Indelible Roots

At 5am on the 8th I woke up and got ready to go to uncle Chheang’s as promised. He calls me up at 5:30 to my annoyance, reminding me to be there at 6 as I had said I would be. I arrived at uncle Chheang’s at 5:50 and we proceeded to walk to the bus station several blocks away. Here I ate breakfast while he smoked and we boarded the bus at 6:30.

The bus then meandered through the streets of Phnom Penh for forty-five minutes, picking up individuals here and there along the way. At 10am we arrived at a rest stop in the city of Pursat and uncle Chheang orders us food. I knew this was a bad idea as we would arrive at our destination in an hour or so and would have to eat yet again. To counter his insistence that I eat more, I ate as slowly as possible and got away with little over one bowl of rice.

We arrived in the city of Moung, forty-five kilometers south of Battambang just before noon. We then walked the quarter mile to a market and into a concrete house. Here I meet a man about my age and uncle Chheang tells us to call each other “heir” which means brother, but refrains from introducing us by name as usual. I still have no idea what his name is, but he takes us on his motor scooter the twenty minutes on a dirt road to Kroung.

Here in Kroung I meet a family of relatives living in three different structures on the dirt lot. One of them is an elderly man of eighty-six years, the same as my grandfather in Georgia. He is blind in both eyes, but is sharp mentally, and ambulates with contact assistance. I’m not exactly sure his relationship, but he appears to be the eldest man in the family here and is highly regarded. He is closely related to grandpa Seur in Georgia.

We eat lunch as I had expected and then the nice man with the moto takes me further out on the dirt road. It is bordered by rice fields and we come to three different wats. It is lushly green with water buffalo wallowing in the mud, men and women working in the fields, and children playing on the dirt road. Later I discover that this area was a Khmer Rouge labor camp where at least one of my aunts in Phnom Penh was a prisoner. Today though, it is a sleepy, peaceful setting without electricity or cars; a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere in Khmer Country.

We return to the house as the sun is setting and on the way I see children carrying car batteries around to my puzzlement. At the house I see about six car batteries on the ground and as the sun sets, they hook it up to fluorescent bulbs for lighting. I’m told the batteries will last three days, but my Khmer wasn’t good enough to find out how it gets recharged.

The next day I sadly said goodbye and was driven a few miles to another relative’s place who had a ten year old cerebral palsy child. I’m told he understands everything and he seems to follow simple instructions, smiling the whole time. I get him into some sitting and standing positions and make some recommendations to the parents. He appears to have quadriplegic CP and is not sitting independently nor is he able to reach for and grasp things purposefully. Tone is only mildly hypertonic at the upper extremities and moderately so in the lower extremities. I’m sure he can learn to sit independently if the parents work with him daily. Purposeful reach and grasp is also a realistic goal.

We then go to another relative’s home, the biggest home I see in this area at two stories and made of concrete. The family here consists of husband and wife in their forties with three girls ages five to eighteen. I play with the happy five years old a bit and we all pick coconuts from the tree in the backyard. His two other daughters mind the shack of a store across the street while his wife prepares lunch.

This balding uncle then takes me on a tour of the parallel dirt road on the other side of the creek and to the home of a super nice grandmother and her children and grand children. This white haired, ever smiling elder woman was warm and projected an ethereal kindness that was calming and serene. Eventually we end up at grandpa Seur’s old home site. The fifty feet by two hundred feet or so lot is overgrown with plants and there is a well kept wooden fence in the front. The rear is bordered by a tiny pond and then an expansive rice field that seems to stretch to the horizon.

Walking the green field and trying to imagine myself here thirty odd years ago surrounded by loud and happy aunts and uncles in their teens, grandparents, and mom and dad I felt very much at peace. The obvious lack of any structures of any kind and the likely fact that no one has lived here in the past thirty years was very saddening though. And yet, like the old concentration camp down the road, time has erased those terrible memories from the land if not the people. The land is renewed, peaceful, and beautiful; the people are friendly and welcoming; the children play with abandon as children do the world over.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 9:38 am and is filed under Khmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.