Salary Hunger

I went to Atlanta's Edge, the multi-cultural cafe, last night to see a documentary titled Salary Hunger. After the screening, a group of the garment workers featured in the film were on hand to answer questions. You don't need to spend much time in Cambodia to be aware of the plight of the garment workers, but last night's event put faces and numbers to the story.  

The women of WIC (Workers' Information Center)

• The garment industry is the single largest industry in Cambodia.
• Over 700,000 Cambodians work in the garment industry.
• 90% of them are women.
• The garment workers' unions are headed predominantly by men who fail to address the real problems, making unilateral decisions that benefit the unions but not necessarily the workers.
• Example: One factory has one toilet for the 30 men on staff. It also has one toilet for the 900 women.
• The women work 8-10 hour days, 6 days a week.
• The minimum wage rose to $128/month in January 2015 following mass protests. Rights groups say that $160/month is the bare minimum to survive in Phnom Penh.
• Most of the workers are malnourished; they can afford neither proper nutrition nor health care.
• Many women share rented rooms with no real cooking facilities or clean toilet.
• Although the garment manufacturers can easily afford to pay a higher wage, the Cambodian government does not press them. If the garment workers get better pay, civil servants are likely to demand the same, and the government does not want to confront that situation.

WIC, or the Workers' Information Center, is a grass-roots group whose purpose is to inform the women in Cambodia's garment factories, to educate them and to fortify them to struggle for better working conditions and pay. They have drop-in centers around the capital city where women can get all manner of help and advice.  

I was pleased to see that Atlanta's Edge was jam-packed for this event. I worried that those who work for NGOs would be suffering from compassion burn-out.  Others might think they already know everything they need to know about the abuses in the garment industry, and others simply wouldn't care. This audience cared.  

So what to do?  If you have an opportunity, tell your clothing manufacturers and resellers that you want clothes made by workers who are paid a living wage. Me? Nearly all my clothes come from second-hand shops nowadays, or I hire a tailor in the Russian Market to whip up the odd dress or trousers -- I don't shop in Old Navy, H&M or Abercrombie & Fitch stores. What I will do, though, is make a point to support the garment workers whenever and wherever I happen to see them protesting. And when I think I'm living on a tight budget, I'll think of their $128 monthly salary and put things promptly into perspective.  

Rivers and prisons and such

I dread any trip to a US embassy. I have vivid and miserable memories of standing in a very long queue in the broiling sun outside the embassy in Kuala Lumpur, being jostled by the hordes Malaysians who were there to apply for visas. The security screening to enter an American embassy is daunting. Yes, I do understand why that's the case, but I also understand why some people have been threatening to arrive at US airports naked, just to simplify the process.  Things like shoes and Kindles and phones and nail-clippers peg you as a potential terrorist, and the guards invariably give you withering looks as if to say, why would you bring a Kindle into the embassy? Your reply -- that you'd like to spend the impending four hours in the waiting area in the company of Edith Wharton -- evaporates as you drop the Kindle into the bin of potential weapons of mass destruction that will remain in the security screening area. I needed to renew my passport this month. Uffffffff.

Whether by luck or design I don't know, but my two trips through the embassy in the Phenomenal Penguin were painless.  No queues outside, chatty security staff in the screening area, and a relatively short wait to submit my application for and then to collect my new passport.  (I watched the blizzard du jour slamming into New England on CNN on the TVs. Not quite as illuminating as Edith Wharton, but I did feel a wave of gratitude to be in Southeast Asia.)

On my first trip to the embassy, I met George in the waiting room. George is a Californian who moved to Phnom Penh a little over  a year ago to be near his son, who is teaching math here and is married to a young Khmer woman. Before Cambodia, George had been living in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.  My ears pricked up immediately -- Nicaragua has been on my radar for a while as a potential destination if and when I need to move on. Our chatter was interrupted when my number was up, but we reconnected by email; George invited me to come along on a river cruise he'd organised to celebrate his son's birthday.

Full moon rising over the Tonle Sap

Little boats like this one go out for a couple of hours at dusk.  There are no amenities provided -- no food or beverages or toilets or life vests -- just a peaceful 2-3 hour cruise up the river to the junction with the other two rivers, the Tonle Bassac and the Mekong, and then back to the rickety little pier.  Khmer groups rent the boats; it's not just a thing for the foreigners, and everyone totters down the ramps with coolers of drinks and baskets of food. Our motley crew consisted of Brian's fellow teachers and dodgeball players, Khmer and western alike, a Korean-American neurosurgeon who works in "the worst hospital in Phnom Penh" -- a mind-boggling statement if ever there was one -- and George and me.

I live some distance from the Phenomenal Penguin riverside, so I tend to forget that this is a city of three rivers. I am suddenly overcome by kayak lust. Especially as the hot season approaches, the idea of cycling to the waterfront and paddling away from the dusty streets becomes especially enticing.  

Another joyful discovery is Atlanta's Edge. (Note to self: Ask the owner about the name. What, if anything, is on the edge of Atlanta?)  This place is a small cafe/bar on a side street not far from my apartment, and the key word is multi-cultural.  They're offering trivia contests, talks, films and a book club.  I showed up a couple of Mondays ago for the South America trivia contest.  As soon as I sat down, a young woman plopped down at my table, thinking we'd met before. She is from Lithuania. I mentioned that I'd visited Vilnius and loved it, especially the Briusly Kavine (Bruce Lee Cafe). She wasn't able to stay for the trivia, but we exchanged email addresses. 

The owner tossed me into a trivia team with Jean-Baptiste, a young Parisian, and Chizoba, a British-Nigerian.  He knew that French Guiana is still a French colony. She knew that Venezuela cranks out Miss Universe winners, and I knew that Uruguay had legalised marijuana in 2012. There were many questions that we all guessed at, and we all decided that we'd underestimated Bolivia in many regards. In the end, we won!  Chizoba is going home to London tomorrow; perhaps I'll see Jean-Baptiste at a talk about the Cambodian garment industry tomorrow night. Justina Lizikeviciute (and yes! I have learned to pronounce that), the Lithuanian, is also promising to be there. It's a largely transient community here, but a culturally rich one.

Someone stood up in a church service some months ago and asked for volunteers who might be willing to visit foreign prisoners in Cambodian jails. The idea of being locked up in a squalid cell in this remote country, largely forgotten, made my gut clench. During the volunteer orientation for Prison Fellowship Cambodia (PFC), the volunteer coordinator, Rosalie (an English woman a few years older than I) spoke bluntly. The volunteers are assigned a prisoner, whom they are expected to visit at least once a month, bringing about $20 of groceries to supplement the paltry food the prison provides. There's a list of stringent rules for volunteers. Debriefing at the HQ is mandatory after each visit. There are things you cannot wear, cannot bring, cannot say, cannot write.  Of the ten or so volunteers at the orientation I attended, I think I'm the only one who proceeded with the application process.

Rosalie was going to take me to meet "my" prisoner in mid-January, but she called me a few days before to say that the Prison Department had suddenly blocked all visits, saying that PFC must complete some new ream of paperwork before visits might resume. Until that  paperwork is completed and approved, no one, neither staff nor volunteers, can enter the prisons. I have two bags of groceries that have now been sitting on my kitchen counter for over a month. There is a foreign prisoner who has had no supplemental foodstuffs nor visits from someone who speaks his mother tongue for over a month. I've not yet met this man, and my heart aches for him. Life for the majority of Cambodian citizens is incomprehensibly hard. Life in the prisons is worse. Some of the prisoners admit to having committed the crimes of which they were convicted; others were in the wrong place when the police were seeking a scapegoat. They end up in the same place, slowly losing their health, their eyesight and their teeth to malnutrition. Please, send up a hope or a prayer that the Prison Department will let the volunteers in again. I won't be able to write about "my" prisoner, because I must protect his confidentiality, but I very much want to bring him a few groceries to sustain him.

Update:  I asked John, who co-owns Atlanta's Edge with his girlfriend Imen, about the genesis of the name. He replied,  "... the name was chosen to describe how cultures have no boundaries and even a city, like Atlanta, will extend its culture all the way to Cambodia. In short, we all are connected and no group can isolate itself from others." As I've thought about that, I would say that no group should isolate itself from others, but many do. I know of wealthy Khmers who give little thought to their less fortunate countrymen, and I've met foreigners who rarely leave BKK1, the posh expat enclave.  In my two visits to Atlanta's Edge, it's lived up to John and Imen's hope, becoming a forum for cultures to meet, discuss, clash and meld. 

Siem Reap and Battambang

A few weeks ago, my friend Malcolm badgered me to accompany him on a week-long trip to Siem Reap and Battambang. Most people, of course, go to Siem Reap to visit the Angkor temples, and having spent about 15 days exploring them on three previous trips, I didn't feel much compulsion to do so again.  I really wanted to see Battambang, though, so off we went.  We'd read that the government is rebuilding National Road 5 between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and the bus ride is punishing, so we bought tickets for the boat that travels up the Tonle Sap River. Good move. It was more costly, but the same amount of time and far more comfortable.

Malcolm spent two days going around the Angkor temples on a rented bicycle, and I spent one. They are glorious, and you should most certainly see them before you die, but it is in fact possible to have seen enough of them. One evening in town, though, we cut through the grounds of Wat Preah Enkosei on our way to an out-of-the-way restaurant. In the moonlight, we spotted what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient temple, and we returned the next morning to explore in the daylight. Sure enough, behind the wat stands what remains of Prasat Preah Enkosei -- two of three original towers dating back to the 10th century.

Although nowhere near as enormous or elaborate as Angkor Wat or Bayon, this little ruin is especially endearing for its quiet location on the wat's grounds and for the exceptionally well-preserved lintel relief illustrating the Churning of the Sea of Milk.  This mythical event also appears in a massive wall relief in Angkor Wat, but you'll be nearly trampled by fellow visitors while you look at it.

Nearby, in front of a heap of Angkor-era rubble with a banyan tree growing out of it, a novice monk sat on a memorial stupa, contemplating his mobile phone. 

Siem Reap is packed with guest houses, hotels, cafes, restaurants, and all manner of other businesses that cater to the massive numbers of tourists -- more than a million a year. It's still possible, though, to find some great spots if you make a bit of effort.  I especially enjoyed this guest house sign.   

After a few days, we travelled west by bus to Battambang, a provincial capital that's famous for its French colonial architecture and relaxed atmosphere. I knew that Battambang is Cambodia's second largest city, but I hadn't realised that its population is only 200,000 (compared to the 1.3 million in Phnom Penh).  For some inexplicable reason, I'd got into the habit, whenever I'm nearly flattened by a moto going the wrong way at night without a headlight -- an occurrence more frequent than you might think -- of muttering, "That's it! I'm moving to Battambang."  Well, now I've seen Battambang, and I may need to rethink that, either investing in some night-vision goggles or coming up with a new oath to mutter. Lovely little city, really, but... a tad small.

Shop-houses facing the river

National Bank of Cambodia

In the evenings, everyone comes out to 'daauh-leeng', or walk about on the riverside, where a park offers exercise equipment and a reflexology walk, with pebbles jutting out of cement to apply pressure to all those important spots on the soles of one's feet. I tried one of these in KL and found it excruciating, but it seems to be popular with the ladies of Battambang.

  

One day Malcolm and I rented mountain bikes and set out on a 20-some mile cruise around the Battambang countryside over some paved roads and some rutted dirt tracks. We visited a couple more temples along the way (note the one perched atop the ledge in the photo below), but mostly, it was just a delight to be out in the countryside on the bikes.  

Since the notion of kayaking didn't appeal to Malcolm, I went by tuktuk to Green Orange Kayaks (named after the famous Battambang green-skinned oranges) and rented a one-person boat. What a great little NGO! They run a school, and they use the kayak rentals to fund it, at least partially. The boat and gear were in great condition, and the directions were simple:  paddle 12km up the river to the ferry landing opposite the old market in the center of town.

It struck me how much produce the Cambodians grow along riverbanks. I would guess most of the vegetables on sale in the market came from fields that I paddled past. Other than birds, and calls from people on the banks, the only sound I heard was the occasional generator-run irrigation pump.

 A riverside corn field

I noticed several instances of posts driven into the river bed, enclosing floating, tangled clumps of branches and brambles.  I happened to see a couple of men in a boat near one of these, and I asked what it was. They looked at me blankly. "Somrap dtrey?" I asked.  "Baat, baat -- somrap dtrey!"  (Yes, yes, for fish!)  And that, my dears, is where my piscine Khmer vocabulary ran out. I have no idea what relationship these structures have to fish -- do they trap the fish? Do the fish live and feed amongst them?  How do the people catch the fish?  

For fish. That's all I know.

Then there are the scenes that don't usually show up in travellers' accounts.  The patch of utterly deforested and eroding riverbank with scrawny goats in bamboo-fenced corrals, rickety wooden houses teetering at the edge of the bank...  This is a Cham village, the Cham being Cambodian Muslims. I know painfully little about the Cham people, except that they were fiercely persecuted by the Khmer Rouge, and that they are now granted freedom of religion by the constitution. I have no idea if the Cham are generally more impoverished than any other Cambodians, but it caught my attention that this village was in stark contrast to the lush and relatively prosperous looking farms I'd passed earlier. Still many things to learn about the Kingdom.

As I paddled into Battambang city, I noticed that the whole riverfront is lined with, if not the flags of every nation, the flags of most, just like those that adorn Phnom Penh's riverfront. Especially when arriving by boat, these flags seem very welcoming, no matter what country you might have come from.  

See the Jalur Gemilang, Malaysian friends?

Not long after I paddled up to the ferry landing, the two fellows from Green Orange Kayaks scrambled down the bank to relieve me of my craft. I asked them if they were going to paddle it back (about a 2.5-hour jaunt), and they laughed. 

Is there nothing one can't do with a moto in this country?

We had some darned good meals on this trip. I sure wouldn't starve if I moved to Battambang.

And seeing a sunrise like this one every now and then can only do a soul good.

Excuses, excuses...

I've not written a blog post for several weeks simply because I've been working about 12 hours a day. The beauty of the freelance site on which I list my editing and proofreading services is that I never know who is going to send what kind of work my way. That can be either serendipitous or overwhelming. I encourage clients with large projects to contact me in advance to discuss my schedule, but not everyone heeds that request, and the past two weeks, I've just been deluged. Great for the bank account, not so good for the blog.

They call them 'deadlines' for a good reason.

One of my big projects came from a human resources software company in India. They are maintaining a blog featuring posts related to various HR topics. The catch is, the posts have been written by many different people with writing skills all over the place. My job was to clean them up and, to the extent possible, standardise them. As I was frantically working away on the vast amount of verbiage, racing the somewhat tight deadline, it occurred to me that the tables have turned in my universe.  Back in the days when I was climbing the IT professional ladder in the US, the talk was of outsourcing work to India. And now, here I sit in Phnom Penh, receiving outsourced work from India.

One of my favourite things about my work is that I learn new things just about every day. Not all of them, however, please me.  The corporate world -- and HR in particular, I think -- has always had an unfortunate tendency to coin new and ever more deplorable jargon. The latest travesty: On-boarding. It's what you do with your newly-hired staff -- you on-board them. Back in my day, we called it orientation, and if we needed to use the verb form, those of us with any respect for the English language would say "orient". HR people said "orientate", but as they handled payroll, who was going to argue with them? Hearing the term "on-boarding", though, has the same effect on me as water-boarding. It makes me want to exit (the new catch-all for quitting, retiring, or being fired) and give 'em an earful during my out-boarding (formerly known as an exit interview).  

 Should I start outsourcing the Phenomenal Penguin posts to freelancers? I could send my photos and notes on my recent trip to Battambang to someone in Hyderabad and see what turns up. Actually, I think I won't.  My ghost-writer probably wouldn't appreciate my observations about the very portly, older Indian lady who struggled mightily to board the boat up the Tonle Sap river in her voluminous sari. Sometimes, Madam, Eddie Bauer is the better part of valour.