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.

where I've been

This is where I went on Friday in the late afternoon, after I'd folded the washing and swept the kitchen floor. I said good bye to the girls and got in the car and drove the hour and a half trip here alone. I walked in the door with only my own bags. As soon as I got here I set my laptop up on that table you see and started writing. It was my first twenty-four hours completely alone for at least eight years.

It was a vague idea we've had for a while, that I could come out here to Mum's bach alone and work on the novel. It was one of those ideas that could have taken forever to make happen, or possibly never have happened at all. I booked the bach for all of us at first, I couldn't quite believe that I was going to get to come on my own. Now that I've done it once I'll do it again. And again.

I only wrote a thousand and something words but I finished the re-structuring I started a month ago and got my head around the part of this thing that I've been most scared of; the historical part. I'm not a natural academic. This is a big admission for me, and something I've literally only just come to terms with. It's to do with dyspraxia and the fact that my eldest daughter is not the only one in this family whose brain doesn't run in straight lines. I faced the fear that I wasn't capable of writing history. I'd had it in my head that I had to have all the facts straight before I could write, that I had to have an arsenal of verifiable and referenced details before I could do anything. But I'm  not writing a paper, I'm writing fiction. I can write whatever I like.

I drove back home with this deep sense of peace. I had spent a day and a night devoted to the the thing I want to do almost more than anything. I felt like a writer.

where I've been

I spent last week in Raglan, one of my two favourite places. It's the small seaside town my mother grew up in, where I went to for holidays and where I lived for a while as a child. It's where my mother's sister and brother still live, and it gave me the story I've been working on for a while. The one I'm ever hopeful might (magically?) turn into a book one day.

We looked after my Auntie's house while she was away. We ate fish and chips on the beach, we went for a drive with my Uncle, we walked everywhere. To the beach, to the shops, to the library, back home again.  We had friends come to visit, we drove out to the surf beach and the kids ran wild through the wind. 

I didn't really want to come home. I've been saying that by moving house it feels like we've moved into a job, and it's true. We really have moved into a job. One with incredible rewards, and one that brings us great joy, but a job nonetheless. So it was nice to run away for a bit, to have a few days where there wasn't much I had to do or worry about.

I know Raglan well. My girls know it too. I've been going down with them at least once a year since Isobella was born. They love it. They know the beach, the park, the string of shops, the library.

It's a gift, in this complicated and time-poor life we live, to know somewhere as well as we know Raglan. I sat in the little Union church my grandmother attended, and remembered all the times I'd sat in those pews as a child. Church has always been fairly quiet there, unlike the churches I grew up in, and it was quiet on Sunday morning. I felt peace well up within me, that feeling of being somewhere I belonged. The pastors' voice was gentle, the small congregation were silent, and every now and then I'd hear the sound of a car driving past on the main road behind me. The same sounds I'd sat listening to as a child. I remembered.

Want to smile?

Follow this link here and play the youtube clip to see something very lovely.

The "Let's Colour" project is a worldwide initiative to transform grey spaces with colour.  I could be cynical about the marketing aspect but I don't want to spoil it for you. ;)

My Favourite Place

We spent the first week of the year at my favourite place - Great Barrier Island.  A group of us went to Orama Christian Community in Karaka Bay, near Port Fitzroy.  Orama is used like a camp, in conjunction with OPC (Outdoor Pursuits Centre), but once it was a fully-fledged community with over a hundred people living there.  I've been there once before, two years ago.  Paddy had to work, so I went with Ella and Greer.  It was a mission, but so worth it.  I found a haven - an incredibly beautiful, wild, remote place, full of history, a place on the edge, a "thin place" in the celtic vernacular.  I fell in love with it, so to go there again all of us together was amazing.

The group we were with was there partly for a holiday and partly to learn.  We were a mixed group of ages and backgrounds, brought together by an interest in the story of New Zealand, using the Huia as a metaphor for our journey of discovery. (More about that to come.) We were there to share perspectives and ideas, and maybe even collectively hear what God might have to say about our country.  (Yeah, I know, Christians are weird like that!!)  We heard from Keith Newman, author of Ratana: The Prophet, Alastair Reese, who holds postgraduate degrees in History, Maori Culture, and Theology, and who has written this dissertation on the alienation of Maori land, Cindy Ruakere, and Brad Haami, author of True Red.

The book I'm working on is partly historical, so it was just the inspiration I needed.

The girls had such a good time.   There was plenty for them to do, and lots of kids around to play with.   At dusk and when it was quiet wild rabbits came out from the bushes by our rooms and they loved watching them.  (Good entertainment for the kids but not so good for the vegetation...) The building we stayed in was at the back of Orama, looking up to the bush and hills behind, and right beside a creek.  We slept listening to the trickling of water.  It was perfectly peaceful.

It is a wonderful thing to have found a place that connects with somewhere deep inside of me.  A place where I feel completely at rest, completely at home, and at the same time completely alive and envigorated.   Where I feel so grounded, so connected to the land and to the past, and yet as if I am standing on the threshold of my future.  Words don't do it justice.

I do have one other place that feels almost as good as that - Raglan.  My mum's family is from there, and it's the setting of my book.  So maybe I should be honest and say I have two favourite places.  I like the maori idea of having a turangawaewae, a standing place.  The best explanation I could find of it was here.  "Tūrangawaewae are places where we feel especially empowered and connected. They are our foundation, our place in the world, our home."  Maybe my turangawaewae, in a physical land sense, can be two places, maybe I have one foot on Great Barrier, at Orama, and the other on the shore of Raglan Harbour.

Do you have a favourite place?  Where is your turangawaewae?  Tell me...