There were three of them, three girls, about five years old or possibly eight. Who knows in Cambodia? Impoverished urchins are often under-nourished and therefore under-grown. They emerged in a huddle of giggles from the shadows behind the tatty grey and brown awnings of the local market stalls that lined both sides of a narrow, busily cluttered two-lane main road; pedestrians on the shuffle bunched along the gutters, older women balancing baskets of fruit and veggies on their heads, unhelmeted cyclists weaving drunkenly in amongst them. Above, spools of thick, black cables and dim streetlights and awnings protruding into the dusk.
Sidling shyly up to me, who happened to be scrutinizing a bunch of twenty-five finger bananas for seventy-five cents the lot, the boldest said, ‘You want snack?’
I paused, not spotting any sign of something edible about her skinny body, wary also of accepting food from strangers with unwashed hands. ‘No thank you.’ But was immediately hustled good-naturedly.
‘Snack very good,’ said the second girl, dark chestnut eyes gleaming, sheeny black hair.
All three were wearing tawdry, short-sleeved shirts with striking large black pom-poms on the front, shorts and flip-flops on their tiny feet.
‘Come, we show you.’ The first girl made a snatch at my hand, but as she did so, the black blob on her front appeared to twitch.
‘What the hell?’ I jerked back, momentarily forgetting myself, almost falling against a wooden stool supporting a messy slab of eels still wriggling side to side in the blood of a cut-off fish head. The pong of crusty sea-wrack hung round in the humid atmosphere.
‘This, spy der.’
‘O my god!’
‘No, no, you take on hand like so.’ She was delicately picking off the hairy, black body between finger and thumb and placed it on the other palm.
‘Doesn’t it bite?’ I asked, making a show of biting my own wrist with snapping teeth whilst keeping a wary eye out for a flicker of its eight legs. In the western world the tarantula is more dreaded for its reputation than its bite, but I was taking no chances with the tarantella.
‘Sir, it no bite. Here, you try!’
‘You like! You like!’ shrieked the other two, bouncing up on their toes, arms flapping against hips.
‘I no like,’ I insisted, with a twitch of my own and brushing them aside strode on past a cage crammed full of tweeting little grey-breasted, brown-feathered birds resembling baby sparrows.
What an appetizer these poor creatures would make!
As unnerving as the shock of staring face to face with live tarantulas, this wasn’t the most memorable encounter with those poor kids of Cambodia.
I can’t imagine for a moment that Tyson Hoddle ever flew too close to the sun. Or that he was accident-prone. But three road accidents in the space of four weeks seems extraordinary bad luck, even if two were minor bingles. ‘Maybe we were scorching along,’ he confessed later. Had the volunteer agency not muddled his dates at registration, that almost fatal accident might never have occurred.
It was mere chance that threw Tyson and me together that November. We had both signed up with Volunteer English Teachers for four weeks and found ourselves sharing the same volunteer house and two classes at the same school on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Quite quickly we formed a congenial and complementary unit, notwithstanding our half-century difference in age. Tyson was far more gregarious than me, but nonetheless carried an air of restraint. His boyishness stemmed from his oval-shaped face, accentuated by short auburn hair and slightly plump cheeks. Strong and stocky of build, he appeared on the threshold of life’s journey, patiently biding his time to join the police force at twenty, the minimum age for application in Australia. Certainly a practical guy, for although we were advised to wear smart clothing that befitted our job, namely long trousers, long-sleeved cotton shirts and shoes and socks, he invariably turned up in khaki shorts, short sleeves and thongs. But then most of those ‘cool’ young men did. When I observed how easily he slipped in and out of his thongs at the entrance to our volunteer house, the staff room and classroom, I envied his fluent transition from bare feet and time saved, while I struggled to kneel down outside a building tying and untying laces. But I didn’t intend to get my feet burned by an intense sun or walk barefoot across a grubby classroom floor like the children did, even when scampering to their crowded and probably unscrubbed toilet. God knows how hygienic that stinking hole was!
It was the first time Tyson had travelled overseas. Hailing from rural Tasmania, just nineteen and out of school for one year, he had earned enough money to buy his third motorbike second- or third-hand and put by enough funds to spread his wings doing odd jobs around local farms; a bit of fencing, driving a tractor, fruit-picking. Within a few months, he could send off his application form.
After queuing for his one-month visa at Phnom Penh airport, he was picked up by a staff member who owned a couple of volunteer houses. Once off the Airport Road, it was a short, bumpy drive through narrow, potholed back streets to his accommodation in what was obviously a run-down part of town: rubbish strewn in the gutters, houses conjoined without gardens or space between outside walls, very uneven surfaces under foot and utterly treeless.
Opposite the volunteer house was a large overgrown block of wasteland, patches of long, straw-coloured grass growing up through the remnants of rectilinear foundations, a pile of dark orange sand, some planks, bits of rag, the inevitable plastic bags of rubbish. Each morning the next-door neighbour would take a cage containing a brown-feathered cock and deposit it on straggly tufts of grass where three or four hens were already poking about the scrubby weeds and rubble. Occasionally, he’d ride off on his motorbike that was parked diagonally on the shallow pavement, his young son on the pillion carrying one of these birds in his arms for the knife or a private sale.
The houseboy, short and slim like many Cambodian teenagers, a uni student studying English, hefted Tyson’s case upstairs to the second floor, while he lugged his bulging rucksack. ‘You share,’ Raksmei said in his quiet, jerky, mumbly voice. ‘With Canada student.’ Tyson cast a glance around the cramped room dominated by two double beds with a single sheet set a mere half-metre apart. He had been forewarned that living conditions would be simple: no place to put his luggage except under the bed, no chairs, no light bright enough to read by, no cupboard for storage space except for a rail to hang his clothes. He would have to buy some coat hangers.
Wearing a pair of gigantic headphones, the big-boned Canadian boy with black hair, black eyes and short, stumpy legs walked in. ‘Hi, how yer doin’?’ he greeted, shaking hands. ‘My name’s Brad. I’m from Kingston, Ontario.’
Pleased by the warm welcome, Tyson noted they were roughly the same age. He could pick the hard, clear sounds of the accent.
‘Tyson Hoddle, just flown in from Tassie, Australia.’
‘Great to meet you. Guess we’ll be sharing for the next month, eh? As you can see, there’s not much room to swing a cat, so I’ve put my case under the bed. You’re teaching, I suppose.’
‘Yeah, I’ve arrived early, so I start the Initiation on Monday and go through for four weeks.’
‘Hope you enjoy. By the way, I don’t know whether they told you, but that waste paper basket next to the toilet is where put your used toilet paper.’
‘Say that again,’ Tyson said, walking six paces to a corner recess that served as shower and toilet.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Brad, noticing the consternation on Tyson’s stubbly face. ‘You’re not supposed to flush toilet paper down the loo because it blocks the pipes. Just stick it in the plastic bag inside that basket on the floor.’
‘Gotcha. Is there any hot water?’
‘You must be joking.’
Left to enjoy free time for four days, Tyson was determined to get familiar with the city. Undaunted by its sprawling size and armed with a map of the city centre, he accepted the first approach of a tuk-tuk driver hovering at the nearest crossroad. ‘How much to Riverside?’
‘Fifteen dollars. Very good price.’
Tyson didn’t argue. It was only later on his return that Brad informed him that the standard fare from volunteer house to Riverside was four dollars only, irrespective of the number of passengers. ‘In any case you have to negotiate the price before you get in,’ advised Brad. ‘Don’t necessarily accept the first offer, otherwise they’ll think you’re a ditzy tourist.’
It took thirty-five minutes for the tuk-tuk to reach the promenade and find a parking spot in the short parade of western shops in the tourist area. Already the humidity was oppressive, the dust palpably affecting his eyes and throat, so he sought something really cold to slake his thirst. Drawn by the advertising of exotic ice creams in the window of The Blue Pumpkin, he lingered over its cool all-white interior walls and air-conditioning, then was enticed upstairs by the open-air balcony looking out over the confluence of two major rivers, the Mekong and the Tonle Sap, but settled on an inside seat or rather raised half-bed acting as couch, where he could still see beyond the far bank of the Mekong. And ordered a fresh fruit salad of jackfruit, banana, apple and pineapple with home-made yoghurt.
So laid-back was he against the pillow that when paying the tuk-tuk driver for the return trip an hour later, he accidentally handed over a one hundred American dollar bill, so similar were the greenbacks, together with the ten and four ones. He winced at his careless mistake and the incredulous smile of the fast-vanishing driver.
‘You sure got taken for a ride,’ Brad jested later, picking at his zits while lying on his bed watching a Harry Potter movie on his i-Pad for the umpteenth time.
‘What work do you actually do?’ asked Tyson, irritated by such lassitude.
‘See, it’s like this. My supervisor said I wasn’t needed today. The proposal I was working on to raise some dough for HIV awareness is still being appraised. Say, how would you like to go visit the Russian Market? I wanna go check out the DVDs. It’s a real interesting place. You can get everything there. Have you ever tasted fried tarantula?’
The first two days of week 1 were given over to the Initiation. A desultory, bantering morning began with personal introductions to the other thirty-one new chums and getting-to-know-you games. Then more seriously, the stress for Cambodians to learn English if they wanted a decent job and for us volunteers to take precautions about our health. After foolishly listening to anecdotes about the danger of contracting dengue fever, mainly by friends back in Melbourne envious of my journey, I had bought a full-length mosquito net to sleep under. But now I learnt that this was the start of the dry season, so dengue fever wasn't an issue unless you travel in wilderness and wetland areas so I should continue to take malaria tablets. The sessions on cultural differences and definite no-no’s proved very useful.
‘Phnom Penh is not a violent city, but do be on guard against bag-snatchers on motorbikes,’ the staffer warned. When travelling in a tuk-tuk, keep your bag on the floor between your legs and keep one hand on the strap. Lydia, do you want to say something?’
‘Yeah, she’s right,’ said a mere slip of a girl, who looked as pale as an anorexic, save for two broad mauve stripes about her right shoulder. ‘On my first day this rider snuck up behind me, stuck out a hand and scooped up my bag, almost pulling me out of the tuk-tuk. Fortunately I let go, otherwise I would have got splattered over the road.’ Her limpid blue eyes grew bolder with threat. ‘It was very, very scary.’
The staffer continued: ‘And remember, when you greet someone, it is courteous to steeple your hands together and bow. It depends on status and age. The higher the hands and lower the bow, the more respect is given.’
The afternoon excursion was more solid. As we alighted at the car park of the Tuol Sleng Museum waiting for our guide, my first impression of the grey-faced buildings erected on three sides of an oval was that of any ordinary secondary school in England of the 1950’s – except for the cultured green lawn instead of playing field, the sombre quiet and the complete lack of children.
In hushed tones and arm gestures, the guide gathered us round. ‘This site, now known as S-31, is shorthand for Security Prison 21. In 1975 the classrooms were converted into rooms for detention, interrogation, torture and killing after forced confession. Some were divided into smaller cells and cages or retained as mass cells. Between one thousand and fifteen hundred people were detained each week. As you proceed through the prison, please observe silence out of respect for those who suffered terribly in this place. Tuol Sleng Museum serves to remind us all of an evil dictatorship in the hope that our country is never subjected to such a brutal regime again.
It was impossible to imagine that day in April, 1975 when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to a tumultuous greeting by its citizens, then abruptly turned face and aimed their rifles at people at once terrified and bewildered by betrayal. Within three days the soldiers had emptied the capital, dispersing its citizens into various rural regions to work alongside their own supporters, basically farming stock. Families were separated: husbands from parents, wives and children; brothers from sisters. Mothers were permitted to remain with their babies, though they would never receive sufficient rations to properly breast-feed. Captives forced to work a twelve-hour day without break inevitably sought tarantulas and crickets as source of nourishment.
Persons adjudged to be a threat to the regime, such as teachers, the educated, the rich, and those who wore glasses, were imprisoned in the soon-to-be notorious S-21. Had I been Kampuchean, I reflected, I would have been starved, tortured and murdered on three counts.
Herded through these bleak rooms was a sickening experience. Many displayed row upon row of black and white photographs of men and women, grim before torture, horribly disfigured after. Some original instruments of torture remained in the same position as in 1979, rusty iron bedsteads, lengths of chain, leg-irons, all testified to the grisly horror. Prisoners slept on the hard floor without blankets and mosquito nets. Each day they were fed on four spoonfuls of rice porridge and watery soup made from leaves.
Living conditions were harsh, meanly regulated and brutally enforced. At 4.30 a.m. inmates were ordered to strip for inspection. They were flogged if disobedient and regularly beaten. They were subjected to electric shocks, water boarding in foul water, sleep deprivation, suffocation by means of paper bags and prodding with hot metal instruments. They were forbidden to talk.
At the end of the tour we were led to a tent. ‘I want you to meet,’ said the guide,’ the last survivor of S-51. You might want to buy his book.’ Which she took from the stand and held up.
The old gentleman was seated at a table, formally dressed in autumnal green jacket and brown trousers, dignified yet a little bewildered, blankly staring, waiting passively to sign copies.
The young volunteers showed scant interest in the victim himself, though they had happily snapped away at the countless photographic displays of the gaunt victims of Pol Pot’s brutal regime mounted in the torture chambers.
The journey to our designated school by tuk-tuk would take thirty-five to forty minutes. We headed out to the Airport Road through narrow broken-brick roads full of potholes that slowed and skewed the flow of traffic. Ah, those mornings in the tuk-tuk, five of us volunteers, one lying uncomfortably across the pillion and space between the carriage, usually Tyson, eyes smarting with dust and toxins, wondering if we should wear face masks like the police and many bikers. In peak-hour - when wasn’t it? - the traffic threaded chaotically, criss-crossing at intersections in a discharge of pungent fumes, mounting pavements, crossing red lights in spite of the police presence. The insistent tooting, I came to realize, acted as a warning (‘I’m right behind you’; ‘I’m going to overtake’) rather than a criticism (‘Get outta the bloody way, you mongrel!’). So rough and mucky some secondary roads, I bounced clean off my seat and banged my elbow on the arm-rest. Yet there must be some semblance of understanding, I supposed: push bikes give way to potholes and tuk-tuks; tuk-tuks give way to potholes and motorbikes; moto-taxis give way to trucks, which give way to coaches, which don’t always give way to police cars, ambulances and fire engines. Even chaos theories have some certainties, but why is that motorbike angling towards us on the wrong side of the road?
North of the airport, congestion eases: a couple of semi-naked fishermen wading to their nets in channels that frame the lush green rice paddies, hoping to catch a sprat or two in the murky water to feed their starving families. A couple of black water buffalo, up to their hocks in water, grazing the edge of the paddies. A scatter of humped white cows tethered by the roadside. Yet even in semi-rural areas rubbish is strewn everywhere: plastic bottles, plastic bags, piles of cinders of half-burnt rags. Nearing the school, I glimpse the two-storey building looming beyond a row of abandoned grey warehouses with heavy padlocks on their doors and windows boarded up.
When we first arrived at our school, upsetting fifteen fluffy fawn chicks scurrying in swerving parabolas behind a squawking mother hen, it was only the bleary-eyed, bashful and possibly confused kinder orphans standing about aimless, not yet summoned to class, who watchfully greeted us as we stepped down from the tuk-tuk.
‘Allo,’ one of them plucked up the courage to murmur, before placing an anxious finger over his lips while continuing to stare.
‘Hello,’ replied Tyson, as natural and warm as you like, which brought forth a gale of more confident ‘Allos’ and the soft pad of more tiny feet from the dormitory.
And when the first child reached out his spindly arms, Tyson not only swept him up, but lifted him way, way up, swung him round and round by his upper arms, then clasped him close to his own face, ‘My name’s Tyson. What’s your name?’
The little boy, perhaps four, his forehead puckered, suddenly beamed. ‘Allo.’
By this time a determined, chunky young miss in pink tracksuit had forced her way to me and bleated to be lifted. I was still clinging onto my shoulder bag and wearing a big, floppy Watership sunhat, so with a deep breath felt cumbersome lifting the girl under her arms. Proving heavier than I expected, she didn’t say anything, merely muttered strange sounds. Her face was clearly Mongoloid about the eyes, but she cracked a broad smile that revealed two rows of silver fillings. Later I asked Tyson if he noticed anything odd about this girl’s demanding manner, her physical features, whether she was retarded.
‘She’s got Downs syndrome,’ he replied straight out. ‘My brother has it. He’s twenty-one but has a mental age of six.’
Because of my age I had assumed that the children would be far less open-hearted to me than to the much younger brigade of volunteers. I recalled how, at the start of a fresh school year at a former institution in Melbourne, I had gone across to middle school before the bell, so that when the first year 8 girl rocked up at the door, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, expecting a young chic female of twenty-five with a cheesy smile, how her face fell when she assumed her new English teacher was an old male fogy of unsmiling countenance, promptly turned tail and raced back to warn her friends. I must have been about forty-five, not given to ‘fun’ lessons and reduced to crestfallen sullenness.
So when little May Ee immaculately dressed in white blouse and black tunic with a red ribbon tied round her ponytail piped up unabashed, ‘How old are you?’ I braced, took a deep breath and blurted, ‘Seventy.’
She looked perturbed.
‘I’m seven tee.’ I started counting five fingers at a time on alternate hands: ‘Five . . . ten . . . fifteen . . .’ The counting seemed to drag on till the target was reached, May Ee looking steadily more incredulous, wondrous. ‘I’m seventy.’
All of a sudden, as if she’d finally understood, she clung tight to my waist, then reaching up insisted on kissing me on both cheeks, an innocent brushing of the cheeks with dry lips, most appreciative that such an ancient man was gracing them with his presence, if not wisdom. As Teacher Godfrey later explained: ‘There still remains great respect shown to the elderly in Cambodian society. Besides, the longevity of Cambodian men is only about sixty. You and I are an oddity for them.’ After that, I had no inhibitions about declaring my age; in fact, there was a trace of smugness about my revelation.
That first day, Wednesday, was theoretically an observation day. Our two classes comprised mainly nine-to-ten year olds, but one girl was thirteen. The most intriguing activity was the children standing up and chanting by rote in unison the numbers one to a hundred in English and letters A to Z of the alphabet as loudly as possible. From time to time Tyson and I got up from our bench at the back to look over their exercise books of impressively neat handwriting, as they painstakingly copied from the board, and gain some idea of the standard and type of exercises in their curriculum.
After lunch our Cambodian English teacher, Narith, failed to turn up. When the natives started to get restless, I said, ‘Come on, Tyson. Let’s hop into it.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I’m not sure yet. Class, stand up!’ There was a scraping scuff of furniture. ‘Good afternoon, children.’
‘Good . . .’ ragged voices trailed away.
‘What’s this?’ I said, pointing to my head.
One girl in the front row with arm pumping the air was bursting to answer.
‘Yes?’
‘Hair.’
I covered the whole body more or less, then Tyson walked round to shake hands (quite a novelty here!) and introduced himself: ‘Hello, my name is Tyson. What’s your name?’
After half an hour silence fell over the room. The tall, slim presence of Narith was hovering in the doorway, nervous about what was transpiring. He said not a word to us, nor did he give an explanation or apology later, a characteristic behaviour that dogged our first week and a half. How I regretted not being able to ask him questions about the difficulties of the children or the welfare of their families! It was Teacher Godfrey who explained that an Australian benefactor had supplied all the children’s uniforms.
In the philosophy of this organization, Volunteer English Teachers, VET recruits should be encouraged to travel about the country in order to get to know the people and the way of life beyond Phnom Penh. I felt a little guilty taking the first Friday off to join an excursion to the eastern province of Mondulkiri after only one day’s teaching! I found myself in the back row of the second bus with the ‘bad boys’, as Brendan called them, as if they were still in year 10. In fact, for much of the ten hours’ journey they were either sleeping or absorbed in their i-Pads. It was a very bright, sunny day, so the curtains were closed, but I clutched a fold of mine to open up a vision of a completely different Cambodia from the ramshackle squalor of Phnom Penh . . . the charming two-storey French colonial houses with balconies and red roofs, the verdant green rice paddies and clumps of coconut palms stretching out to the horizon on both sides of the highway, the crossing of the vast Mekong river spilling out in abundant waterways, the tracts of woodland and orchards; then away from the heat of the plains into the more temperate wilderness area of Mondulkiri and the hillside people, thunderous, two-tier waterfalls and undulating green hills and valleys redolent of Europe with stands of pine trees, so free from rubbish and crowds . . . Such a relief to escape the capital, which hemmed me in, with nowhere green and peaceful to walk to and the anxiety of inhaling toxic fumes if I walked anywhere. Whenever I parted the curtain strung across the window of my room, I was confronted by a jumble of antennae, wires, washing lines usually chockfull that barred other vistas, iron staircases and rooftop scallywags who might walk off with your drying shirts.
They loomed obliquely through the dense scrub of trees and bush, phantoms of a preternatural age, like the mythological seven-headed naga or the garuda, half-man, half-eagle, lumbering unhurried, unfaltering in stately procession over the rocky basin of grey basalt.
As if in a daze, an air of expectation, the bathers stopped their splashing one another with the hard of their hand and posing for the gallery’s photographers with gleaming white smiles, to stare at the majestic pachyderms. A jockey of a mahout, perhaps nine or fifteen, sporting merely a green shirt and blue shorts, his short legs clamped in behind the long droopy ears of the beast, led the parade, gliding into the water with a gentle ripple towards the deeper centre.
In her element, Sharon, all fulsome curves and flashing teeth, who had created a sensation with a running jump and headlong dive from the grassy knoll above into blissfully cold water, her long, blonde tresses spread across the surface, bobbed up to immediately lunge at the spine of the elephant. Seizing the initiative with two hands, springing up on hard, leathery skin whose texture of short hairs reminded her of the bristles of a toothbrush, as if hungry to meet the challenge, slithered her bronzed legs up to straddle the elephant’s neck. The tolerant creature did not deny her upraised salute of both arms to her new pals above, the sun gleaming on her sexually unabashed smile and her ample bosom barely encompassed in a white two-piece bikini. Then opening her arms wide, beaming ecstatically at the gawking admirers, who appeared transfixed, ever snapping their own provocative goddess, Sharon was momentarily surprised. Without warning, the elephant rolled but slowly, as if sensing that though struggling to hold onto his slippery back she would break free and slide back into the water safely clear of his body. Regaining the surface, still laughing up at the others, she must have felt the elephant creating such thought-out moves for his own enjoyment. Indeed, his microscopic eye in that massive leathery head seemed to have a smiling benevolence.
I, however, had no such trust. By this time there were four elephants frolicking in the pool. It seemed inevitable that as they trundled up close, at least one foolhardy volunteer would get crushed if trapped between the haunches of two of them. I almost yelled ‘Watch out!’ when fragile Lydia fell back into that very danger I was fretting about, but when she resurfaced her pale face was split in a huge grin from ear to ear.
Standing in the broiling heat without a hat, Brad flicked at his bare legs, more frantically when he identified a brool of mozzies buzzing and biting at him. I was concerned because he had not started a course of malaria tablets, nor had he found any in stock in the pharmacies of Phnom Penh.
‘Come on in, Brad! Its bewdiful! Don’t be a chicken!’ yelled out Tyson, clearly loving the challenge of mounting the slippery elephants, and would be the first to exercise some muscle in swabbing them down. ‘That was the happiest day of my life,’ he confided later.
‘You lot are crazy!’ the Canadian yelled back. ‘Those elephants are crapping in the water! You’ll all catch dysentery!’
The party was winding up the narrow trail behind the refreshed elephants when suddenly there was a crashing sound up ahead. One of the creatures had lumbered off the path and was ripping down a branch of sugar palm with its trunk and shoving sections at a time into his mouth. His mahout slid down and with his baton struck the animal’s flanks and hindquarters to force it back onto the trail. The elephant was not to be denied his treat, but once he had satisfied his appetite he resumed his normal duties. Several of the volunteers were disenchanted at witnessing the elephant’s punishment; these hillside people were supposedly promoting elephant welfare in their Elephant Valley Project.
‘If it moves, you can eat it,’ said Raksmei, with a straight face. The local delicacy around Siem Reap is flying bugs. They live in rice fields. Maybe you see fluorescent tubes hanging up in trees when you visit. People put bags under tubes to catch bugs. They taste like nuts.’
‘Look, there’s the Bug Lady!’ said Brad. ‘The one in the wide-brimmed hat and red pants.’
‘I’m not so sure about this,’ muttered Tyson.
‘You can order spider eggs if you want,’ enthused Raksmei. ‘They are special but they cost more.’
The Bug Lady wandered over, not smiling but the creases in her face testified to her durability, speaking in Khmer to Raksmei.
‘She says,’ pointing to a pyramid of grey winged insects, ‘This is plate of crickets. Taste very good. This worms, here plate of bats, birds eggs . . .’
‘No, he just wants to try some tarantula meat.’
‘The Bug Lady, she recommend head and body,’ said Raksmei. ‘Taste like chicken.’
‘I read on the net that the abdomen is real juicy,’ said Brad.
‘No, no,’ said Raksmei, ‘don’t have brown stuff, that’s dirty part, insides. Shit.’
‘I’ll try a leg,’ sighed Tyson, resigned to his fate.
‘How many leg you want?’ asked the Bug Lady. ‘One leg, only 300 riel. Very good price.’
‘Just the one to start with, thanks.’
‘They drown and wash the tarantulas in water, then deep-fry,’ said Raksmei, trying to be helpful. ‘You should be fine.’
The Bug Lady handed him the blackened, brittle tarantula leg on a serviette and cocked her head with interest, but Tyson was already wincing in expectation.
‘All of eight cents worth. Here goes!’ There was the slightest of cracking sounds, then a plosive cough and quick-fire spluttering. ‘Jeez, that is gross.’ He spat some more flecks of flesh before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Yuk!’
‘I’m sorry,’ quipped Brad, chuckling away. ‘But tarantula meat is on every volunteer’s bucket list.’
‘Shit happens!’ murmured Tyson. ‘Must be an acquired taste. Grab me a beer quick smart!’
As a novice teacher, Tyson would pitch his voice too high. Besides, the sound produced was sometimes mushy. Instead of isolating the sound difficult for the children, such as ‘v’ or ‘w’, he would merely repeat the whole word. Then the children repeated it in the same incorrect or indistinct way. But then several of the volunteers did not open their mouths to enunciate clearly or know the strategy of poking out their tongue to correct the ‘th’ sound or putting their upper teeth over their bottom lip to illustrate the ‘v’. Also Tyson had the tendency to be too wordy. Even I forgot this danger on the first day. It was the custom for the Cambodian English teacher to say ‘Stand up!’ in a terse manner, whereas I invited the students with a gentler ‘Please stand up.’ But they didn’t know the meaning of ‘please’ – I never heard the word spoken once during my tenure – I figured it was the sound of this construction that was unfamiliar to them. When I said, ‘Stand up!’ they immediately scrambled to their feet, so much did they relish pronunciation practice. But Tyson would merely offer a second meaning with a synonym to explain the word. Instead of sticking to 2 times 2, for instance, he’d say ‘times, err multiplies’, which baffled the kids more so.
‘Keep it simple, Tyson,’ I thought. ‘Write key words on the board and do pronunciation practice before handing out the worksheets, not afterwards.’
Then Tyson would realize his mistake, as the youngsters had already raced through half the worksheet without getting a taste of the new vocabulary. When it came to impatient requests to ‘Play game!’ he was in his element with ‘Hangman’, even deciding to hand over the building of the skeleton to one of the children; or revising parts of the body by pointing to them: ‘What is this?’ ‘Hair’; ‘Nose’; ‘Chin’; or distending his body into strange contortions and asking them to imitate his actions: ‘Stand up!’ ‘Scratch your left ear!’ ‘Nod your head!’ ‘Turn right round!’ And when the ice cream vendor cycled to the end of the road one lunch-time, Tyson bought twenty icy poles at ten cents each for everyone. Which thereafter led to the vendor cycling up to the very front gate of the school every lunch-time for a week.
In the two-hour lunch-break, eleven till one o’clock, the volunteer teachers would sit together on benches round a grotty wooden table in an enclosure facing the broken-brick road that ended at the rice paddy. Kindergarten infants hovered at our backs or at the side of the table staring at our lunch packs. A Cambodian teacher kindly placed a plate of elephant apple on the table. We volunteers hoed in. One of the more impulsive little boys clambered onto the bench at my side and kneeling reached across for a slice. Without thinking, I uttered a stern ‘No!’ and pushed the plate out of the boy’s grasping hand and promptly lifted him down, annoyed that even at lunch there was no respite, no peace. When I took a bite of the elephant apple, it turned out to be dry, almost tasteless. I wished I hadn’t chewed on it and wondered if it had been washed in tap water by unwashed hands.
I felt embarrassed by my bad grace, my meanness, even though the children had consumed their bowls of soup. After that incident I simply gave my plastic container of rice to Jim, the cook and social worker, who smiled most happily: ‘You give to the children,’ I explained. But every time I tendered my offering, I saw Jim commandeer the rice and wolf it down with an appreciative grin and salutary wave of his spoon.
During my second Sunday night, humid and sleepless, my stomach was gurgling queasy. Frequently I made a dash to the toilet, my insides churning. What I had speculated upon with trepidation had become an embarrassing reality. I was afflicted by a watery flux of diarrhoea four or five times through the night. Each time I thought, Thank goodness, that’s the end of it, only to feel another slight tremor and the compulsion to be ready to leap out of bed. Should I risk having breakfast? What should I do if nature calls on the journey to school? Then my very anxiety threatened to loosen my bowels once again.
What a great stroke of luck that I had no stomach upset at school! But I was no longer willing to eat the container of rice, no longer hungry to do anything more than pick at the vegetables that were the same as the previous dinner. However, the diarrhoea suddenly returned with a vengeance during the next three nights. Was tap water used to boil the rice? Was the rice left too long to cool on the kitchen table and grew bacteria? Had the mice that ran the kitchen fouled it with their droppings? Or was there too much olive oil or soya sauce that clagged the vegetables, including those short stubs of broccoli, my favourite vegetable back home, now themselves rendered tasteless. Or was it the unwashed hands of the staff member who cut up the elephant apple? Or the kids who offered me a lolly, before I requested if I could take one myself without them touching it?
In two short weeks Tyson had explored the night life on Riverside: he had tried his first tipple of alcohol, a finger of whisky, accepted ice in his Anchor beer and sipped a slug of exotic cocktails. One humid afternoon – when weren’t they? – he settled for a simple refreshing coconut water by means of a straw punched into the shell of a large coconut. He enjoyed the fruity bouquet of Ros’s vodka mandarin that she mixed with soda in the volunteer kitchen, surprised that she was unashamedly hooked on her favourite poison and occasionally suffered a hangover next morning. Limiting himself to one glass of alcohol per night, he proved far more vigilant than more experienced volunteer drinkers. As for street food, he loved it, even without asking questions of the particular flesh fried in batter, be it pork, dog or rubbery calamari. At Dr Fish’s Massage in Siem Reap, he almost broke down and quit early because the minnows nibbling the skin off his tired, sweaty feet were excruciatingly ticklish, but he gritted it out and kept his feet immersed for far longer than the shrieking mums and their hysterical children dared. Several of the volunteers patronized Friends on Russian Boulevard, where the tapas were not only scrumptious but they liked the notion of supporting those former street children presently carving a career in the hospitality industry. Naively, he was the only one to try the minute chili spears served in a tiny dish. At once he spluttered, then choked, his throat burning, eyes watering so that he could barely see, leaving him gasping for breath and urgently gargling a swill of ice-cold water.
Already in his youth, Tyson had been the proud owner of three fairly cheap second-hand motorbikes, so when Narith invited him to go for a spin, he unflinchingly accepted, unfazed by two bubbly twenty-something female teachers, Srey and Sokhana, who flirtatiously egged him on. Tyson agreed to take them along those quieter semi-rural roads, marvelling at how the dangerously narrow pillion could possibly accommodate two derrieres, no matter how petite. Our teacher offered him a woollen beanie to disguise, he hoped, the lack of a helmet, lest the police spotted a foreigner and were more likely to threaten him with arrest than locals to gain a bribe.
During that two-hour lunch-break I was thankful that I hadn’t wandered through the rice paddy to the Buddhist Temple complex, a five-minute saunter away. I would often look across the sea of rich green rice stems at the occasional coconut palm and gilded and silver spires and domes, and the more stolid funereal stone monuments and main hall with the giant gold Buddha seated and smiling serenely back. Now, however, as the heavy clouds broke and a sudden downfall dinned down on the metal roof of the verandah above the staff lunch table, I began to grow concerned about the riders amid the sullen deluge, the greasy roads, their sodden clothes, as the time for afternoon classes drew near.
Five minutes before the bell the four teachers bobbled up on the rutted surface of our no-through road grinning hugely. Even Narith looked genuinely pleased with himself astride his black Honda Dream, his broad smile, his wavy black hair more matted. Tyson’s shirt was soaked, the large V-stain of damp evident from neck down throughout the afternoon.
‘That was so much fun,’ he burbled.
‘I’m afraid there’s no towel in the change room and that black hole of a shower has no water,’ I said.
‘She’s sweet, man.’ He was barely listening. ‘That was so refreshing after all this humidity and choking dust.’
Bubbling away, the two Cambodian misses had somehow remained immaculately groomed in their cream blouses and ankle-length, multi-coloured skirts.
I moped off to class with a spelling test.
Early on Friday mornings a Buddhist monk in orange robes would ring the doorbell of the volunteer house and Raksmei would scurry out, make a humble bow with hands in prayerful pose, tender his offering, then kneel down on the ground for the monk’s blessing. Friday was sports day for both classes, two periods each. Our tuk-tuk arriving early at school, I ducked my head in at the library. Narith was asleep, head on hands, our class happily poring over the pictures of the English readers I had brought over from home.
I coughed loudly to wake him, much to the mirth of the children closely watching my reaction to his slumbers. ‘Excuse me, Narith, I would like to know what you have organized for sport today.’
‘You can do it,’ he replied crisply, then disarmed me with an instant smile.
I noticed some buckled badminton rackets on top of the library shelves.
Narith followed my gaze. ‘You can buy some new.’
Yes, I could, but I grew indignant at his assumption that I had money to burn. Besides, we had been warned not to give freebies or presents till the very end of our contract; otherwise the children would continually badger us for more.
Teacher Godfrey in a smart brown-checked suit came to visit Tyson and myself in the morning. Now a hale, soft-spoken man of eighty, the New Zealander had first volunteered at seventy. So moved by the good he felt he could achieve if he established his own educational organization, he became a resident of Cambodia and applied to Volunteer English Teachers for a regular stream of teachers to supply his own network of schools. In email after email before they had set foot in Cambodia, he advised volunteers to peruse his website and read their predecessors’ lesson plans.
It was up on the rooftop that Teacher Godfrey found me sweeping away the rainwater from the concrete floor into the gutters around the perimeter, then brushing it over the edge with a flick down onto the dried-green scrub and palms that bordered the rice paddy.
‘The kids are great,’ I was telling him, ‘but the drills they are learning are mostly ineffective. The children learn words by rote, but if you ask them a question they cannot speak in sentences.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ replied Teacher Godfrey. ‘But remember, children cannot simply translate from Khmer into English. The English language is so rich in synonyms, idiomatic phrases and connectives, whereas in Khmer there are no tenses or auxiliary verbs like ‘shall’ or ‘have’. Another awkward piece of syntax they have to get their heads around is that adjectives precede nouns in English, not vice versa.’
‘I grant you that, Godfrey, but surely we don’t expect them to translate word for word. That’s why we should teach them from familiar situations. I do set up situations or compose very short stories based on their word lists, but even then when you take a word like ‘fifty’ and take it out of the sequence one to a hundred that they communally chant every day, they don’t know what number fifty actually represents. They have to count upwards from one to forty-nine before the penny drops.’
I know,’ said Teacher Godfrey, shuffling his feet, growing tetchy. ‘It’s slow progress but they are teachable. When I consider the pride with which those deprived families show in their children’s educational needs, what sacrifices they make so that their children can make a start, I just marvel. Frankly, it’s a miracle. Most of these children have poor cognitive growth, yet here they are so determined to learn. Many families herabouts are riven by HIV. In effect, quarantined. And don't forget that three generations of families were brutally tortured and murdered by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. It’s worthwhile considering that what we give these children emotionally in love and support is more valuable than our teaching of grammar.’
I tried to remember these words when I handled the question of Nimol’s attitude. This boy sat by himself, usually distracted, inattentive. Whenever he turned his largish head, he hunched his shoulder up to his neck as if it were frozen stiff. He had to make an effort to turn his body right round when he wished to hit back at the two teasing boys behind. Two oddly shaped flaps of skin or growths hung from the face beneath his left ear. I often had to stop conducting the class to stare at him until he faced the front or joined in pronunciation practice. Yet in spite of my blatant ticking off, he still wanted to give me hugs at the end of the day.
That second Friday coincided with party-time for the two classes that Maddie and Ros taught, the girls who shared the tuk-tuk with Tyson, Cara and myself. So large was their booty for the children, a big bucket of lollies, face paint, simple story books in English with illustrations, boxes of coloured crayons . . . ‘We’ve spent nearly sixty dollars,’ declared Maddie. ‘And we think you two guys will have to share the cost of the extra tuk-tuk to transport it all.’
While Maddie was dishing out lollies, Ros applying face paint and Tyson defending himself against a thumping balloon attack aimed at his head, Cara, the sophisticated twenty-two year old, who was teaching English with an Italian accent, was perpetually besieged by children dying to have their photo taken and pleading to admire their self-image on her camera prontissimo. Yet by the end of the afternoon’s exciting carnival, Maddie and Ros were both red-eyed and snuffling.
‘It’s so sad,’ whined Ros. ‘We shan’t ever see them again.’
‘My emotions are . . . everywhere!’ whimpered Maddie. ‘I feel so miserable.’
Tyson, his face a glossy pink and mauve, a bandanna round his forehead, in the thick of the action, charging from one end of the soccer pitch to the other, dribbling round two and three defenders, sudden stops with foot over the ball, step-overs, a change of direction with a shimmy of the hips, unleashing shot after shot against gallant midget bodies blocking his way do-or-die to goal, galloping back to palm away a save on his own goal-line . . . stealing in to break aslant the line of ten nippers skipping in unison, nine girls and one diminutive boy, jumping high knee jerks and ducking heads to avoid entanglement in the rope’s cracking round, fetching down two or three shrieking skippers in a tumble . . . standing tall and burly on the volleyball court, thumping the ball high and mighty, then crashing the easy put-away over the net as it went bouncing over the upraised hands of despairing minnows . . .
In short, the kids clamoured for him, loved his energy, his sense of fun, his looming above them like a man-mountain. In their ten-minute breaks they would drag him up the steps to the playground on the flat roof of the school; there to race a gaggle of them from one wall to another, skipping, running backwards (‘Hey, steady on, Tyson!’ I thought), even encouraging wheelbarrow races, girls and boys walking upside down on their hands, their partners holding their ankles and steering. Once during break he was engaged in a wrestling match. At one end of the classroom the boys would usually bounce marbles from floor to ceiling - I had to duck to avoid being struck as these little bullets rebounded crazily in all directions – or practise kick-boxing manoeuvres, launching at each other with flying feet, often two against one, when Tyson must have challenged the biggest boy, but only half his own size and weight, to a wrestling match.
Seated on the floor at the front of the classroom, playing some game which involved flicking coloured plastic animals like counters into a small square hastily drawn on the floor with a blue whiteboard marker, the girls began shrieking - Darany had made a quick grab at Tyson in order to throw him. Their shrillness was ear-splitting, coming in waves as the two warriors circled and grabbed, twisted and hugged, each sticking out a leg to trip the other backwards, smiling but now dead serious. Strangely enough, Tyson was the more red-faced yet surely it could only be a matter of seconds before Darany was thrown to the floor. Tyson made one supreme heave with all his strength to pin Darany, who just would not let go. Lo and behold, the youngster somehow unbalanced the heavier bulk and incredibly there was an astonished but good-humoured Tyson on the floor, defeated to a crescendo of screams. Both wrestlers helped each other to their feet, laughing like drains, the best of mates and would thereafter seek each other out as the champion wheelbarrow team.
Throughout the party, I strove to keep out of the limelight, but some older girls whom I didn’t know snatched away the broom and coaxed me over to dance, where Cara was demonstrating some nifty moves on the balls of her feet: a pulling down motion with alternate hands, stooping down to thread one hand through her legs to touch the other hand behind her, jiggling round on the spot, clapping twice to the rhythm, then starting all over again. I groaned within, but recalled those halcyon days in the sixties when Sam Cooke twisted the night away. I began with a gentle swaying of my hips before slowly lowering myself, still twisting but cautiously, when I noticed the girls tittering hand over mouth at my minimal gyrations. At that moment my knees locked, the tendons twinged, I could barely sway back up as if I’d skewered myself into the concrete. Trying to muster some dignity, I said breathlessly, ‘Okay, girls, now you can dance the Twist’, and ushering them to lead with their hips, I limped away.
When I arrived back from a weekend in Siem Reap, I was disappointed that another volunteer had moved into my room. He had hung his clothes on one half of the rail and purloined two extra fans that could whip up a gale. I was already lying down on my sheet in the dark when Neville burst in and turned on the light.
‘I can’t stay here. This room stinks. It’s damp. You can see it, these brown stains on the walls, and just look down at the skirting. There, look! It’s rotting. No, I’m not staying here. I’m an asthmatic. I was coughing all last night. Besides, I can’t eat the food here. How can anyone get chips wrong? They were so dry, they tasted like charcoal. You and I deserve better than this. If they want good teachers who know what they’re doing, not just idealistic teenagers who think the whole volunteer thing is fun, an adventure, how are they going to bring their syllabus up to date?’
A retired policeman from London in his mid-fifties, Neville had recently done a crash course in TEFL. At first his intensity and frankness and persuasiveness engaged me. He frequently put into words what I had suspected but kept to myself. He deferred to my academic qualifications, underlined by the fact that no one else had any in our volunteer house. But when he finally stopped holding forth, it was one o’clock in the morning and I felt my life leased out.
‘This afternoon we visited S-51. You’ve been there, of course. Unbelievable place, just horrible. But you know what? I bought this book. I’m fascinated by history, specially World War Two. It was written by the last survivor of S-51. And he signed it, look! Chum Mey. There! I’ll always cherish this chance meeting. It’s so unusual to meet someone who’s actually lived through such a momentous event. But do you think these young volunteers cared a toss? Not a jot of it! I can’t believe this, I thought. This is the last man left alive from Security Prison-21 and these kids, they’re nice kids, but they just don’t get it. This is not light years away, this is living history. They’ve got no idea of what horror and pain this last remaining survivor has been through. And yet they were drifting away, discussing arrangements for tonight’s partying.’
By the end of the third week the back of my throat was burning dry, my voice scratchy, my eyes stinging and constantly flickering with flecks of dust and grit. But at least my stomach was settled and Neville had shipped out.
The road out to Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre was severely rutted and tortuous. The picturesque and tranquil green-treed setting of an orchard struck me as incongruous with its mass graves, its insidious secret function. Seventeen thousand victims of the Khmer Rouge were transported from Security Prison, S-51, bound and blindfolded for the fifteen-kilometre journey to The Killing Fields. Up to three hundred people a day were murdered, mainly bludgeoned to death to save precious bullets. If any guards, mostly young teenagers, showed any skerrick of sympathy to the prisoners, they were summarily beheaded and thrown into a mass grave. A notice urged visitors not to remove anything from this sacrosanct ground, not even fragments of bone or bits of cloth that still surface from time to time around the disinterred pits. Beyond the entrance, one could observe the huge pile of skulls staring blankly out from behind the glass panels of the Memorial Stupa. Babies had been flung against trunks of trees to crack their skulls, their dried blood discernible to the liberating Vietnamese soldiers. Everything was recorded: the number of bones and teeth; the utter practical ignorance and incompetence of those captives assigned to farms. On the circuit around the lake, a reverential silence was solemnly maintained by visitors listening to audio commentaries telling of the host of atrocities committed, stopping at information boards that gave chilling details of the Chemical Substances Storage Room, which housed the DDT used to decompose bodies in a hurry; or the tree strung with loudspeakers that played traditional music through the night to drown the screams of suffering, the screams of murderous death.
When Tyson returned to the volunteer house at the end of week three, he was clearly depressed. He spoke in a slow, subdued voice. ‘Two hours out of Phnom Penh, it happened. I was in front. Maybe I was going too fast, I don’t know. Perhaps Brendan was trying to stay with me. At an intersection a motorist shot in from the right without slowing down and probably not looking, as they do, assuming right of way. Brendan jammed on the brakes, but skidded with a wobble on the gravel and was flung off. Thank God, he was flung off to his right side, because a coach travelling at a frightening rate of knots was passing him on the left. Otherwise he would have been crushed. When I heard the screech of tires, I slowed to turn round but had to take evasive action as the coach careered on, shading me by a whisker, and never stopped. There was Brendan lying still at the side of the road. I jumped off my bike to check his condition. For three or four minutes he was right out of it, clearly concussed. I feared the worst. His right hand was bleeding where the palm had scraped gravel. We hadn’t tracked down leather gauntlets anywhere in Phnom Penh. There was a gash under his forearm and skin scraped from his elbow, where the jacket was ripped. His right knee was mashed badly. Minutes later I noticed his right foot was swollen in his boot. Broken bones, I reckoned. Frantically I emptied out my medical box on the ground but found only some strips of gauze to pick off the pieces of grit, dust and dirt from his hand and elbow. I daren’t touch his bloody knee.
Soon enough a small huddle of villagers had joined the scene. Do any of you speak English? I cracked on with some agitation: You know, English?
By this time Brendan was moaning, his eyes flickering open. Are you okay? How bad is it? Can you feel your feet?
My mother will kill me when she finds out, he muttered and closed his eyes.
Where is the hospital? I urged the villagers again. Hospital! I shouted.
No one said anything but stared down out of dumb curiosity at the injured Brendan, who began another round of moaning.
Are any of you a doctor? I said, almost in tears with frustration and anger. You know . . . doctor . . . medico . . . or medical student?
I’m a student! called out a youth, jogging over from his push bike that he lay on the other side of the road.
Thank Christ! I thought. All students know some English.
Is there bad accident?
We need to get Brendan to hospital. Where is the nearest hospital? Can you help?
Country hospitals not so good. I ring police.
Please, anything!
The hospital did not have appropriate materials to clean and dress the wound or strong enough painkillers. The cop, who knew no English but sought explanations from the locals in Khmer, at last drove Brendan back to the nearest hospital for observation, then he was transported back to Phnom Penh and put on a plane to Australia the following day. I’ve already received an email from him. He can’t go back to work, but must rest up for a few weeks in bed. A knee reconstruction is on the cards. His foot has sustained hairline fractures only, but they can’t do much about that. He’s fairly cheerful, apart from the six hundred dollars for the damage to the motorbike. We didn’t take out insurance for the bikes. Fortunately, he’d taken out health insurance.’
Tyson returned for week 4. I expected the children to be wildly excited. They were thrilled to see him, of course, but not so eagerly demonstrative, not even Darany. Perhaps they sensed Tyson’s slightly detached or distracted air; or they remembered that he would soon be leaving again - for good this time.
Of all the various exercises, I derived most pleasure from pronunciation practice, but in the final week one or two children were getting a little cheeky, in a good-humoured way. Sita began to imitate me. At first, I was dismayed, then I relaxed as all the class began to copy my actions. When I coaxed the class to raise their intonation towards the end of the sentence when asking a question, I spread my arms out like wings and slowly raised them. Also I had recently gotten into the habit of pounding my right fist into my left palm to emphasize the stressed syllables: taxi driver. My energy was becoming more rhythmic. Gradually, all the children were gleefully imitating my gestures.
Oddly enough, my colleague didn’t materialize at school on Tuesday. Without a word, he slunk down to breakfast, dishevelled and subdued, head bowed.
‘You okay, Tyson?’ I asked, when eventually I noticed him sitting staring at an empty plate.
‘I’m sick,’ he mumbled. ‘Hot one moment, shivering the next.’
‘Cripes, that’s no good. Your stomach’s okay though?’
‘Feel I’m gonna be sick. Don’t think I’ll make school. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay. I hope you’ll feel better after a lie-down.’
At school, hardly any of the children asked after him.
That morning we had planned to introduce the word list Occupations. The picture illustrating Dentist on the worksheet was not sufficiently detailed about the job, for it didn’t discriminate between Dentist and Nurse. I did not try to explain it or attempt to demonstrate it by myself. The next day I wised Tyson up. He should sit on the teacher’s chair, lean back, mouth open and moan fearsomely, as I drove sadistically at him with an imaginary drill. The children fell about laughing. Even the teacher couldn’t help but chuckle. As I walked back down the aisle to the back of the class, Jorani, the tallest, quietest and most mature girl held her hand poised to give me a high five. Childish as it sounds, it was my happiest moment in that classroom, the zinging vibrations at their warmest.
Another such moment but unexpected occurred when Narith called over to me, ‘They want you to sing.’ Teaching had teased out the repressed actor within, but singing was not my forte. I racked my brains for something suitable, but there was nothing in my repertoire but sentimental romances about teenagers in lurv. Then fortuitously I recollected years ago when I was studying for my TEFL certificate, how we taught the alphabet by singing the letters to the tune of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star.’
There was dead silence as I tentatively tested my voice, but a frog in my throat caused me to abandon ship and start again, very softly. When I reached the letter G, the children in twos and threes joined in, much to my surprise and relief, retaining that soft Peggy Lee sound of mine, not the rollicking, raucous rhythm that they loved in their own recitations. I’d forgotten how this ditty ended – there was a tag to round off after the letter z – so I stopped, but they finished the last bars on their own in muted, respectful tones. I was touched in spite of myself.
That evening we had our evening meal cross-legged on a carpet on the floor of the lounge. Like all the volunteers, Dorothy, a Chinese Australian, lived on her smartphone or i-Pad, constantly glued to the screen even at meal-times. At such times I felt alienated from this generation. She was effusing about the five orphans in her charge. ‘I can’t go home for Christmas, I love my children too much.’
‘What does your boyfriend feel about that?’ asked Brad.
‘Oh, he understands. At least, I think he does. I haven’t seen him for six months, but we talk to each other five or six times a day. Thank God for Skype! It’s still tough, though. And you guys will miss your classes, won’t you?’
‘I guess so.’ I hesitated, non-committal. ‘I’m content that I was there for the children, like Tyson, even during breaks and lunch-time. I like to think we gave them some happy times.’
‘I’d agree with that,’ said Tyson. ‘I was disappointed with my pissy efforts in the classroom, but our activities outside were grouse.’
On the final Wednesday our tuk-tuk was involved in a minor collision. I was sitting on the back seat of the carriage, which had patches of leather missing and slashed chunks of foam rubber visible. My left arm had rested on the chrome armrest. The rain had been bucketing down, the seat was very damp, but the side rainproof cover was up. Tyson was very quiet. I assumed he was already contemplating our final day at school.
‘Is anything the matter? I thought you had a ripper of a day.’
For several seconds he remained silent, then mumbled brokenly: ‘I heard some bad news this morning. I was hoping against hope. Brendan sent me an email. It’s been confirmed. He’s got to have a knee reconstruction. For god sake, he’s only twenty-two. No, I should never have ridden so fast. It’s all my fault. He’s such a good bloke and doesn’t deserve this. He’s never once blamed me, simply shrugs it off.’
Suddenly the nose of a car struck my side of the carriage. Fortunately, I had just removed my arm, otherwise my left hand would have been crushed. Not much damage was inflicted on the vehicle. Our driver glared back, stopped to check the dint, no names were exchanged. In the Buddhist tradition it did not do to nurse anger.
Before my departure I was determined to get these children speaking English to one another. I wrote a dialogue on the board using English vocab that they had used in the worksheets. After pronunciation practice I had boys and girls reciting alternate lines. The result was embarrassingly ragged vocals that required much more practice, so I asked them to converse in pairs. Would you believe, they dug their heels in, refused outright!
I cornered Narith. ‘I’m sorry. My experiment hasn’t worked,’ I said in hushed tones.
‘They don’t want to speak English.’
‘Then what on earth am I here for?’ I must have sounded peevish as well as irritated. ‘Sit down, boys and girls!’
‘Thank you, teacher,’ they all chorused.
‘Copy!’ said Narith. ‘Copy the board!’
‘No, I don’t want them to copy,’ I said. ‘This exercise is a waste of time.’
Without more ado, the children, pens in hand, already had their heads bowed in concentration, busily fashioning their neat letters.
‘They spend too much time copying,’ I hissed. ‘They need to be speaking the language.’
Narith bore with me for a few seconds before sliding into a smile and sloping away.
Which served me right. I was certainly getting steamed up, then duly felt mean and intolerant. Now it was my turn to save face.
I remember some details of that last day. Sita sharing her small packet of thin sweet biscuits with me at break. Then showing me a treble recorder, a carbon copy of the one I had learnt to play at secondary school. What a wonderful surprise! I couldn’t help myself but pick it up and finger the notes. It all came back to me. I recollected the opening of ‘Greensleeves’ and started to play. Then stopped abruptly, a cold sweat tatting my forehead. Christ, what was that warning about HIV and the exchange of saliva? C’mon, think! Was the mouthpiece moist when Sita handed it me? I gulped, but couldn’t remember.
Nor could I hurt Sita’s feelings. I tried hard not to show my anxiety but it wasn’t long before she was leading me by the hand, Koliyan holding the other, as I descended the steep steps from the second storey, the better to avoid falling, the girls so solicitous that morning, treating me like some fragile antique that might break. Then in Indian file, one behind the other, still holding me by the hand on the narrow, slippery path through the rice paddy, gripping me tight when I slithered on the orange mud. When we reached the quiet minor road and I regained my balance, some way behind the rest of the class, I was securely on the level tarmac and suddenly broke into my lengthy stride, leaving the two girls tripping along in my wake, helplessly laughing.
In the grounds of the Buddhist temple, Narith headed for the pond inside the far wall. The children plucked at the large lotus leaves like elephant ears, collected pearls of water in their leaves shaped into a funnel, then designed oriental sunhats, umbrellas, a smock with the centre torn out for their own head. Nimol collected water beetles from the muddy edge to slip down someone’s gaping collar, even pressing me to open my stubbornly clenched fist to take them in my palm.
Sita and I were leaning against the wall in the thick shadow of an old banyan tree, watching the children searching the pond for some mythical creature. When she realized it was time to bid a final farewell, she looked up with baleful eyes and said softly, ‘When you come back?’
That was the very question I had been dreading all day. ‘I don’t know, Sita.’ But deep down, I confess, I did know. I couldn’t cope with the intensity of these children for much longer without a break, their desperate demands for attention, ‘Teacher! Teacher! -cher! -cher!’ Plonking their worksheets down on top of the one I was trying to correct, pulling at me to correct their worksheet with 11 out of 10 when Tyson had already signed off with ‘Good job!’ and a smiling face. Their painfully deafening shouts of the Alphabet chant. At lunch-time the children bunching and bobbing around me, clutching my hand on the teacher’s desk and tracing the prominent blue veins, lost in fascination, lifting folds of my loose skin in their tiny fingers or rubbing the face of my gold watch. Other times their squealing pierced my eardrums, the bile rising. Keep calm, I told myself, feeling faint in that relentless shrill and humid atmosphere.
For these children were so tactile, so excitable. Tyson related how two girls startled him by stroking up his calves, very gently, and saying ‘Monkey’, giggling all the while. ‘What’s going on here?’ he thought. ‘Then it dawned on me: Cambodian men don’t have hairy legs.’
Tyson and I collected our bags for the last time from the desk in the staff room that we rarely used, that the staff rarely used, except Jim who would put down a roll-up mattress on the floor for an hour’s lunchtime kip. As we headed for the waiting tuk-tuk, we saw the children heaving themselves up onto the back of a covered truck or being given an extended hand up. A lucky few could sit on planking on either side, facing inwards. Some sat on the floor amongst the legs of the huddled crowd standing. Through the gaps between slats, I could barely make out faces in the gloomy interior, only hands fluttering a farewell wave. I was reminded of the convoy of open-topped cattle trucks of male and female workers from the garment factories on Veng Seng Boulevard that would pass us near the airport on our return journey in the late afternoon, all standing packed tight together, facing the road ahead with grim determination. That week the half-million garment workers were headline news, demanding a minimum wage of 160 dollars per month, twice the amount they were currently receiving. Striking workers were apparently arming themselves with sticks, rocks and petrol bombs. The police, clad in black helmets and visors and black leather riot gear studded silver like medieval armoured trim, had shot dead four workers already.
Was this the political destiny awaiting our urchin children?
Michael Small
November 3, 2013-January 23, 2014
