Eat To Live: Feeding Pol Pot's children
- From: Chim <ChimS1@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 21 May 2007 13:02:20 -0700
Eat To Live: Feeding Pol Pot's children
Posted : Mon, 21 May 2007 19:30:00GMT
By JULIA WATSON
On the manicured lawn between the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh and the
Tonle Sap River, a young couple sitting under a banyan tree offered me
their 14-month-old son in exchange for my wrist watch.
"Angelina, yes! Angelina, yes!" they complained when I turned them
down. Gustav Auer of Friends restaurant is not surprised. He and
others involved in non-governmental organizations locally are waiting
to see whether the adoption efforts of Madonna and Angelina Jolie --
who visited Friends when she was in Cambodia recently -- have a
positive or an adverse effect.
There is no such thing, says Auer, as a legal adoption policy in
Cambodia. It's all about the money. You pay enough, you get the
papers. "In my nine years here, I know of only one legal adoption
where there was no financial compensation." Crossing the Mekong River
by ferry boat on the bus trip from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to the
Cambodian capital, hawkers brandished woven circular trays of the sort
adored by Western interior decorators. They were piled high with
cooked cicadas and shiny black beetles.
These, though, are not the food of the poor, but popular snacks. What
the city poor eat in this staggeringly impoverished country is what
they can scavenge from garbage dumps, those putrid-smelling piles of
rubbish mixed with plastic bags and food scraps piled on every street
corner and in every gutter.
The visible city poor are children, as young as 5 years old. Their
parents more than likely have HIV/AIDS, or have sent them in from the
countryside to support the family.
This is a nation of no contraception. When foreign NGOs distribute
birth control methods in the villages, they are seldom used; farmers
need workers in the fields.
In the city and towns, children are useful earners as beggars or
prostitutes -- for their families if they have one, for themselves if
not. So long as tourists support them, there is no incentive to seek
out the few opportunities for education.
Look into the face of any Khmer in the streets of Phnom Penh in their
mid-thirties and you will be looking into the face of a victim or a
perpetrator of Pol Pot's genocide.
At one of the killing fields just outside the capital, in the shadow
of a glass-sided temple densely packed over 100 feet high with skulls,
the rains sluice at the compacted earth paths between the mass graves.
Bundles of clothing, teeth and bones emerge as the soft mud drains
away.
Between 1975 and 1979, 3 million men, women and children died or went
missing, 1 million of whom starved to death. When it was over, 4
million Cambodians were left.
At Friends, Khmer workers attempt to turn around the horrors now
invested upon the young.
To draw street children into a future away from drugs, sex and crime,
the not-for-profit runs programs in business, welding, farming,
sewing, beautician work and literacy. Aged between 15 and 24, 700 at a
time spend up to two years learning a trade taught by local Khmer.
Gustav Auer, a Canadian with a catering business, came in 1998 to
visit his girlfriend working at the U.N. Development Bank and
volunteered at Friends for six weeks.
In 2000, he gave up his company, returned to Phnom Penh and offered to
launch a restaurant to train the children in cooking and hospitality.
Round the corner is Veiyo Tonle, opened by a Khmer, Lay Neth. Another
non-profit, the restaurant has the same goals -- to teach cooking and
wait-service to keep children off the streets.
As you sit on the sidewalk outside in the steaming Cambodian night,
eating the mild local fish curry happily named Fish Amok, children
below the age of 7 stagger by barefoot with small babies on their
shoulders. Some drag boxes behind them. When they want a break from
their begging, they crawl into them for a brief rest and to bottle-
feed their tiny charges as the tourists buy a 10 cent shoeshine while
sipping their ice-cold beer.
--Fish Amok
--Serves 6-8 with steamed rice
--1 pound white fish fillets
--2 tablespoons curry paste (ready-made from Asian supermarkets)
--2 tablespoons fish sauce (Nam Pla)
--2 teaspoons sugar
--2 large eggs
--3/4 cup coconut milk
--1/2 teaspoon salt
--1/3 teaspoon ground black pepper
--4 Kaffir lime leaves
--Chop fish into 1-inch chunks.
--In a heat-resistant bowl of a size to fit in a covered pan (if you
don't own a steamer), beat the coconut milk into the curry paste then
add everything but the lime leaves, then fold in the fish.
--Place in steamer above gently boiling water for 15 minutes,
carefully stir, then steam another five minutes till fish is opaque.
If you haven't got a steamer, put an upturned saucer in a lidded
casserole and place the bowl of fish on top.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, May 21
.
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