MK 93 - Blindness

Blindness, a jazz poem. 

Middle Kingdom podcast #93.

https://soundcloud.com/leonardtm/blindness-22-dec-17

Animist Cemetery - Ice Girl

Chapter 20.

Ice Girl said: North of Banlung in a remote jungle village along the Heart of Darkness they carve images of their dead.

  The Chunchiet animist people bury their dead in the jungle. Life is a sacred jungle. Animists believe in the universal inherent power of nature world. The Tompoun and Jarai, among animist world tribes have sacred burial sites. 

  The Kachon village cemetery is one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok River from Voen Sai. It is deep in the jungle.

  The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site. The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell. In their spirit story dream the shaman meets LOTH, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief says sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy LOTH. It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.

  After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, carve wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a festive week long celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village. New tombs have cement bases and carved effigies with cell phones and sunglasses. Never out of touch.

  See your local long distance carrier for plans and coverage in your area. The future looks brighter than a day in a sacred jungle.

  Fascinating, said Leo.

  Walking is the best form of travel, said Ice Girl. Take your time quickly.

  The paved road from Pakse, Laos to NE Cambodia is made for tourist buses, said Leo.

  A rusty red and white metal border bar weighted by rocks in a bucket netted by twisted wire hangs suspended. The VIP double-decker candy cane colored bus is packed with babbling European flash packers destined for the 9th Century at Angkor Wat. They have a long way to go to get back in time. They are doingSEA.

  The more they see the less they know, said a shaman.

  The efficient busboy hands out departure and arrival forms, collects passports, a $2 Lao departure fee, a $25 Cambodia visa fee and $2 entry fee. He takes everything to a Lao shack. The border bar goes up. The bus rolls through no-man’s land at the speed of a snail. 

  Being landless is fun, dramatic and exciting. No country, no documents, no money, no food, no medicine, no family, no friends, no chance. Abandoned on a strip of soil.   

  A female Cambodian health care worker wearing a facemask and official shirt patch gets on the bus. Pointing a small medical toy gun into each face, she registers body temperature.  

  Someone said, “If you’re sick you stay here.”

  “On the bus?”

  “No. Between countries. On the road.”

  Sounds like a novel.

  Crossing a border is a transcendental act.

  On the C side it’s business as usual. Immigration shacks, money changers, women hustling fried food, beverages, fruits, naked children, scavenging emaciated dogs, ripped cell phone umbrellas and haggard tourists drinking H2O waiting for the boy to return with passports.

An incomplete grandiose empty glass and brass Cambodian immigration building with fake Angkor temple motifs surrounded by landmines signifies exotic investment.

  Money = tourism and tourism = money. 

  Stung Treng in Ratanakiri province is 87 clicks south along the Mekong. Tourists pass through this small faded colonial town. They have a schedule. Time chases them, Hurry up! Hurry Up! You’re going to be late for an important date. Get a move on.

  Leo visited Mekong Blue, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center. Fifty women are trained in a six-month silk weaving course. They harvest, dye and create silk textiles. It is a UNESCO award winner for superior quality, creativity and originality. 

  They have Mulberry trees for leaves. Worms eat the leaves. Their saliva makes yellow cocoons. Saliva becomes a protein and stronger than steel. They boil silkworm cocoons to extract raw yellow silk. One thread is 300 meters long.

  It is separated into soft and fine threads. Women dye the threads using natural materials: banana (yellow), bougainvillea (yellow), almond leaves (black), lac insect nests (red and purple), prohut wood (yellow and green), lychee wood (black and gray), indigo (blue), and coconut (brown and pink).

  Women also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on silk threads prior to dyeing and weaving. It is called HOL with 200 motifs.

  The center improves the women’s standard of living. It breaks the cycle of poverty through vocational training and educational programs. They have a primary school with thirty-five kids and two teachers. Everyone receives lunch. It is the single biggest employer in town after the government.

That’s so cool, said Ice Girl.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Li - Ice Girl

Chapter 16.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I am H’mong. I speak excellent English.

I finished nine years of school in my village and learned what I really needed to know on the street. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. I use really a lot. As someone said, “You don’t want to let school interfere with your education.” 

Tourists visit Sapa. It’s in the mountains close to China. I’ve never been to China. I met a boy named Leo who used to live there as he passed through life as we all do. He said he had a crappy job there.

Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. Plan the dream and dream the plan. 

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC or Bang Cock. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese stuff. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh because you can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses 2) they wear bright red tour baseball hats so they don’t get lost 3) they travel in packs like scared animals 4) they stay in local government hotels and eat at local Vietnamese places 5) they ignore you.

No, I’m talking and I speak excellent English about the foreigners. We, my friends and I, who work the street selling, politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. It’s such a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. Tourists find and travelers discover is what I say.

Li

They have a vacation schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? They eat, sleep, wander around and maybe take a trek to a local village and then, POOF! like magic they disappear. 

And then the tourist machine spits out more tourists and visitors for us to sell to, pester and offer treks to our village.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels (H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses) charge a tourist $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get 10 people. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy only gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet them the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They sit and talk with people. They take some snaps.

Then we walk trails through pristine forests, through rivers, along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal direct with the tourists and trekkers.

I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman. Ha, ha.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza. With cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

  It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical viewfinder box. What’s up with that?

Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live and work, play and evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don't leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa overnight. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than going all the way home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It’s simple. Beds and toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work.

I’m a great little trek leader. I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do. Nature is my teacher. 

Life is good in Sapa. See you in the next life.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Gateway - Ice Girl

Chapter 3.

Banlung is a gateway to isolated animist villages up river.

The Tonle Srepok River is the heart of darkness. The Apocalypse Now River.

The river overflowed with tedious years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved wooden faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, animal sacrifice and rice wine hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering humans, mountains and jungles obsolete accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Someone said there was a war, said Ice Girl. Mother saw a whirling bird, called a helicopter. She wove it with our traditional motifs of weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, playing music, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. Before writing after cutting and selling ice I weave.

Animist people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy woman shaman performed a family ceremony and healing sacrifice.

She smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Villagers are superstitious and trusting.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust.

One prolific business in Banlung was mechanical. Along and adjacent to the single east west paved artery were brown wooden homes and shacks of rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125cc engines and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Freedom worked 24/7. Under a broiling sun tempered by a soft breeze they carried buckets of cement over boards, pouring it on red dirt. Freedom shoveled 21 muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. Freedom pushed it to a new world order construction site filled with profound expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.

After dark Freedom caressed a hungry $10 passive lover inside a plywood shack along a dirt road removed from neon, Zircon and the tooth fairy. Dirt floor, bed, OK condom.

Her clothes hung on rusty nails embedded in exploitation. Stale perfume, lip-gloss and mascara sang lost memories. Her dead eyes said, plow my field with no emotional connection. She stared at a brick wall as Freedom assaulted heaven’s gate grinding desire.

After fifteen minutes longer than forever she joined five girlfriends sitting around a fire below stars. See who shows up, said one, the night’s young. We are tools, said another. I don’t give a shit, said a sad one remembering her mother and siblings upriver.

The fat male moneyman slouched in a porch hammock watched reality reruns under a red light special.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Take Amazing Risks

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.

“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.

“Learned helplessness. They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, Lucky said, “When I was nine I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on nine. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” Zeynep said lighting a candle in darkness.

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

Oh the shame.

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

The Language Company