Tag Archives: Siem Reap

The Healing Fields…A Message from our Cambodian Guide

Today I read an e-mail from my study abroad professor with a forwarded message from Bunthin, our guide during our time in Cambodia. It is worth sharing because within the e-mail was a proposal to help to build an accommodation center for poor women and girls, who work late at night, to stay in when they leave their work and return home in the morning next day. Women and girls are often raped, robbed, and/or violated in respective ways by evil men during the night-time as they ride bikes 6-11 miles from Siem Reap back to their homes outside the city. As in the night of January 12, three women were murdered and robbed in Siem Reap province. One of those women was brutally raped before she was killed.

These girls deserve better

Siem Reap has seen civil unrest disappear in recent years and, as a result, tourism has increased year over year, providing growing opportunities for women to work in hotels, bars, restaurants, nightclubs, spas, and other entertainment places. It is an amazing and beautiful town with many wonderful people who deserve to be safe as they commute from work and home. I plan to get involved with this project and do what I can to help the wonderful Khmer women and girls of Cambodia find safety as they do what they can to have a better life. Cambodia is a wonderful place, but still has much healing to do, so as I learn more about this project I will post more.

Below is the e-mail Bunthin sent to the professor.

Dear Dr. Cliffford J. Shultz,

I hope you and your students were all arrived home safely. Since you came to my country I have met you in person and led your groups. To meet you and your students was my privilege as my personal. I was always happy and proud to show you and your students of my personal story, country, culture, and  histories etc.

I do know that you and your students have seen our country as well as our people living condition and the problem we are facing right now. On behalf of Cambodian and myself are thank you so much for Loyola University Chicago, which have committed to help me, our poor people, our poor  children to get better education.

Apart from all your above commitment, I have raised the idea of helping poor girls, ladies in general women who works for tourism sector in Siem Reap. These poor women come from countryside which their home located 10km to 18km away from town. These women have to go back home from work at the end of their work shift. Most of tourism work place are required to work in the night shift. These women have to push bike back home in the night which is very dangerous. As our government has reported that Traffic accident is the main killer of our people today. Apart from traffic problem is the human trafficking, sex abuse especially happened in the night  when those women leave work for home.

So please have a look of my proposal concept note in attach. I really want  you and your students to help and make this project to happen in Siem Reap town in order to deduct phenomenon incident and to help to increase their safety and happiness.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
Bunthin

My Visit to a Cambodian Hospital

It sounds much scarier than it actually was, however I did mention to my professor, “Had I known I would be going to a hospital while in Cambodia, I may not have come on this trip.” For someone who RARELY gets sick back home, I sure have a way of falling ill when I travel *sigh*. Good thing I wore a surgical mask on my flight over from Chicago like a weirdo.

Between the poor air quality in Ho Chi Minh City (6 million motorbikes expel a lot of exhaust), our bodies adjusting to a 13 hour time difference, lack of sleep, drastic changes in diet, etc. most of us developed colds. I was the lucky one in the group whose body was unable to fully combat the illness.

I must have looked pretty bad that morning, and I had no voice. After our elephant rides to the Bayon Temple, I swear everyone asked me how I was feeling. With no voice to speak, I resorted to thumbs up and forced smiles. I was pushing through as well as I could, but was weak and having problems breathing. Katie (who became my nurse and mother for the next 2 days) and my professor insisted I go back to the hotel for rest. It was my choice, which I was VERY upset to have to make, but walking up the steps at the temple became an exhausting chore, so Katie and I hopped in a tuk-tuk to head back to the hotel.

Just moments before we left for the hotel

Katie and I at Pre Rup for sunset

Katie, God bless her, was just wonderful, asking for every detail of my symptoms, forcing me to drink water and eat a little, checking on me every couple of hours as I napped, etc. Eventually it was insisted I go to the hospital to make sure there wasn’t any “strange Asian flu” that I caught and to figure out whether or not I needed to be flown to Thailand for care (many people don’t know this, but Thailand has some of the best healthcare in the world, in fact, healthcare tourism is big business there since they offer quality services at a fraction of the cost in the U.S….it’s really a shame what liability insurance and frivolous lawsuits do to HC costs in this country, but I digress).

Royal Angkor International Hospital

So, we made our way to the Royal Angkor International Hospital, which, quite possibly, could have been the best healthcare experience I’ve had in years. The staff was attentive, kind and quick to get me to the doctor (who I’m guessing was either Khmer or Thai) for diagnosis. The nurses wore the traditional nursing uniform (which I have not seen, I think, ever) and were tiny and adorable. While the doctor and nurses spoke English, there was a slight communication barrier we were able to get through with minor effort.

It turned out I only had a double ear infection, sinus infection, slight fever and laryngitis…nothing I haven’t had at home (sigh of relief).  When the doctor said he wanted to do blood work just to be sure there wasn’t anything else wrong, I was sure to ask if they use disposable needles (they do). It seems almost silly after the fact because this is really a world-class facility but Siem Reap is MUCH more developed than I thought it would be, having had a surge of tourism in recent years.

I look really pathetic, don't I?

An hour later, the doctor went through my blood work, line by line, with a level of thoroughness I have never experienced in the states. “Your white blood cell count is high because your body is trying to fight a bacterial infection. Your hemoglobin is normal, but if it wasn’t that could indicate…” Basically everything else was fine, but my sodium level was very low since I wasn’t eating enough food (causing the weakness and dizziness I was experiencing that morning at the temple).

I was given $115 in medication (thank God for student health insurance) in a cute little gift bag you’d expect to get at the Body Shop (“Get well soon” it says along the bottom), with a total bill of $419. I was to sleep, drink and EAT to get back to normal. Katie is such a doll, she took care of me all day, ordering me room service, making sure I was slowly getting better and taking my medication.

It goes without saying that I wish I didn’t miss a day of this amazing trip, however, Dr. Shultz must be so proud of how far this country and city has come in the past 15 years. He has worked as a marketing consultant in this region of the world to promote tourism in Siem Reap and offer direction on how to create a “differential advantage” for Cambodia over other countries in Asia. When he first started travelling to Cambodia, it was not safe for foreigners, but has become one of the safest places in the country. If not for his efforts, who knows if this hospital would even be there!

And with that crazy story, I will leave you with the guy from Avicii’s video…

Levels

Elephant Rides in Cambodia…Priceless

A few things I didn’t know about elephants:

1. They have the most gentle brown eyes. The tame giants we rode seemed sad…thus making Coldplay’s “Paradise” the theme song for the rest of the trip :)

2. They’re actually kind of hairy

3. Riding on the back of one is very bumpy

On the morning of the 8th, after breakfast, my classmates and I paid $15 each for an elephant ride through the jungle into Bayon Temple, the last temple to be built at Angkor. Built primarily as a Mahayana Buddhist shrine dedicated to Buddha, the temple has 216 gigantic faces on the temple’s towers smiling in 4 directions. As seen in the video above, when going through the main entrance, on either side of the bridge, there are figures depicting the Churning of the Sea of Milk, which we had learned about the day prior at Angkor Wat. Approaching the archway, we saw the first of many faces, beaming down at us.

Smiling face at Bayon Temple

Sadly, after an hour or so, I was feeling too weak to go up the steps and was having difficulty breathing. This adventure had to be cut short, but in hindsight, I am just glad I pressed through my illness long enough to have had the chance to ride on an elephant!

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Crazy Buntha’s Bar – The Path Less Traveled

Pub street, the main night-life area of Siem Reap, was another one of those unexpected places encountered during my stay in Southeast Asia (we never stopped learning new things on this trip, so it obviously was an immensely successful study abroad). When reading about Cambodia, I learned of war, and genocide, and people suffering from lost limbs as a result of still-active mines. What I never read about was just how developed (and safe) Siem Reap has become in the past decade and how fantastic the night-life scene is in this little town of 250,000 (about the size of Lincoln Nebraska).

Pub Street Entrance

Admittedly, my fellow classmate, Damien, and I were looking for a break from Asian food and ended up at a pizza place in the strip of restaurants with names all strikingly similar to each other; happy pizza, happy herb pizza, ecstatic pizza, happy Angkor pizza. No surprise, Chicago pizza wins :) While we ate, fireworks went off in a courtyard across the way. We had no idea why since it was now a full week after New Years and a couple of weeks before Tet. Little did I know I’d have my own adventure later in the night, during which I would discover the meaning of the celebration.

Damien and I started at Angkor What?, the first bar to open on Pub Street back in 1998, which offers $0.50 drafts of Angkor and Anchor beer (and they taste about the same). Almost everyone spoke English and everywhere we went listed items in U.S. dollars. Being on the other side of the globe, I found it strange I never had to exchange to the local currency, the Riel (our professor suggested just bringing a lot of singles, which was a great suggestion because that is all I had to use).

Temple Club

While observing the movement on the street from the outside patio, we noticed a whole group of our fellow classmates walking by. Soon thereafter we left Angkor What? and ended up dancing our hearts out at Temple Club.

Fun group of Loyola students

A couple of hours later, around midnight or so, I went to the street outside to get my bearings and determine which direction to walk to get back to the hotel. The cold I had been fighting since arriving in SEA seemed to be getting worse, so I decided it was time to call it a night. While looking at my map, I saw Cambodian kids dancing next to me. Despite having to sell items on the street in the middle of the night, they still had cute little smiles on their faces and seemed very happy. These two in the video look about the age of my niece and nephew…I can’t imagine them being out at 12am having to make money to eat.

At the very end of that video, around the 1:15 minute mark, you’ll see a guy in a white shirt. That’s Mr. Chin, a soon to be new friend who allowed me to have an adventure I will never forget. He approached me asking if he could help me figure out how to get where I needed to go. Yes, but both being endlessly curious, we started a conversation that ended up lasting a couple of hours.

This tuk-tuk driver was warm and friendly and having the good sense to trust him I asked where he and other locals like to hang out. I asked if he could take a break from driving people around and have a couple of beers with me off Pub street and somewhere else that my classmates wouldn’t likely find. He took me a bar owned by his friend, Crazy Buntha.

Mr. Chin my new Khmer friend

Buntha was only slightly crazy, more funny and quirky if you ask me. I noticed a Khmer waitress behind the bar, and a group of Aussies who live in Siem Reap (if I remember correctly they do UN peace-keeping work). For the next hour or so he asked me all about life in the states, how my husband and I met, what he and I do for a living, what we do for fun, where we’ve traveled,  and so on. Only having the chance to travel to the U.S. in his wildest dreams, he was as interested in learning from me as I was him. He told me about life in Cambodia, taught me how to say thank you in Khmer (Ahh Koon), and shared his thoughts about the police in his city. “Now it is very safe here. About 80% people here good, 20% or so bad.” I assured him that was probably the case in the U.S., and the rest of the world, as well.

Pointing at the Khmer day calendar, Chin said, “Buntha, change the day, the day over,” and ripped January 7th off the wall since it was now about 1:30am on the 8th. Chin handed it to me and said “Today was special day, we celebrate. Today was celebrate Vietnamese overthrow of Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge. In 1979 on this day, they come and save our country, so we happy.” This explained the fireworks I saw earlier! How exciting to be able to celebrate that day with a local! Shortly thereafter I was too tired and talking became painful (suffering early stages of laryngitis) so I asked him to take me back to the hotel.

This one day, ending with drinks and conversation with Chin, was my personal favorite of the trip. He even gave me his information so that I could call and have him and his tuk-tuk driving friends pick my classmates and I up the next night and do something similar, but sadly, this was the only night I was able to go out in Cambodia because the cold I was fighting, well, it ended up winning.

I found this interesting clip about the event from ABC in 1979. Interesting what other governments, including the U.S. said about it at the time. Thank God the Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot, one of the worst mass-murders in history!

The Fall of Pol Pot and Phnom Penh

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