good-bye for now

There are parts of Phnom Penh that remind me of Buenos Aires. The wrought iron gates with their ornamental details, the iron lattice bars over the windows, the tree-lined streets. There is enough of the air of L'Indochine left in the best parts of town to make me feel like I was sitting down to tea with a grand old dame. Well past her prime, but still with good taste, and fairly good manners for her age. That the city has any beauty at all is incredible, givZen that it was completely cleared out when it fell. Apparently, before the troubles, the city was one of the most beautiful in Indo-China. 

We went to Siem Reap this week and on the way up I saw houses on stilts, cows on the road. It was subsistence living in full colour. Siem Reap, however, has become a tourist mecca. The kids weren't begging (much) but they were peddling their wares with the same desperation. The prostitutes have gone underground in most places, but the girls who were offering massages and beauty therapy, a career that's used to get them out of the sex trade, looked tired and blank.

We went out to the Killing Fields by tuk-tuk this afternoon and life was hard where ever I looked. Don't ask me about the Killing Fields. There are plenty of complicated places around the world but this has to be up there near the top of the list. I can't explain how life here has evolved since the Khmer Rouge destroyed the very fabric of the Cambodian culture. Evolved probably isn't even the word. If Cambodia was a patient, a victim of some horrific act, they would be barely recovered, hardly even standing on their feet. Beneath the bustling streets and the commerce springing up around the tourist dollar and the floods of ex-pats in Phnom Penh, there is a vulnerability that is chilling. 

I'm getting my head around going home tomorrow. I'm more than ready for the ordinariness of family life, and I've got some things I just need to get on with. Like write that book. Mels has been my tour guide, co-adventurer, and confidante. She has put up with my absent-mindedness and my naive dreaming. I couldn't have done this, wouldn't have done this, if it wasn't for her. She has made a home for herself in the craziest of places, and she lives this complicated life day in and day out. We'll say good-bye to each other at the airport in the morning and she'll jump on a moto and drive back into the thick of it, while I fly right on out.

lines and light

 

I'm not sure what to tell you about Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was called by the Khmer Rouge. This is the school which the Khmer Rouge turned into a detention centre and used to torture and kill about 20,000 of the two million or more people that were killed all together.

I knew a smattering of Cambodian history before I came here but it did nothing to prepare me for this. I walked into the first room I came to and nearly walked straight out again. The room was filled with tiny cubicles, the partitions hastily built out of brick. On the floor of each cubicle was fixed a set of chains, and in some of them what looked like a petrol can and a long tin box. They were instruments of torture, left right where they were last used. I felt like I'd just walked into hell.

The rooms kept on going and going. I couldn't face them all. The last rooms we went into were the ones where hundreds of photographs of the deceased were on display . Every single person brought here was photographed. Their faces, blank with fear, shouted at me. They were all somebody's son, somebody's daughter. So many of them were children. One of the photographs showed a woman cradling her sleeping baby in her arms. She was sitting in an execution chair so horrific and depraved that I can't bring myself to describe it. The photo was taken a moment before she was killed. What happened to her baby?

These photos of mine don't tell you anything, except that taking photos was my therapy at Tuol Sleng. When I felt like the horror was going to eat me up I looked for the lines and the light. In the end I would have walked away before I'd even gone into the rooms with the photographs, if it wasn't for the holding cross I'd bought earlier that day. We'd been to the Peace cafe, a beautiful cafe and shop run to support Banteay Prieb (Centre of the Dove), a vocational training centre for Cambodians with physical disabilities run by the Jesuit Service. I unpacked that cross when I didn't think I could take any more, and walked through the last rooms holding it and turning it anxiously.

Tuol Sleng was left pretty much as it was when the Vietnamese Army finally overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. You can see it gets swept occasionally, but that's about it. There was a chair sitting facing a wall in one of the upstairs rooms, and one of the blackboards still had the faint chalk marks of a french lesson. The floors are filthy, covered with years of dust and grime and blood turned rusty brown.

notes from Phnom Penh

I didn't think I'd be able to do this! I was prepared to have very little in the way of comforts, but here I am on Mels' laptop with a "dongle" stick, online. I have airconditioning in my bedroom, and there's a washing machine in the kitchen. This place is luxury. And what an adventure I am having! You can trace my steps.

how it is in June

My bags are half packed for Cambodia, I'm leaving in the morning. I've been sitting here watching these photos download off my camera, thinking about those girls of mine and how far away I'm going to be from them. We prayed together tonight, all five of us cuddled up close, and I thought, these people are my outpost, my base camp. They will be keeping life going more or less as it would normally, while I'm gone. I love them.

I should be in bed, obviously, but I'm dragging out the last stages of packing, and waiting for itunes to do its thing with my phone before I do. This thing that itunes does with my phone is something I feel I have little power over. I plug in my phone, that circle goes round and round, and I MUST NOT unplug my phone, or else! At the moment I'm not even sure that it's doing it's thing yet, I think it's getting ready to do it's thing. And I really want to make sure it does. Because I really want this lovely music in my ears on the flight. So I'm not going to bed quite yet.

It's been a whirwind week, and having a bad cold didn't help. I rushed around all over the place this afternoon, getting my jabs done (better late than never) and picking up all the things I thought I would have had time to get earlier in the week. The house is no where near as organised as I wanted it to be. I had visions of it spick and span with freshly made bread waiting in the freezer. But who am I kidding? It's been a strange thing, getting myself ready to go, and trying to leave myself behind at the same time.

owning my dissent

Today I wrote about my experience of toxic church culture over at re-inventing eve.

counting

So my baby is three today. Three years ago today they whisked her out of me, and ended my baby making days in one foul swoop. I now have mixed feelings about Abigail's birth day. I look at the video of her caesarean and see the smile on my face as clear and bright as a blue sky, and yet I know that in the very instant I am smiling they are doing the tubal ligation I requested, and taking away every other baby I would ever long for.

And she wants a baby too, that three year old of mine. She says “my need a brother and a sister.”  She is right. She would run the show if we let her, and a younger sibling (or two, or more) is just what she needs to help her remember that there are other people in the world beside herself.

Isn’t that one of the most important things we can teach our children, after all? Far better for them to learn it now than suffer the heartache and  loneliness that can only come from a life lived in expectation that everybody else should be about the business of making them happy.

We are away for the weekend, and I can see the ocean from out of this wide window. The white breakers are crashing on a faraway shore, and scrubby green hills rise up above the seaside-town-turned-suburbia.

With all this space I can finally hear myself think, and I am weighing up my life. Measuring expenditure versus income, checking the balance to see that it does, in fact, break even. I’ve never been able to do this before. I’ve never, not in my whole life, known where I start and where I finish. I’ve lived at the whim of everybody else’s feelings and expectations. If you were happy, I was happy. But it never really worked for me, it only made me tired and anxious and depressed. I don’t need to live like that any longer, and I am thrilled.

The three girls have been playing and playing today. They took armfuls of toys up to the rooftop deck, ran around, and then dragged them all back down again. This is nice, this having a three year old. The older two have spent so long having to put up with her interrupting their games, or messing up their creations. There have been things they wanted to do that they couldn’t, because a toddler had to be included, or kept safe. Now comes our reward for  that. Three girls who play together, who genuinely enjoy each other’s company. We can all relax a little.

I’m going to Cambodia for a week this month. I’ve been so busy with the wedding I’ve hardly had the chance to think about it. But the tickets are sitting in an envelope on my desk, and my renewed passport should be arriving any day now. I’m going to visit my dear friend Mels who has been teaching in Phnom Penh since January. We were talking on the phone a couple of months ago and she told me about the holidays she had coming up. “I should just come over and visit you!” I said, half-joking. I got off the phone and told Paddy what I’d said, and he agreed. “Go!” he said, in so many words.

I’ve been a traveller for as long as I can remember. I made my first solo overseas trip when I was eighteen, the summer after I finished school. I went to South America, mostly Chile, and I came back convinced that the only thing that I wanted in life was plane tickets. Since Paddy and I got married twelve years ago I haven’t left the country. We’ve dreamt of travelling, but it all changes once there are two of you, plus children.

This trip is my reward, in a way. I’ve put family needs and responsibilities ahead of my own ambitions again and again. Women do this without even thinking. It’s in our DNA. But eventually the time comes, or should come given the right circumstances, when we can reap a little freedom from the hard work we’ve put in.

I’m turning thirty-eight next month. I’m thinking of the next two years as preparation for my fifth decade, rather than the tail end of my fourth. And my preparation will be doing more of all the things that are important to me. More writing, more reading, more travelling, more walking, more babies and more abandoned enjoyment of that family of mine. I owe it to all of us.