Waking Up To Reality

Once upon a time there was a dragon who lived in a lake. By the side of the lake the Buddha sat and meditated. Every day the dragon watched the Buddha, and they became friends. One day the dragon pleaded with the Buddha to let him become a monk. He wanted this more than anything in the world. Impressed with his eagerness and his desire to learn, the Buddha agreed to change the dragon into a man for a time, so that the dragon could train with the other monks.

Years passed and the dragon was the most diligent of monks. He almost forgot he was really a dragon. Because he had taken the form of a man, the other monks and the other people who lived or worked at the Pagoda where he was training, either forgot or never knew that once this monk had been a dragon.

One day, however, the Buddha woke up to a commotion. One of the workers had entered the monk’s bedroom to see a huge dragon on the bed. Nodding sadly, the Buddha went to the room. There on the bed was the dragon, weeping at the sight of himself and begging the Buddha to turn him back again. But the Buddha explained to the dragon that he could only work this miracle for a while. It was simply time for the dragon to become a dragon again.

Sadly, the dragon accepted his fate, to return to his original form, but he asked the Buddha that the other monks remember him. To this day Buddhist monks wear their orange robes with a twisted piece of fabric up and over the shoulder, like a snake – or a dragon, in honour of the dragon and his commitment to his faith.

This story is told to us by Y, on a day in which we essentially travel around Battambang, peeping into other people’s lives.

The family who make rice paper get up every day at four am and work until two pm. They soak the rice first, then crush it in a machine. They mix the crushed rice with clean water and steam it until it reaches a paste like consistency. Crouching between two barbecue style hobs, each with a pot on top of it over which is stretched a thin piece of fabric, with a small gap to allow the steam to escape, they spread the mixture thinly in a circle over the fabric, put the lid on and allow to steam. When the mixture has been steamed to a circle of rice paper mixture, they scoop it up and hang it over a sort of turntable made of four pieces of pipe. The other person then takes these circles of rice paper carefully off the pipe, spread them out on large bamboo frames, to leave in the sun to dry. It’s long hours, hot work and very repetitive. By the end of the working day they have made, literally, thousands of rice paper circles which they can sell. There is much competition from hundred of other, similar family industries and from exportors like Vietnam, who use machinery ensuring more uniform circles, and, (arguably), better quality goods. If it rains, the produce is smaller, because they have to scratch around for alternative places to dry the rice paper, and the humidity makes this a slower process.

“Do they make enough money?” I ask Y.

“No.” says Y, “”They struggle. But they have to do something.”

The family who makes dried banana slices work long hours each day. Surrounded by hundreds of bunches of bananas, the wife squats, picking up one banana at a time and slicing it by hand very thinly, before laying the slices on bamboo boards to dry. When the slices are dry they are packaged. Each packet sells for about 25 cents. Out of the proceeds they must buy more bananas. The final produce is difficult to sell. Mostly they are sold to children in schools.

They struggle. In case you were wondering. But they have to do something. The lady slicing the bananas beams at us, as she tries, simultaneously to comfort her crying baby. She sings to herself a little as she works. However tough their lives might be, we have seen nobody looking as grim as you might expect.

The family who work together to make rice noodles get up at five a.m. and work until three p.m. They make a similar rice paste and dry it in large sacks put out in the sun. Once it is hard and dry they soften it slightly with fresh water, and then force it through the holes of a mould using a large wooden beam as a lever. The two young men who work it repeatedly refill the mould and then push the lever down by sitting on it. The noodles which are forced through the holes in the mould fall into a waiting pot of water, boiling over an open flame. At the risk of becoming repetitive – it’s hard, hot work.

Once a reasonable batch of noodles are cooked this way, the men fish them out of the boiling water and rinse them with fresh water, before handing the bowl of noodles in water to the mother and older daughter who squat on a bamboo table, pulling handfuls of noodles out, folding them attractively and expertly into banana leaf lined baskets for sale, and watching what look like Cambodia soap operas on the TV which hangs from the ceiling on fraying string. This serves as office and home together.  I don’t ask about money this time.

The fish paste, used by Cambodians in many Khmer dishes, is made by a selection of families at the fish market. Y warns us, before we arrive, about the smell.

“We will go and you can see.” He says, “and if you don’t like, we don’t stay”

He is not purely sparing us the details as vegetarians. I gather some tourists have taken one sniff of the fermenting fish in huge barrels, their guts on the floor, and urged him to drive as far away as possible. This rather goads me into a determination to be the tourists that don’t. Besides, when the tuk tuk pulls up at the market and I reel slightly from the heady aromas of dead and fermenting fish, I see two children, maybe six or seven years old, squatting together over a chopping board in the corner, expertly slicing and gutting fish. And if they can do it, I can. Though frankly I think it would have been less gut wrenching if they’d been playing with the fish than working with them. I stare at their hands, quick and concise and practiced, and I try to imagine handing a British seven year old a cleaver. I try to imagine asking them to gut sacks full of fish with it. I try to imagine them doing it with such speed and efficiency.

“Can they not afford school?”  I ask Y, still transfixed by the children.

“Oh yes – they have to go to school and primary school is free for learning. They just have to pay for materials.  But they work between seven and eleven and two and five. This is their break.”

This is their break. I am sobered. Once again, as I stare at the wooden vats full of salted fish, being churned and mixed by the expert hands of the seller, I don’t ask whether the families make enough money. I am getting a little too used to the answer.

“It is better now,” says Y, still talking about the children’s education, “there are many NGO’s to help give free schooling.”

“Will they have a different job when they grow up?” I ask, “if they have education?”

“Not really,” says Y, “they will follow their parents.”

It occurs to me that I am being vastly patronising – when in fact what I am faced with is children capable not only of learning in school, but of undertaking a skilled job in the meantime. There is nothing wrong with following your parent’s job. But I suppose it does depend what your parents do to get money.

We pass a lady on a wobbling bike, piled high with sacks of something.

“She is on her own”, says Y, sadly, “and so she collects bottles and rubbish. She can get a small bit of money from giving them to the recycling centre. It does not give her much. But she has no choice.”

Later we hand our empty plastic bottles to a disabled man in a wheelchair who is collecting them. We feel magnanimous. Then we feel patronising. This is a country full of people who may be struggling, but have dignity. They feel, as Y keeps saying to us, that they must do something. It’s a work ethic far greater than what we know of back home. But it’s also a necessary one. There is no social security system in Cambodia. If you don’t have any money you don’t have any money. Nobody else will hand it to you. And if you cannot work or your harvest suffers, you lose out. It’s a rather harsh example of the survival of the fittest. But when I look at the people we have seen today working – I rather suspect them to be much fitter than us.

We ride on the bamboo train. If it sounds like a fairground ride that’s because it is like one. Originally, this railway served as a link between Phnom Penh and Battambang, transporting goods. More recently the advent of motorcycles and road transport has ceased this usage of the railway, and it remains purely as a tourist attraction. We climb onto what is essentially a sort of bamboo ‘raft’ on wheels and sit on the floor of it on cushions. Our driver uses a piece of string to start the chugging engine, and we are off, clattering down the tracks like the steam engines of old. Every time the ‘train’ crosses the link between one set of rails and another, there is a resounding clang and a jolt. It reminds me of the ‘Runaway Train’ ride at the various theme parks of my youth. As we click clack along the tracks, through green rice paddies, jungle foliage and underneath huge spider’s webs in which sit huge, portentous looking arachnids, I ask M is this is the sort of experience he imagined when we were planning this trip.

“Kind of” he says, “though I don’t think I could have imagined this.”

Every so often we encounter another train travelling the other way along the single set of tracks. Both carriages stop and there is a small altercation between drivers at which point one or other of the train disgorges its passengers onto the side of the tracks and then both drivers lift the bamboo raft from its wheels and place it, and the wheels by the side of the tracks to allow the triumphant train to continue it’s journey. Then the whole raft is put back together, and the journey recommenced.

“You should tip the driver” says the young girl in charge of one of the market stalls at the end of the tracks, where we drink from a coconut and try to settle our lurching stomachs in preparation for the return. “The fare you pay goes only to the owner. Not to the driver.”

“I hope that’s not true,” says M over the sound of the engine as we chug our way back. I agree. It’s likely that the girl is simply doing a friend a favour, but unfortunately equally likely that the drivers are not in fact paid a fair wage. And that the owner is western and/or very rich, widening the already chasmic gap between rich and poor in Cambodia, with every clack of the tracks. We tip him just in case. It’s either food for his family or it’s money for a beer. Either way we don’t begrudge it.

Later, we find ourselves sitting, spellbound on the side of the dusty road, staring up at a large cave in the side of a mountain. The air is filled with the sound of bats. This is the famous ‘bat cave’, in which, according to popular legend, more bats live than there are Cambodians in Cambodia. At first, we can only perceive a faint circular motion in the mouth of the cave, as though the bats are warming up. Then suddenly, as if by some pre arranged signal, they soar up and out of the cave, silhouetted against the purpling sky and arcing, elegantly, over our heads in formation. There are thousands of them. It takes some fifteen minutes of constantly emerging bats before the line begins to taper out. It is absolutely and literally breath taking. (“Don’t open your mouth when you look up” warns somebody. We don’t ask why.)

I am filled, as I watch, with a sense of how utterly privileged we are to be witnessing this. Of how very lucky we have been to have the breaks in life we did, to be born into an affluent, western society. To be able to drop everything and travel for a year. And I am reminded, suddenly, of the story of the dragon, awarded his wish but for all too short a time period.

I wonder if we will wake up, one day, to discover ourselves poor farmers in Cambodia. To find we must make rice paper all day for pennies.  That the comfortable lives we have been leading were never intended to last forever. It’s time to go back.

I imagine a world in which the reigning Godhead awards each person a period of time to be poor. And a time to be wealthy. But deliberately, fails to tell them this. Each person lives out his life assuming it to be for ever. I imagine that the Godhead have promised to cease this cycle and grant immortality to every human, as soon as humanity has learned to balance its resources so that everyone is equal. A huge cosmic game that humanity doesn’t know it is playing.

I wonder how long it would take before we won it.