and dies every morning in a red dusty paradise. Sun streaks water. Ice cries.

After school the mother's daughter, 12, saws ice. A man sees her. What are you doing? he asked. She smiled. She is happy. I am a seller, she said. Her English is clear, distinct and filled with confidence. She bags a block of ice and hands it to a cycle man. He hands her crumbled red dusty notes.

She saws ice in afternoon heat. You are a good seller, said the man. Yes, I am, said the girl. I greet the buyer and sell, I cut, I bag, I talk, I sell. Ice is moving.

See you later, she sang playing her saw through crystals inside red dust. 

Metta.

Six images, 2010

Greetings,

He's been in Cambodia for a year. One year seems like a day. Here are six random images.

Many thanks for your support and kindness.

May your new year be filled with joy.

Metta.

Handicap International in Siem Reap. They provide rehabilitation and prosthetic devices to land mine victims.

Inee, a weaver in a Kampot training center for disadvantaged women.

Angkor Wat

Blacksmith

 Clean water

A memory travel story

Greetings,

A Cambodian orphan said the NYT was looking for stories from readers about their worst travel experience in 2010. The kid suggested I send them a memory. Here it is.

This year was all about first class travel. While climbing into a volcano in Iceland it blew up.

I was blasted into the stratosphere where, fortunately, my cargo pants offered me ballast. The jet stream meandered over Europe in incredibly clear skies because there were no planes. Then, south of Yemen, the air pressure dropped and I drifted toward the Mediterranean. Using my polarity navigation device I located a highjacked Russian cargo ship loaded with weapons and landed among Somali pirates. They were very cordial.

We sailed the seven seas. Eventually they transferred me to a Turkish boat heading for Israel. We were forced to divert to an unnamed northern port where I hitched a ride with a camel caravan going to China. We visited markets in Bukhara, Samerkand and eventually reached Kashgar on the Silk Road where we traded with local merchants.

Over butter tea and tsampa (a hard rock cheese) Tibetan traders invited me to Lhasa, so we drove yaks to Shigatse, and then Lhasa.

From there I walked to Yunnan before crossing into North Vietnam to help Black H'mong friends in Sapa harvest rice. Laos was next door and the northern rivers connected with the Mekong, so I sailed south into Cambodia where I volunteered at an orphanage.

I told the kids this story and they were amazed to learn about volcanic activity.

Metta.