Staying safe, staying sane

Crime is a frequent topic of conversation amongst expats in the Phenomenal Penguin. I get unsolicited advice from nearly everyone I speak to:  Keep your bag behind your feet when you're in a tuktuk. When walking, carry your bag in front of you, where you can keep an eye and a hand on it. Whatever you do, don't wear any kind of a bag when riding a bike. Don't carry anything of value. Don't use your mobile phone in public. Don't walk alone at night. Don't walk here at night, or over there at night, either. In fact, don't walk anywhere at all at night.

These bits of advice are always well-intentioned, and they aren't baseless. There is a significant amount of snatch theft, often armed. It gets much worse in the times leading up to the big holidays, when many Cambodians find themselves without adequate funds to go home to the provinces to celebrate with their families.

Last Thursday night, I had an invitation to join a group of people, and I found myself fussing about it most of the day. Should I go? If so, how -- on foot, by bicycle, or by tuktuk?  Maybe you should just stay home with a book, nudged my inner reclusive misanthrope. Prepared to be mired in claustrophobic traffic jams on the way there and mugged on the way home, I headed out on the bamboo bike.

My destination was a 15-minute ride from the house. Although I could hear heavy traffic on Monivong Boulevard behind me, my area was relatively free of traffic. I needed to look out for kids playing in the streets, or neighbours meeting outside their gates to chat. I don't think I saw another white face along the way. Our gathering ended about 9.00pm, and it was well and truly dark by then. There are no street lights along my route, so I worried about slamming into a pot hole that I couldn't see. There was enough light from doorways, though, that I could see plenty of people out on the streets -- talking, buying snacks from pushcarts, on their way to or from their favourite seafood-beer gardens. I was deeply happy pedalling along through the night streets of Tuol Tompoung; in no rush to get home, I took a meandering route. As I finally parked the bike next to the house and switched off the outside light that Yee, my landlady, had thoughtfully left on when she saw that my bicycle wasn't there, I regretted the evenings I'd decided to stay in.

I went through this same process when I lived in KL. As the city's crime rate soared,  the stories were inescapable. If my friends and acquaintances weren't the victims, they knew the victims, and we were all deluged with reports in the press. Bags snatched from shoulders, from car seats, from toilet stall doors, from moto passengers, from blind masseurs, from posh shopping malls at mid-day. Houses and cars burglarised, gold chains torn from necks, mobile phones ripped from hands that held them to ears.

The trick for me is to find that elusive balance between security and liberty. I don't want to be a blithering idiot, but I don't want to barricade myself inside my house, either. I now carry a bag that I can pull around in front of me when I'm walking; when I'm cycling, I stow it in one of the panniers, so no one can grab it and pull me off the bike. It's a locally made fabric bag, not even a faux Louis Vuitton. My mobile phone and netbook (both of which are at the low-cost end of the electronics spectrum) stay in my bag when I'm out on the streets. I see a lot of young expats tinkering with their iPhones and iPads while they're riding along in tuktuks, and I think, "Wow, that little device represents more than a year's salary for a lot of Cambodians..." I bet a lot of Cambodians think the same thing as their hands reach out for the grab when the light turns green.

Both in KL and in Phnom Penh, the crime conversations come around to the neighbourhood. Brickfields has had a shady reputation for decades; it's always been one of KL's red-light districts, and there have been reports of Indian gang activity. Many people suggested I was mad to live in such a dodgy part of the city, but you know what? I knew my neighbours, at least by sight, and I felt relatively safe there. I walked through Brickfields as I walk through Phnom Penh:  very alert, with an attitude that I know where I'm going and I intend to get there. I always greet the local folks I pass along the way, especially if I've seen them in that spot more than once.

Boeung Trabek is mostly residential, with small retail shops here and there, and it's mostly Cambodians living here. Some people say they worry about this area, because it's too quiet. That's a valid point. When I come home from The Flicks at night, there might be no one else on the street when I stop to unlock our front gate. If a dastardly moto driver whipped around the corner, I'd be easy prey. On the other hand, I look at BKK1, a more affluent neighbourhood peopled mostly by expats and wealthy Khmers -- it is better lit and has shops, restaurants and cafes open til all hours. If I were a thief, though, I wouldn't be hanging around Boeung Trabek; the pickings are probably much better in BKK1, and better still down by the riverside, which is packed with tourists, most of whom are drunk.

So I will ride my bike down to Tuol Tompoung on Thursday nights, and I'll ride it to The Flicks and back when I want to see an evening film. I probably won't ride it to the other side of the city after dark; I'll take a tuktuk for that, or I'll walk with my friends, Malcolm and Lin, but not alone. I think those are considered and calculated risks that I can live with.  If I shut myself up in the house after dark, I'll have bats in my belfry as well as on my balcony.

I may meet with some trouble one day or one night. That's life. If I do, I won't hesitate to ask for help from anyone around. Call me a Pollyanna, but I believe that most people are good. I got myself into a potentially disastrous mess late one night in Brickfields, and it was an act of sheer stupidity on my part. There had been a pack of feral dogs on our street, and every night they would interrupt the sleep of everyone in my block of shoplots. They'd fight with each other over food scraps or over a bitch in heat. They'd bark if anyone approached the rubbish barrels they considered their food bowls. They would chase and sometimes kill the rough cats. Other times they seemed to bark for the sheer hell of it. One night, totally sleep-deprived after about about four hours of non-stop canine mayhem, I snapped. It was about 3.00am, and I stormed down the stairs with my umbrella.  I started chasing the pack of 15 or so dogs, waving the umbrella and menacing them with it. They scattered. Some of them turned and ran directly away from me; others slinked away to the sides. After a moment, I heard a man running up behind me, shouting fiercely. Oh, that's it, I thought. Now I'll be murdered. The man, wearing only a pair of shorts and bellowing in Bahasa Indonesia, was flailing a big stick. He was not in fact trying to kill me -- he was going after the 7-8 dogs who had circled around behind me and were closing in fast. Also sleepless, my Indonesian neighbour had come out onto his balcony for a cigarette. He saw me go after the pack, and he watched them split up. He knew enough about pack behaviour to know that I was in a very bad situation. (I knew that packs will divide and conquer in this fashion, too, but in my crazed, sleep-deprived rage, I just wasn't thinking.) This fellow, one of those "foreign workers" who gets blamed for a lot of the crime in KL, possibly saved my life -- he certainly prevented a wicked mauling. Bless him.

I hope I've found a sane balance for my life here. I hope I'm being neither foolhardy nor overly cautious. I hope that when I do something witless, the damage will be minimal, and I hope I will keep my belief that most people are good. That would be my greatest loss.