Today I stood with my family in a school turned into a prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of people from 1975-1979 were photographed, measured, weighed, imprisoned, tortured, and then killed. Seven of them survived. And I stood next to my 11 year old son, by a tree against which Khmer Rouge soldiers swung the heads of babies, so that they would not grow up to take revenge against their parents' murderers. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million dead, in 4 years.
Maybe a bad parenting moment. But how do you hide from this? We gawked our way through the Vietnam War museum in Saigon too, displays of Agent Orange birth defects and photographs that haunted my own childhood. We stood by a B-52 bomb crater that helped mostly destroy a 1000 year old Hindu temple site where the US Army mistakenly believed the NVA were hiding. How can you explain this? Why should you try? I don't kmow. I hope I didn't mess this one up...
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Out of Indonesia
Ibu Kasum, our wonderful pembantu, sobbed early Monday as we loaded up the van with out giant load of suitcases for the drive to the Semarang airport. I'd been feeling like crying for about a week by then, every motorcycle ride around Salatiga through the cloudy lens of my tearing-up eyes. And now we're not there anymore - I'm writing this from Hanoi.
We lost internet at home in the final week, or I would have certainly posted more. But then we had to scramble around town looking for places to do our emailing, and I never got the last week's musings up. It was a flurry of departure and last-minute purchases (like the machete I bought, which later caused an hour's worth of drama in the Singapore airport, though I am now a licensed machete carrier in Singapore.) Every morning Mount Merbabu looked glorious last week, shining and green and huge. The department had a farewell lunch. We packed and packed and distributed stuff. We ate our favorite sate and fried noodles. And then we left, suddenly gone from a place that had started to feel like home. Now, in Vietnam, again linguistically helpless, I speak to everyone in Indonesian, accidentally.
It's a good thing we didn't come straight home, though. The transition would have been too abrupt. We would suddenly be in our house, still grieving about leaving, looking at our life there with outsider eyes. Plus we're in Vietnam now - so far we've just wandered around and bought food, which is miraculously delicious.We're on the road for three weeks, a last Asian hurrah (until the next one), in Vietnam and Cambodia, only tourists now, wide-eyed and lost. It will be wonderful.
I will write more as I can, but probably not too much until we are home. But we have left a place I never expected to love as much as I do, and I know only that we will certainly return.
We lost internet at home in the final week, or I would have certainly posted more. But then we had to scramble around town looking for places to do our emailing, and I never got the last week's musings up. It was a flurry of departure and last-minute purchases (like the machete I bought, which later caused an hour's worth of drama in the Singapore airport, though I am now a licensed machete carrier in Singapore.) Every morning Mount Merbabu looked glorious last week, shining and green and huge. The department had a farewell lunch. We packed and packed and distributed stuff. We ate our favorite sate and fried noodles. And then we left, suddenly gone from a place that had started to feel like home. Now, in Vietnam, again linguistically helpless, I speak to everyone in Indonesian, accidentally.
It's a good thing we didn't come straight home, though. The transition would have been too abrupt. We would suddenly be in our house, still grieving about leaving, looking at our life there with outsider eyes. Plus we're in Vietnam now - so far we've just wandered around and bought food, which is miraculously delicious.We're on the road for three weeks, a last Asian hurrah (until the next one), in Vietnam and Cambodia, only tourists now, wide-eyed and lost. It will be wonderful.
I will write more as I can, but probably not too much until we are home. But we have left a place I never expected to love as much as I do, and I know only that we will certainly return.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Relativity
Upon seeing wild orangutans in the jungle of Borneo's Tangung Puting National Park:
The fifteen year-old: ...uh...yea, that's cool...can we go back to the boat now?
The eleven year-old: Oh my god, mom! Look at its butthole!!!
The fifteen year-old: ...uh...yea, that's cool...can we go back to the boat now?
The eleven year-old: Oh my god, mom! Look at its butthole!!!
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