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.