The Chili Bomb Diaries: Camp Economies and Cambodia

It’s been ages, I know. I actually don’t remember the last time I wrote one of these. Maybe right after Christmas? Things have been overwhelming and busy and the pressure has been enormous, so after work the last thing I want is to sit down and write something. Usually I just flake out in front of the tv with my housemates. It’s not productive but it feels necessary.

So strange. I’m eating something the secretary gave me which appears to be two cheese crackers with pineapple jelly in between. The way Thai food blends flavors still sometimes makes me stop and reflect. There are no barriers, no faux pas in mixing the four primary tastes of Thai cooking: salty, sour, sweet, and spicy. You can have a sweet and spicy; a sour and salty; sour, sweet and spicy or perhaps the most difficult for a western palate to adjust to, salty and sweet. Not like Kettle Korn salty and sweet, I mean like fish sauce and sugar. Together. Most powerfully in desserts. Frequently with corn. No combination scares me off now but I still have moments when I stop and examine my food, reflecting on the potential marketability for a product or dish in the states. Usually there is no hope.

Work has been going along. Our program is growing so quickly I can’t believe it. We’ve introduced 2 new projects a month for the last 4 months and they’ve been working! This is either the result of hard work on the part of a lot of people or sheer dumb luck on mine. Probably, it’s a mixture of the two. My staff has doubled in the last two months and I’m very happy with the results. Still, the life stories accumulate. Last month I had a woman in my training who has been a refugee in Thailand since the year I was born. This put my work into perspective. One of my new staff is fascinating, she was a bank manager in Rangoon and left to escape the regime with her husband. She is incredible and brings so much to the program because she understands what we’re trying to do and also can think about the context in ways that I can’t. I don’t know how I survived without her.

We now have Yarn Banks in all 3 camps and they are booming beyond our capacity at this point. Through the banks we lend thread for weaving to whoever needs it. They have 2 months to repay and get access to high-quality thread at a low price. Community banking is more complicated with serious trust issues impeding progress. People just aren’t used to putting their money anywhere but in their homes so it’s proving difficult to get people to try it. Business skills training continues at a rate of one training a month and the cross-section of participants is always fascinating. High school kids, business people from Burma, and housewives all congregate to learn about record keeping and how to set a price.

The differences between the 3 camps I work in still blow my mind. In the largest there’s a full-fledged economy complete with the social stratification according to wealth found in the rest of the world. In the second largest the Muslim community dominates the markets. In the Muslim section there is an entire street with shops and restaurants. It looks like any small town in Thailand. The smallest camp, however, has one noodle shop run by an NGO and only a few small scattered shops.

Given that my job is to find ways to empower people economically, I feel very overwhelmed sometimes especially in this time of resettlement. People who have been here for years and years have been living on rations for years and years without really having to work. This is as it should be, but as we gear up for ever larger numbers of people resettling to third countries the situation can feel desperate. People who haven’t worked in years are going to have to make their way in America or Australia or Canada. They are going to have to find apartments and learn English and figure out what to do with their kids during the day. In camp, four babies means four rations. In the states four babies means four mouths to feed and, in the US, four plane tickets to repay to the government after resettlement. Resettlement also reduces people’s interest in contributing to camp life. So many are just waiting to go that they don’t want to work or start to participate in any kind of program, even though they will probably be waiting for months if they get to go at all. As a result, recruiting staff and participants is a very frustrating business these days.

This past weekend was Songkran, a big water festival in Thailand. I took advantage of the 4 day weekend to go to Cambodia. I spent two days wandering around Angkor Wat and the temples around Siem Reap in the kind of heat that is unknown to most Seattleites. One day in Phnom Penh finished up the adventure on a dark note with the primary purpose of the stop being the Tuol Sleng prison museum which documents the Cambodian genocide. It may have just been the heat that made me feel ill, but the experience was horrific. It was frightening. Unlike Nazi concentration camps, which are located out of major urban centers, this place is a converted high school right in the middle of Phnom Penh. It’s complete with the kind of white and orange- checked flooring you’d expect to find in a high school. And I’m not sure what else to say about it, except, maybe, that what I finally learned while walking through that space was that this didn’t happen very long ago. We learn about the holocaust all through our educations in the states, but don’t hear much about other cases of atrocity on a large scale. Even right now, the word genocide gets thrown around in the news all the time and, of course, everyone thinks it’s terrible and should be stopped but how many of us stop to think about what it really means?

Being here, I’m amazed by the variety of hells that exist on earth and the way the world keeps turning in spite of them.

On that uplifting note, I’m going to call this email finished. It’s been a long time since a lot of you have heard from me. I plan to launch a full-scale attack on my address book soon to touch base, but be patient!