Floating village

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Hi everyone, this is Garry.  We’ve just returned from a late evening meal and it’s 11pm, so there will be no student post tonight.  Today was our rest day in the Friends Forever program and the 10.30am start was very popular with the members of our team.  They’ve been working very hard, often in high temperatures and close to 100% humidity, so three extra hours of sleep was just what they needed to prepare themselves for the final few days of the trip.

We travelled about 15 km out of Siem Reap to a tributary of the vast Tonle Sap, the lake that dominates central Cambodia and is, in fact, Asia’s largest lake.  Tonle Sap is tidal.  When the rains come (they have started now) in the wet season, the waters of the Mekong and other streams and rivers fill so rapidly that they flow back into Tonle Sap, raising its water level considerably.  Around the shores of the lake, and in many of its tributaries, live boat people.  They are often very, very poor – too poor to own any land, so they have to live on boats.  As the levels of water change with the seasons, the boat people move their floating homes accordingly.  Along the shores of the tributaries are also ramshackle homes made of pieces of wood, tarpaulins, tin and any other pieces of refuse the owners can scavenge.  These homes are also dismantled and moved above the water line as the levels rise and fall.

Many of the people in the floating village we visited are of Vietnamese descent.  We boarded a large cruise motor vessel and chugged our way down the channel to the lake.  On both sides we saw floating homes and other structures in various states of repair.  One boat that we passed served as a floating general store, another as a floating men’s clothing retailer and a third was selling fruit and vegetables.  We saw a floating pagoda where monks live and work, floating schools, a floating orphanage, a floating TV repair shop, a floating Catholic church, floating mechanics, a floating duck farm and even a floating basketball court.

As we motored along, boats passed us in both directions.  Often their appearance belied their seaworthiness and many had someone sitting in the prow continually bailing water while another worked the tiller.  As you might expect, the water was filthy, yet we saw a child defecating in it, people washing clothes and dishes in it, people catching fish in it, kitchen waste being dumped in it, and on several occasions, people dipping cups into it and drinking it.  As fascinating as it was, there were also many depressing sights.  Of all the poverty we have seen in Cambodia, this was perhaps the most extreme.

In the boats, many people lay in hammocks.  Others, including children, were in the water alongside their boats, playing or perhaps repairing fishing nets.  Our guide told us that those people lucky enough to get a job often left their children unattended on the boats all day while they went in to Siem Reap to work.  He said that seven children drowned in this village in the past year.  He had grown up in the village, but his father forbade him to leave the boat until he was sixteen because of all the unexploded landmines that were once prevalent in the area.  He lost his best friend to a landmine.

As our cruise boat left the tributary and headed out into the lake, the sky suddenly turned very black and threatening.  Scanning the horizon, it was impossible to see the far side of this vast inland sea.  There were a few small fishing boats on the lake, but falling fish levels have caused the government to place a short term moratorium on fishing to try to build fish numbers to healthy levels once again.  Fish is a staple food in Cambodia, especially in the vicinity of the lake and the Mekong River.

Looking back to where we had come from we saw a small boat rapidly gaining on us.  Soon it was alongside us and a small boy unwrapped a python from around his neck and draped it over Arthan’s shoulders.  “You give me one dollar.  One dollar,” he demanded.  His mother at the tiller was also begging.  It was distasteful and very depressing.  We looked to the other side to see that a second boat had also chased us.  In this boat was a woman with a sleeping infant.  She reached her hand over the other side and began screeching that she also wanted “one dollar.”  It’s hard to explain to our students that handing over money to beggars such as these is wrong, but all of our guides have advised us that people such as this often spend their money on alcohol and gambling and use their children to beg rather than sending them to school.  The best advice we have had is to be generous with people who work to earn a handout, such as blind or landmine victim musicians who will play for a donation, but will never solicit money in a menacing way.  They only left us alone when another cruise boat was nearby.

On the return journey the boat stopped at a souvenir shop that doubled as a crocodile farm and we had to virtually ‘run the gauntlet’ of more begging mothers and small children and infants, many of them bearing pythons.  A python was placed on our boat deck at the place where we had to alight.  Another was placed on the boat dock, between the crocodiles and the boat, requiring some of us to step over it.  The pythons are harmless and present a photo opportunity, but the relentless “You give me one dollar” that the children were screeching was enough to drive us all back onto the boat in a short space of time and we all breathed a sigh of relief when the beggars were left in our wake.

As we chugged noisily back along the channel the rains came.  In Cambodia, when it rains, it really pours down in bucketloads and soon it was coming down very heavily indeed.  This did little to deter the people of the floating village.  Little kids still continued to jump in and splash about.  Fishermen continued to repair their nets.  Commuters continued to pass us in both directions.  Meanwhile, we huddled under cover and pulled the tarps down on all sides of the boat.

It was an eye opening experience and allowed us to witness yet another aspect of the hardships faced by the people of this country.  Perhaps most obscene of all is that the government has commenced the construction of a huge resort casino complex at the entrance to the floating village and clearly intends to exploit foreign tourists who want to visit the area.  Sadly, almost every large tourist hotel constructed in this region in recent years is foreign owned and all the profits earned ultimately leave Cambodia to fill the coffers of business people in other parts of the world.  Even the Cambodian people’s greatest cultural heritage, the Angkor Wat temple complex, is managed by foreign owners and most of the tourist dollars spent there do not ever find their way into the hands of the descendants of the Khmer people who built it.