Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Joel Brinkley

Author:Joel Brinkley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781610391832
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-04-12T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

When the government delivered some emergency food assistance, three hundred residents of Dang Rung village rioted. Some of them saw the sacks of free rice, scores of them, delivered to the village chief. But none of them got any. So they naturally assumed he had given the rice to his family, friends, and CPP cronies, leaving none for the rest of the villagers. “We didn’t see even a grain of rice,” fifty-six-year-old Saing Moeva said with a sneer. He was rolling a cigarette from a plastic bag holding a small bit of tobacco, leaning against a pillar holding up his one-room home. Asked if he had ever received any aid from the government, he chortled as he said, “Yes, every five years,” at election time. “They come around and give us a sarong, 2.5 grams of seasoning, and a scarf.” His sense of humor was rare among Cambodians. In fact, it was quite rare to see Cambodians laugh at all. Given their desperate situation, they seldom even smiled.

His wife, Mou Chouerm, rose from the hammock under the house and pointed at a small cultivated patch. “I grow mint and sell it at market,” she said, her voice slurred. “I can earn 7,000 riel, maybe 10,000.” That’s roughly $1.75 to $2.50. The slur was the product of an ugly deformity. She’d had a stroke years earlier and lost control of the right side of her face. Her mouth drooped, baring her teeth, almost as if a lead weight pulled at it. She had looked like this since 1985, when she collapsed and her husband decided “to take her where they could treat her with traditional medicine. She had bad spirits, so we went to a secret spirit house about thirty kilometers from here. A traditional drama group played music to chase away the spirits. It didn’t really help.”

In 1985, during the Vietnamese occupation, professional health care was largely unavailable in the provinces. But the spirit treatment left more lasting damage. Not only did Mou Chouerm and Saing Moeva have to pay about $500 for the ceremony, “we also had to buy alcohol, beef, and other food for those people.” To come up with the necessary funds, the family had to sell half of its land. Now Mou Chouerm still presented an ugly sneer, and they owned so little land that they could not produce enough rice to feed themselves. That is why they were so excited to hear that the Asian Development Bank was donating free rice to the poor.

A villager working for the local government had come by to take their names and location. But to get to their house, he had to pass a Funcinpec Party sign planted at the head of the dirt track leading to their home. And when he spoke to Saing Moeva, the odds that day were fifty-fifty that he was wearing a Human Rights Party T-shirt. During the recent campaign party workers had come by handing these out for free. “No, no, I am CPP,” he objected, waving his arms, as if to say otherwise would suggest treason.

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