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Cambodia-Demons Beneath the Earth
Photodocumentary by Rachel Pfotenhauer
Yus Pisey, 36, was 25 when she stepped on a mine on her way to the lake to take a bath. She was married and had a son. It happen on the Thai border, so they took her to a refugee camp to recover in Thailand. The government would not let her son and husband into Thailand. She was in the camp for 2 years. She never saw them again and didn't look because she felt she would be a burden. The VVAF taught her how to sew and employed her as a seamstress. She is now married to another landmine victim.
Photo documentary
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Some of the Khmer people say there are demons beneath the earth. They pray to
Buddha that they will not step on the demon and make it angry. They hope they
were good in their last life so now they will not step in the wrong place.
They know the demons are underneath them but they must farm their rice and
wash their clothes. The small Buddha statue hangs around their neck. They rub
it and pray.
There are an estimated 7 to 9 million mines buried in Cambodia, one mine to
every person. Some 35,000 to 45,000 people have lost a limb to landmines.
The government reports about 300-400 new victims a month. One in five of
these is a child who rarely survive the blast. Eight out of 10 victims are
civilians. Often mines are laid in areas of heavy foot traffic like roads,
bridges, near water or in the center of a village. Eighty percent of the
victims knew they were in mined areas. They had no choice but to walk through
in order to gather food or buy necessities.
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Malin
I sit at a table in a restaurant at the National Center of Disabled Persons.
A woman serves me a stir-fry and sits down with my interpreter, Pruen, and
myself. She places her hands on the table and begins a conversation with
Pruen. On both of her wrists are two deep vertical scars. She sees me
noticing them and tries to place her hands elsewhere. I tell her it is OK.
She says, "OK," and smiles at me. I smile back. Malin is a survivor of war,
pol pot, landmines and despair. She is stronger than my imagination, because
I cannot imagine how someone could carry on after the horrors of war.
Malin was 20 years old when she stepped on the mine. She had dreams of being
married and having children. When she heard the explosion, she thought she
was going to die along with her dreams. The mine was only a hundred feet from
her grandmother's house. The Cambodian army had recently come through, laying
mines on the road because the Khmer Rouge were going to be on the same road.
A man carried her to the hospital where they amputated her leg. She spent one
night there before her mother took her home. Within two weeks she had slit
her wrists twice, hoping to kill herself and relieve her mother from herself
and her disability.
"While I was in the hospital, the only thought that kept me alive was the
image of my mother," said Malin. "Even though I did not want her to carry my
burden, she was what made me want to keep on living. She was all I had then."
Malin's mother sold everything in their house to pay off the hospital bills.
They left their village in hopes of finding work or help in Phnom Penh. "We h
ad very little," said Malin. "My mother begged the boatman to let us ride
free to Phnom Penh. When we arrived we could not find any work. I had
crutches made of wood and was begging on the streets for food and money.
Everyday I looked for work but there was none to be had."
Three weeks went by before a woman named Judy from the Christian World
Service (CWS) saw Malin begging on the streets. "She saved my life," says
Malin. "She took me to Calmette Hospital where I received a prosthesis from
the Cambodia Trust. She also gave me money to go to school. I learned to walk
again and that alone changed my life for the better. After my studies I got a
job as a cook for the CWS and now I cook here."
Malin tells me of her family; her dreams of marriage and children did not
die after all. She had met her husband while working at the CWS, shortly
after she gave birth to two boys, which bring her the most joy in life. Malin
explains to me that for a woman in Cambodia it is very important to have
children. Women who do not ever give birth are pitied. For Malin, she wants
her sons to be educated to help support her when she is old.
I ask Malin what she has learned from all her experiences in life.
"I hear people say that one person cannot make a difference in a place like
Cambodia," Malin says. She looks me straight in the eye. "Where would I be
without Judy? She changed my life. She gave me hope when I had none. I am
happy now. I feel useful again. All we want to feel is useful. She has opened
my heart and I have learned compassion, before it was only a thought, now I
know compassion."
Pruen
Pruen, now 28 years old, stepped on a landmine when he was 10 years old. He
tells me of the day of his fate, predestination, the will of Buddha. It had
been raining lightly, which made him happy because it had been hot for days.
His mother and father, still together, alive and survivors of the Khmer Rouge
camps, had told him he could go swimming and meet his friends at the lake.
Walking there, his Buddha wrapped within his fingers, his lips moving in
prayer, he was careful where he stepped. Pruen was aware there were mines in
the area and knew what the consequences were of stepping on one. The
Cambodian army had just come through and the monsoon rains were flooding the
village and land. As the water rises it picks up the smaller mines and
carries them into rice fields, lakes, roads and farms. The smaller the mines,
the more stealth they are. They hide in unexpected places, beneath a lotus or
by a stone on the side of a path. Designed to only maim, not kill unless you
are a child. Children rarely survive the blast due to loss of blood. Pruen
was old enough to survive.
He remembers skipping down the path, excited to play with his friends. A wide
stream of water trickled stones and debris into the mouth of the lake. A
stone bridge was made to cross the stream. Pruen leapt from rock to rock as
he has done many times before. "I faltered," says Pruen. "The rock tilted
and I heard the click. Time stopped and the moment before the explosion,
clarity of my reality filled my mind, horror and fear grabbed hold of me.
There was a loud explosion. I saw my blood spray my screaming friends. The
horror in their eyes revealed my future. All this in a moment. And then I
fell into darkness."
Pruen's friends carried him to the village hospital where he lay unconscious
for a week. His left leg was amputated below the knee. When he awoke his
family was there with crutches made of bamboo. He began the journey of
rehabilitating his body, mind and spirit.
"I am lucky I did not die," says Pruen. "I am also lucky because I have a
family. Most children have only one parent because the other was killed in
the camps, or they have no family at all." Pruen smiles at me. "Do you have
two parents?" he asks.
"Yes ," I replied.
"You're are lucky," says Pruen. His expression turns serious, his eyes fixed
on my recorder. "It is a difficult life here in Cambodia," says Pruen. "Our
history has torn apart our civilization, our families and for some their
sanity. To be handicapped is very difficult. We must work even harder, not
only physically but also in educating the public about handicapped people. We
are not "disabled," we are very "able" to do anything. Our minds are healthy,
we are just missing a part of a limb, not part of a brain. We strive everyday
to prove this to people."
Pruen finished school. His parents heard of an non-government organization
(NGO) that made prosthetics in Phnom Penh. Pruen received his prosthesis and
training from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF). Shortly
thereafter Pruen landed a night time security job and studied English on his
own time. His prosthetic training went so well he soon was on the handicap
volleyball team and eventually became captain.
"The limitations are in your mind," says Pruen. " There are limitations I
have no control over because of the politics, or lack of, in my country. The
poverty and our economic situation places certain boundaries around me."
"Education is my power," says Pruen. "At one time it would mean death. Pol
Pot ordered everyone that was educated and even those that wore glasses, to
be executed. Tell me, do you not think people are still scared to learn to
read and write; especially if they never saw their parents again because they
spoke another language or were professors at a school? Many parents in the
villages are still scared to let their children study. How can our country
become civilized with a recent history of insanity and brutality?"
It is true. Many Cambodians are uneducated mainly because of their recent
history and widespread poverty. Most Khmer farm the rice fields and cannot
afford to send their children to school but rather need them to work in the
fields. The remote villages are extremely poor and have little contact with
the rest of the country. The roads to these villages are radically damaged
and take a long time to reach. This has limited the amount of access from
outreach programs trying to get to families to inoculate them against polio
and give them mosquito nets to decrease their chances of getting malaria. The
people living in villages are mostly farmers and while they are educated in
farming they lack the general knowledge that most of us learn in school. One
less person in the field farming can make a big difference in what is on the
dinner table.
Chuen
The Khmer also hold on to old traditions and taboos. A figure like a
scarecrow hangs from a fence next to a bright green pond that rests beneath a
Khmer's house on stilts. The pond, stagnant, glistened in the sun. Water
lilies and lotus rise up proudly out of the water. I'm momentarily caught up
by its beauty.
"The scarecrow is there to ward off evil spirits that may infect the
people," the VVAF outreach supervisor, Chuen, says. "Otherwise, known as
cholera. We tell them to boil their water because the disease comes from the
water. They don't always believe us. Try to understand that many of these
people lived through the Pol Pot regime and they are used to being lied to.
Their lack of education, our history, old traditions and superstitions keep
them from trusting us."
Chuen leads me down a path to a cluster of houses made of bamboo and wood. A
young girl limps up the path. She has two braces on her legs. Chuen tells
me she contracted Polio when she was 4 years old. She also has a problem with
her hips, the bones didn't form correctly at birth. The girl looks at me
tentatively. Her skin glistening from the sweat on her body. Her eyes are
wide with excitement. I snap a picture; she looks down shyly and up again
staring into the camera. She looks like she is searching for another world
inside my lens. She removes her shirt and lets Chuen examine her braces
around her hips and legs. Her skin is callused underneath the brace. Chuen
adjusts the braces explaining to the mother how to prevent severe abrasion.
The mother smiles at me and tells Chuen to tell me that she is very proud of
her daughter. Her daughter walks to school and back everyday and studies in
the evening. On cue, the girl walks quickly down the road, turns around and
walks back. Her smile resembles a budding lotus, a pale pink petal, within it
shimmering white pearls.
Bud
We went back to the VVAF rehabilitation center. A man from the United States
sits in front of a photograph of a woman working at a weaving loom. The man,
Bud, turns to me and tells me her name is Valentine. She stepped on a mine on
Valentines day and lost both legs. I asked him what she was weaving. He is a
VVAF director that runs a factory that employs primarily female land mine
victims to make kramas, which are similar to American scarves. The employees
cultivate mulberry worms, extract the silk, dye it from seasonal fruits and
local plants and then weave it into kramas. Bud bought some property with his
own money and divided it up into sections, built houses on each section and
sold them all to his employees. Now employees give him monthly payments until
they own their own house. The more kramas he sells the more employees he can
hire and the more land he can buy.
"I'm tired of hearing sob stories about landmine victims," Bud said. "It is
an overload to the system hearing story after story. Lets talk about success.
Valentine is a double amputee and no way could she find a job. I hired and
trained her, now she is one of our best weavers. She is also married, has a
child and owns her own house. A success story."
Bud shows me a photograph of women and men finely dressed in the clothing
they had woven and sewed. They were dancing with each other. All landmine
victims. They looked regal and proud.
Chuen, drives me back to the apartment in Phnom Penh. The image of the
dancers swirl around my mind: An outcome of one man's perseverance. He had
the idea for the factory; the VVAF accepted it. He conceived and delivered.
Sixty lives changed for the good. One person can make a difference. I lay on
the bed. My consciousness dissolves into black. I dream of a Khmer woman
holding a lotus. She is in my room. Her smile pierces the darkness
surrounding us.
In 1997, 120 countries signed the Ottawa Land Treaty-a treaty designed to ban
landmines worldwide. The United States was noticeably absent during the
signing of the treaty. Write congress, senator or the President to inform
them that you will not support a government that manufactures and sells
landmines.
If you want to support NGOs that help landmine victims with prosthetics,
orthodics, training, and employment, contact the following organizations:
Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation
www.vvaf.org
2001 S. Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
(202) 483-9222
Cambodia Trust Limb Project
1675 Broadway
NY, NY 10019-5820
(212) 506-2560
If you are interested in purchasing 100% organic silk kramas, write Rachel
Pfotenhauer at rpphoto@fone.net. A website is being developed to view and
purchase the kramas. 80% of sales goes directly back to the female landmine
project in Prey Vihear.
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