purposes, motives and desires

I mentioned in my previous post, the notion of what brings comfortable Westerners to places such as Cambodia, and a struggle with my own motives that brought me here.

Sitting at my Khmer cafe in the humidity that's hovers over PP right now, I couldn't help but wonder, beyond the tourists, what does bring people to work and live in PP and Cambodia? Is it the alarming ease to access prostitutes of all ages, types and psychological states? Is it the heat? Or possibly is it some sort of redemption from prior crimes that one can expect salvation through some act of altruism; playing with children in a Battambang orphanage comes to mind, as does, publishing useless and repetitve research papers about the forces which drive prostitution. Over dinner, I watched a white dude with the dreads park his moto across street from my outdoor table, and the older British man with the arms of a young Khmer girl wrapped around his waist while jetting down St. 278. Then there are the military offspring, or adult army brats, for whom consistent migration hass been engrained in their genes, such that the DFID contract in public health consultation in Cambodia comes with an obvious yes.

Finally, there are the people who just care. Like my boss Bruno. I can count him as one of those that I hope to look up to because they've essentially focused all of their time and energy, and perhaps have even made many personal sacrifices to get the work they want done. Over lunch at the one Italian place so good that it attracts Mafiosos galore, Bruno essentially gave me his life. Italy, Sarajevo, the Balkans, Mexico and now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and Vietnam. His only mandate being that the place must be warm, such that the Balkans for his doctoral dissertation was a bit of a fluke and parts of Central Asia are out of the question. He's really passionate for his work concerning labour migration and human rights. To the point that I think he tried to continue doing it despite the physiological intensities that wrack him right this moment. I suppose I shouldn't deify him since I've only worked with him for one day thus far; any deities I have created in this field tend to crash into pieces of defiled rubble. It must be the heat that drives these illusions.

I bring this up because I question my own motives that bring me here. I mentioned before that it was the film, The Killing Fields left an indelible image of Haing S. Ngor, crawling his way through a swamp of deceased Khmer, skulls and blood in his escape from Pol Pots agrarian work camps. I think I was about 11yrs old when I saw this, and the helpless Sidney Schanberg, journalist, abandoned by a government who could not give a damn about the million Khmer dying. I've been criticized for this. For a film, and its most likely romanticized, aggrandized, bleached out images to impel me to pursue some sort of god-like solvent for the remnants of crimes against humanity; its absolutely ridiculous. But at least it happened, and that I'm aware of the very important fact that I am here to learn. It was a question that constantly haunted me at these expat gatherings. "What makes you, fresh out of college, decide that the only internships you really want are the ones in Cambodia?" Well, why not? If Welcome to Sarajevo, After the Wedding, or god forbid, Hotel Rwanda push you into that field, well, at least it succeeded, and it got to someone. Manufactuered motion pictures are not short term levers that pull at the heart strings. Sometimes the effects are permanent.

On a lighter note, I did order something for lunch without actually knowing what it was since the waitress didn't speak English and the menu only featured Chinese and Khmer. Thankfully 5 yrs of Chinese school was able to indicate to me that I had ordered something with beef.