It's Friday night now and I'm sitting here at the computer listening to Positive life radio broadcasting from Michigan or some place very far away. My but things have changed in the time I've been here. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I landed at Poegentong Airport in Phnom Penh and met up with Murray Millar the ADRA Cambodia country director. There were lines of logging trucks going through Phnom Penh toward the port. Army people everywhere with guns and tanks. Generally I had the feeling that I was in the middle of very frontier town and country. Like stepping back in time to Cody Wyoming in 1890 or something! On the one hand, people were going about their lives as they had for years and yet the atmosphere was charged. In a few months there would be an election and no one knew if war would break out again or not. Almost daily there were Khmer Rouge attacts somewhere.
Now the political climate is very steady, at least on the surface. We can drive anywhere anytime of day without being shot at with an RPG (better known as B-40's, here). There are no longer huge swaths of untouched jungle teeming with elephants and other wildlife. In fact, the human population has almost doubled since then, which probably helps explain the almost instant loss of most of the wildlife.
But probably one of most amazing changes is that fact that I'm sitting here on the internet listening to a radio station from America, able to chat with my folks or anyone else in the world. The first few years here we went down to one of two hotels that had phones in Phnom Penh once a day and sent and recieved faxes for 6 dollars per minute. Most of the time the faxes messed up and we would send the same fax two or three times for an average cost of about 15 dollars a page. There was no point in entertainng the thought of calling home when my salary was only 150 dollars a month. And now I can post pictures that I took this afternoon on this site for the whole world to see instantly. I know that change is normal and most people reading this will think it strange that someone finds it quite so amazing. Maybe there is something in me that doesn't want change to happen so fast. Especially here in Cambodia, change is often not all positive. For example, here in Rovieng, a Chinese company is setting up house and preparing to stay a very long time. They are talking 70 years for starters! The object is an apparent iron ore deposit with upwards of 3.5 billion tons of high grade ore. There is also gold which they have already begun to dig for. Last week several villages staged a protest over the fact that the company has been poisoning the local stream and killing dozens of cows and buffalow. The gold mine is extremely small scale compared to the iron ore one which is on the bank of our one an only river here in Preah Vihear. After reading newpaper clippings about Chinese iron ore mines in China where whole villages have cancer and other problems from living down stream of the operations, I have to wonder what this place will look like in a few years. And yet most people here are happy to have them here having bought into line that in a few years everyone will be able to live in high rise concrete apartments with running water and 24 hour electricity. I guess I've gotten carried away here with my reminiscing. I had actually meant to write about my week. I guess I can do that tommorrow!
Friday, February 1, 2008
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