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April 26, 2009

This Land is Your Land? This Land is My Land.

Land rights and forced evictions have become a huge problem in cambodia over the past five years. While Cambodia shares many aspects with squatting and shantytowns around the world, there is one important difference: all titles and claims prior to 1979 were basically eradicated. Families returning home after the end of the Khmer Rouge found themselves in something vaguely reminiscent of the state of nature, albeit one administered by the Vietnamese army. According to Boramy, in the early days you could just move into a house, clean it up, and take possession. (By 1981-82, things had settled enough that while you could still claim open land, houses were pretty much a closed matter). Of course, you couldn't take any house you wanted, because some were specifically reserved for government officials.

And therein lies the biggest problem in Cambodian land issues: if you don't have a clear title to the land (something that seemed like an unnecessary expense in terms of the bribery and fees to make it happen), it probably belongs to the government. And if the government wants to sell off that land to some foreign company or some company run by friends of the government, there's not a lot you can do. The government might make some token effort at restitution, but mostly that involves moving from a central city location you've lived and worked at for 30 years, to some exurb without plumbing, electricity, or decent roads. Too many of the shiny shopping malls and
The land law says that five years of continued possession is enough to grant you a legitimate claim to the land, and that was the law, which was more or less followed until fairly recently. The real estate boom and ensuing rampant speculation (particularly by government and army officials) changed things so that there's a much stronger constellation of private and public forces pushing for unjust evictions, and much less recourse in the face of illegal actions by private companies.

It's a messed up situation, and it's one more reason for you, dear reader, to be grateful that you are not poor and Cambodian.

For more info, check out this report from Amnesty International.

Anyway and on a happier note, Khmer New year was a lot of fun. Hopefully I can put together a quick retelling of all my various adventures soon enough.

Posted by flynn at 4:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 1, 2009

Scene and Herd

Most travel/'adventure' blogging is centered around narratives. Often, they seem to revolve around going somewhere with either nature or culture relatively undisturbed by globalization, and the 'deep lesson' the author receieves from such an experience. It doesn't matter if the people imparting the experience have done it a thousand times before for naïve westerners, it's the narrative that ends up on the blog. Either that or it's a 'awareness-raising' post about some sort of downtrodden victim group in need of assistance.

Both are worthy when they come from the right places, but the thing is, everyone wants to do that, regardless of whether their experiences actually match up to the template. That's probably why blogging from afar gets tiring after a while: sometimes life doesn't fit the template. [NOTE: MY ENTRIES DURING KHMER NEW YEAR ARE LIKELY TO FALL UNERRINGLY INTO THIS TEMPLATE]. Sometimes you just get busy living, and it's hard churning that into content. Sometimes the real grain of your experience comes from the apparent husk--strange details and observations, that are common currency to people living here but impossible to guess for outsiders. With that in mind, here are a few interesting things I've seen, heard, or thought about:

-Cockfighting has been banned by Hun Sen's fiat. I wnder if this means that they're not going to have the weekly televised cockfighting on CTN (complete with stats, record, and play-by-play) anymore...

-one of the most common vectors of computer virus transmission is through USB flash memory sticks. They can sneak in through the autorun protocols, so you barely have to click on anything. And at the same time, there's really no getting around it. Given the unevenly distributed and usually poor bandwidth here, physical storage is the only way to go. Actually, if you think of it that way, the piles of software, gaming, and film DVDs for sale in the markets really just represent a form of arbitrage between areas of high bandwidth to areas of low bandwidth (and low regulation).

-interest among the Cambodians I know has slightly risen for the first of the KR trials, but overall it's still fairly low.

-I keep reading in the paper about westerners being found in their guesthouses dead of heart attacks. The thing is, they're all under 50. Speculation suggests that it's got to do with heroin, either spiked or being sold as cocaine.

-Given the myriad Mennonite, Mormon, Maryknoll and other non-M religious charities operating here, it seems like it'd be much easier to get a steady gig teaching and working on educational capacity development here if I got churched-up a bit. But seeing as they don't have any churches like the one from the Blues Brothers (the late Rev. Cleophus James presiding), I'll pass for now.

-it's MANGO SEASON, and it is indeed as wondrous as it sounds. Mangoes! Mangoes! Mangos for the taking! They're also accompanied in April by the "Mango Rains," cloudbursts that break the heat and often loosen mangoes from the trees. My Khmer tutor told me a funny story about when he was a kid. A ferocious storm hit his hometown when he was at school, knocking mangoes off trees for miles around. He ran around gathering them up, elated at the prospect of bringing so many mangoes home, when he found out that the storm had knocked over his house. You win some, you lose some.

-I went to "Culture Day" at RUPP, a big pre-Khmer New Year celebration organized by the tourism department. There were other parties sponsored by other departments, and my students were very happy and surprised to see me (I accentuated the surprise by arriving several hours after the 8am beginning of festivities) I saw lots of my students in various forms of traditional or semi-formal dress(the guys mostly wore the same things they wore for school, but the girls were practically wedding'd up in makeup and stiff, uncomfortable shiny attire), playing those silly games and dancing. (Here, slapping and hair-pulling as a form of flirtation seems to go on into your early 20s.) One of the games was similar to a piñata, but involved a clay pot and no candy. I was amused because it emphasized the humiliating aspects of swinging a stick whilst blindfolded, with none of the rewards we normally associate with such activity. I also learned some of the khmer standard party dances, which I was able to pick up on fairly quickly, The biology party was for some reason more raucous than the others, and I was asked by some possibly-drunk students if during the hip hop tracks I could "show us your stylez." Needless to say, that is the kind of offer Adam Flynn never refuses.

Posted by flynn at 11:43 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack