It's June (long post)

First off, some of you have left me comments and I don't have your e-mail addresses. I'd like to stay in contact with you. So, if you've left me a comment and we don't normally correspond, please e-mail me at mpaulv@umich.edu or leave another comment with your e-mail so we can keep in touch.

Second, I'll try to work on getting some pictures posted soon. It's tough because it's difficult / expensive to get my laptop hooked up to internet.

Third, my mom said I don't talk enough about the work I'm doing here, so part of this will be about that. It'll probably bore most of you so feel free to skip it, but I'm sure at least someone is interested.

Friday I went to a prison to deliver food with a mixed group of do-gooders: people from a variety of charities and human rights groups, church folks, and evil Western people from the US Embassy (believe me, all the Western-born NGO folks here have done their best to convince me that America is indeed evil, whereas all the Cambodian-born NGO folks tend to think of it as a nice, albeit rich, place). The prison was for women and juveniles only. In Cambodia, women can have their children in the prison with them until the age of five, and then the children have to leave (hopefully they have somewhere to go?). Most in the prisons are malnourished... the government pays 1500riel (about $.20US) a day to feed them; I spend 6000riel ($1.50US) on my (remarkably cheap) breakfast everyday, and probably close to 30,000riel ($7.50US) a day for food. So, it was pretty humbling to hand out food to the prisoners (some of which tore right into it), but I almost feel bad getting anything personally edifying out of it considering just how rough the prison situation was. Not to sound too trite, but the world needs love a lot more than I think we realize on a daily basis.

I got dehydrated after that and skipped the afternoon at work. At night we went to this yuppie ex-pat bar that was very fashionable and trendy, and I sort of felt weird being there, and I was generally run down from my trip earlier, so I called it a night after one Beerlao (probably the best beer I've had so far in PP) and went home to relax.

Saturday and Sunday were just general wandering around town days. We saw the National Museum, which was essentially a ton of Buddha statutes and old crumbly bits from Angkor Wat.

As for work, it's very discouraging. The Khmer Rouge tribunal is crap. Imagine a country with improving but weak infrastructure, with lots of poverty and malnourishment, etc. etc. Then imagine spending $60M in that country (most of which will come out of Cambodian funds) for a trial of maybe 4 old, greying dudes, some of which are senile. Then, consider these facts: a.) it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to effectively bring justice to Cambodia, so while $60M is large enough to make a difference elsewhere in Cambodia, it is simply too little of an amount to be effective in the trials; b.) the trials are being manipulated behind the scenes by government officials who don't want them to happen. It's a joke. Why not feed some of the starving kids I see on the street everyday instead?

Everybody here has some part of their family tree distorted by the Khmer Rouge, and 95% of the population wants the trials. But with the corrupt state of the judicial system here, and the fact that most of the accused will be dead in five years anyway, why not just use the money on something else?

It's frustrating. I believe in the cause of justice - especially for crimes like genocide - in the abstract. But this isn't justice.

So there you go, my first really serious post about Cambodia.

- m