Art Women

Greetings,

The sewing woman returned to her guesthouse early with her girlfriend to change clothes, spit into red roses and splash water on her face.

She kick started her cycle and they went to the market, deep inside the labyrinth to her corner stall. She unlocked multiple locks, stacked wooden shutters and dragged out her sewing machine, ironing board and iron.

She lined up manikins. They wore her work: exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux-paws silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls. Her work was for women needing refinement, special elaborate occasions; weddings, funerals and engagements.

She did good work and stayed busy. Serious fittings and adjustments. 

Her sewing universe: process, fabric, measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, sewing machine treadle, edges, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, ironing.

Inside this slow prism threads of nets flashed light and shadow, needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. The needles talked about traditional values and the opportunity cost. They perform quick precise calculations to establish a stop-loss figure

smashing blocks of ice inside a bag with a blunt instrument creating a symphony of hips rolling outside these unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of tired brown pants thrown over a shoulder using a solid walking stick sits down to rest and shy women avert their beautiful seductive deep pool eyes

women manipulate stacks of printed government issued paper trusting a perceived value in exchange for goods: meat, fruit, gold, fabric, counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams of light, cracked cement, lost mislaid wooden planks, debris, feathers,

jungles, jangled waves surveying commercial landscapes with the quick dispatch of dialects as Black H'mong girls far away near Sapa rivers and waterfalls express their creation story

Metta.

 

 

International Women's Day

Greetings,

To honor women this day, every day, everywhere, here are some cultural images.

Nature is what you are. Culture is what you can be.

Metta.

How's this compare to where you've been?

Greetings,

That's the question three fat white guys discuss at a garden restaurant on a breezy Saturday. They were dropped off by a van. They meet friends.

One wealthy self assured Arab man with forehead sunglasses and his tall sleek jaguar girlfriend in tight jeans, tighter top and rattling high heels. Her feet are small and beautiful. Coiffeur hair. Originally, "inner part of the helmet." She leaves half her noodles. A Frenchman and his pregnant wife. She laughs a lot.

The weekend escape exercise from the capital. The three amigos booked rooms for their Cambodian honeys coming down from Phnom Penh and now they're drinking beer. The waft of suds and distinct European body odor drifts along the river. Intelligent life on Earth is a rumor.

The answer? "Now we've got women," said one man.

Sounds like a history story about a group of seafaring men who raided a Mediterranean city. They kidnapped all the women. The city men were pissed off and raided another coastal town, kidnapping all the women there. This is how war started. Revenge baby.

One day the women were asked about this event. "No," they said. "We weren't kidnapped. We went willingly."

No squeeze, no please.

This is a five minute free writing exercise. Keep your hand moving. The birds are singing. 

I live at Orchid. Orchid is important because I love orchids. They have many yellow and purple orchids growing, hanging, from planters. I feel great with orchids. I am a traveling gardener with unlimited potentials. Plural.

I remember many orchids in Indonesia. They were cheap. I decorated the front porch with multiple colorful orchids - red, orange, purple, white, and yellow in clay pots with a charcoal base. Orchids took me to the mountains to see my wild friends. (5 minutes)

At 7:30 a.m. the Orchid restaurant is filled with the smell of burning fires from refuse, plastic bags, and organic material. German travelers spit out their harsh dictatorial guttural sense of determination. It is harsh. They are planning to invade, to provoke a war to justify their extreme greed for land and slaves.

Teutonic tongues mix with screeching Khmer tongues. Question. What is louder than a group of Khmer people? Answer. Another group of Khmer people.

Babbling comparisons display firm purpose. They establish their memory-fiction with a drunken slow administrative tone. A singing bird says, "Good-bye, I'm taking wing. The sky is my refuge from description. The divine details create uncertainty in my grand plan."

Khmer children bleed water.

ROUGE: a rainbow with the smell of laughing birds, clouds and rivers. Milling around.

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

The Temple of Literature, Ha Noi.

Warrior statue, ink. Xiamen, China.

No women in tuk-tuk land

Greetings,

Now here this. The tuk-tuk is leaving in five minutes. Departing for points unknown. A massive 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, guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on...you will visit the following areas on your short, fast, easy tour.

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

You may be surprised or traumatized  to realize your experience at Angkor is not about "seeing" the temples. 

Angkor, Bayon and Beyond...

Please conclude various private and group discussions to ascertain your destination. 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 problems. For starters he will lose his job and have to return to his small, isolated village where he will plant rice. The biggest dream for many young 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.

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 person'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.

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

1. it's too dangerous
2. it's inappropriate
3. it's foolish
4. they lack the education, intelligence, drive, initiative
5. they haven't broken free of deeply ingrained social and cultural stereotypes: a woman's place is in the home, taking care of kids, washing, cleaning, and cooking.

Thirty years ago a woman was lucky to finish 9th grade. She married and stayed at home. It may take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers. So it goes.

Metta.

Lina studies Engineering in Phnom Penh. 

Innocence and War

Greetings,

I met Alice last month. She's from England and has visited Cambodia six times. She's worked here as a volunteer at local schools. She recommended two important books. 

The Lost Road of Innocence by Somaly Mam. Her true story of being sold into sexual slavery at the age of five. Heartbreaking. Somaly now runs shelters for abused girls and women in Phnom Penh. She's received international recognition for her work establishing AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Circumstances). 

Cambodia Now: Life In the Wake of War by Karen J. Coates. Karen is a freelance journalist based in Thailand. Her book examines Cambodian life in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge's genocidal regime of 1975-1979. She interviews Cambodians across the country. She details relations with neighboring countries, politics, violence, family, poverty, environment and Cambodia's future.

Metta.

She sells souvenirs to tourists at a temple after school.