The Key Conspiracy

At least 5 days a week, I get a locker key from the sullen and disinterested reception staff at the front desk of  The Place- Phnom Penh’s premier upscale gym.    I have been a member since the Khmer New Year sales promotion  The membership investment was a critical part of the decision to reclaim my health and sanity and was combined with a decrease in work hours and responsibilities.  Life has been flowing since April with laps back in forth in the pool and elliptically-propelled daydreams of nordic skiing.

Now I have other frustrations.  Invariably, my key opens a locker tucked into a corner or is perched on a wall that is right next to the sauna or is immediately adjacent to a person that has just arrived.   There seem to be the same keys distributed to certain individuals.  When I overheard a wealthy-looking Cambodian woman asking the locker room attendant in Khmer for a key, I realized that there must be a tiered system for the better locations. This was never an option for me.  I was feeling at the lower-end.

I have a mixed relationship with the place- it’s an air-conditioned luxury gym with an enormous number of top-scale machines and a "min-Olympic size"  pool with lanes of tile and  swimmers who stay within them.   On the other hand,  management insists on playing Electronic Dance Music (EDM) at levels that I can still hear with my earbuds in and the women’s locker room is a microcosm of what I am growing to resent about Phnom Penh's rapidly changing economy.  

From The Place website 

The daughters and wives of Phnom Penh’s wealthy tycoons act in ways that are socially appropriate for them, but a bit perturbing for me.  I see the confident women lounging around, talking and laughing in the early evening on a bench near the water cooler. They are planted firmly in the most heavily trafficked area of the narrow hallway, so that each person must carefully navigate around their outstretched legs and pristine, colorful sneakers.  The younger Asian women bow their heads as they go by in respect.  

Members of this social group order the attendants—likely paid about the amount of my monthly fee—to fire up the steam room, to slather lotions and scrubs on their backs before they enter there, and to carefully carry  their plastic baskets of expensive French and Japanese skin products and a clean towel to the shower and hand products through the curtain as needed. 

The fancy women primp themselves.  Eyelashes are gently glued to the lid in a ritual probably performed at least twice a day. One woman bends over in the in front of the mirrored toilet doors and uses 2 blowdryers to fluff her hair.  Makeup is applied in small dabs and smoothed over what already seems to be perfect skin.  

There's generally at least one
gym bag like this in the locker room.
I never thought about your workout
gear matching your stilettos.  

Then, the attendant girls fasten bras, adjust dresses and pack the bags.  The girls remain poised until their lady is ready, then dutifully tote the gym bag behind the impeccably- heeled woman to the waiting Range Rovers, Lexuses and Land Cruisers. There are small amounts of local currency given for these services.     I see, on occasion, a younger caucasian woman sprinting ou the door in gym wear for a quick bike ride home for her shower and think, "We are all so different".

As written about many times before, there is great change happening in Phnom Penh and in some ways the differences between the expatriate aid workers and the Cambodians is also reaching some level of equilibrium.  The expatriates are not the only rich people in town anymore.  A Rolls Royce dealership opened a few months ago.  The economy is growing at breakneck pace- approximately 7%  a year in Phnom  Penh.  The Khmer Times reported in April that the number of Cambodians with more than $30 million in net assets increased by 170 percent over the past decade and further increases are likely in the next ten years.  In a particularly ironic travesty, the Minister of Rural Development owns a huge estate with its own golf course and 6 luxury villas. (Phnom Penh Post, Febuary 2015).

In recent weeks, there has been increasingly bad news for democracy and civil society.  A new law that severely restricts NGOs ability to speak out against the government was passed to the King for signature.  This had no public comment or review.    Foreigners are prohibited from participating in any public political gatherings. The opposition party leader Sam Rainsy took a selfie with Hun Sen and then flew off to Paris while 11 of his supporters who were arrested in a political rally against the ruling party were sentenced to 20 years in Cambodia's horrible prison system.

Phnom Penh Post "My dinner with Rainsy" 15 July 2015 

This rapid economic growth continues to fuel the environment for exploiting and displacing the poor and limiting the opportunities of the struggling middle class.  Just yesterday, Forest Trends showed the destructive legacy of economic land concessions (largely provided in sweetheart deals among the political elite) are destroying the last of Cambodia's highly valuable timber resources under an illegal scheme.   Over and over again, the ill-gotten gains from the rapacious drive of Cambodia's elite fuels their own ambitions and desires for sumptuous trappings.   The middle class may get a good key some time in the future, but the house will be stripped bare and worthless.  

For the extreme poor, the poor who are working or the lower levels of Cambodia's middle class, they will never have access to My optimism for change and hope for the poor, the struggling lower-middle class and the large percentage of Cambodians under 30 is continually challenged.  Without a profound shift in the ways of doing business, their families will never have the key. 

All over the world, there are families and entrepreneurs who seek the "key to success".  Savings, an ability to invest in their future, affordable and quality healthcare,  good education for their kids and a  prosperous community that provides opportunities to grow.   I'd love to be a part of a society where there are unlimited keys.  The seesaw of life here always seems to come down to the heavy burden of reality and the collective hope of a better vision for future.  Here in Cambodia, I remain teetering  on the fulcrum.

Time is but a Shadow

My parents are moving. They are leaving their house in the woods to a bright new condominium in the closest small city about ten miles north.  In the days before my dad was admitted to the hospital for his scheduled non-invasive hip surgery, I did some work to get ready for their transition.

It was a glorious bluebird day in mid-coast Maine. I surveyed the old woodpile in their front yard. Ten years ago the tree had come down. At the time, my sister and I loaded up the wood racks on the front porch, dutifully created a wood pile and then covered it with a blue tarp. 

A magnificent rhododendron in someone else's front yard
around the corner from my parent's house in Maine.. 

In northern regions, blue tarps are legendary for covering up all sorts of mysterious things. Sometimes the tarps evolve into their own identify, a mainstay of presence that slowly fades in the sun. They are a symbol of that which will be used someday, but not now. Perhaps there is hope that the items and the tarps themselves will melt in the spring sun after the long winter. However, each year the distinctive blue returns, reminding us of all the things in our lives that have been ignored, shrugged off as too much or remain simply a secure object in the landscape. Clearly, a house with a blue tarp in the front yard was not that marketable.

With a walking and pulling, the tarp ripped off into pieces and threads, Small logs had fallen asunder, creating an incredible heap of wood chips and compost.  Ants swarmed out of the layers of plastic as the pile was revealed: a midden of decaying matter and vibrant microorganisms with slow motion smells of rich earth in progress and the ripe colors of fungus.  The fireplace sized logs crumbled in my hands, soaking through the gloves as all matter of insects scurried about. Slugs appeared bloated and gluttonous with undisturbed feeding.  The pitchfork blades reached deep into the pile of now rotten wood- a glorious celebration of the passage of time and the fleeting transience of life. It was too much to move it all around the yard that day; my parents are now facilitated to find someone to deal with it or simply use it to improve habitat.  

The next morning, it was time to work in the basement. I tackled the letter boxes of 30 years of tax files. The slips of gasoline receipts from the station on the corner, the vaccination and check-up schedules from the doctor’s office, pay-stubs recorded on computer punch cards.   The diligent accounting of everyday family expenses slipping down into the recesses of the shredding bin. Ancient overruns of magazines from my father's professional work, loads of old papers and paperbacks discolored, yellow and spotted with mold. There was no need to keep it. I was still working with my father’s papers in the basement, just as I had when I was 14 in 1976. Things do not really change.

Just one box of many. 

“My mother always said, ‘Time is like a shadow.’” Bob the chatty hotel bartender said as he poured my mother and I our third glass of wine after the first evening of my dad’s surgical journey.We were giddy in the accomplishment of the procedure, planned for months while Dad suffered quietly in pain. We were staying in a hotel as the house in the woods was over an hour's drive from the hospital.  

The daily routine of hotel check-out and hopefulness, disappointments, waiting for medical professionals who tippy-tapped into computer monitors during their dialogues with my father, uncertainty, bad food, grumpiness and the tension of captivity, cumulated with "just a few more days to be sure" of the sickly antiseptic smell of a rehab center/nursing home. Wispy haired women waitedin wheelchairs. I scurried back to the house in the woods to tend to the garden, do the recycling and direct all my emotions into getting things done.   In one night, I dreamed I was crawling across a bridge over a large chasm, noting the deeply frayed cable above me.

A glimmer of nature on a walk in the woods with my oldest
nephew and the dog.  A beautiful bench all hand hewn. 

This crevasse of fear and concern opened as I witnessed aging- my own, my parents, and my sister's now teenage children who I last knew very well when they were 7 and 5 years old. Oldest daughters in traditional Cambodia culture often assume the care for parents, and as a single person there was no one else for me to take care of. The dutiful/loving role of matrimony was obvious for both my parents and for brother in law and my sister, who had another major surgery, which also occurred during my visit.  I was feeling quite alone, supporting my family through travails, but it was important to be there. I was happy to do it.

1992- a time when I had no home and
inconsistent work. The book was called
"Vagabonding in the USA". I still wear
a pink bandanna in the field. 

These questions remained gaping in the sense of my own state of transience as a single expat, now over 50, with no base of operations to call my own home. How will I age? Where will I live when I can no longer muster the resources to cope with the maintenance needed to steward a home, let alone my body. What trustworthy person will come to take care of me when I need it? 

In these moments of sometimes volatile vulnerability, I slipped into a morass of self-doubt in the great unknowns of my own future and the eventual repatriation. The grand open step of what is next loomed large and mysterious. The thoughts of years to come abounded and multiplied, creating a spiral of questions of where, who, how and what. The spirit of "I believe" wavered under the stress despite phone conversations with old friends and my internal attempts to reassure myself,

Now returned to Cambodia, I am far distant from those personal worries for now. My apartment is cheap and serviceable. There are plenty of fruits and vegetables. The future of my workplace is evolving, with directions ahead. There are no firm decisions to be made now, so the questions can be placed under a tarp until more months pass.  

The rainy season has started the dynamic and unexpected of everyday life. Small raindrops fall from a sunny sky, the plants seem happy and fresh and the flame trees that shelter the small community of commerce across the street from my house are now filled with brilliant red flowers and verdant foliage.

 

Land O’ Lawlessness

Parishwithou borders.net 

I was patiently waiting at the 4-way intersection near my house when the officer, his helmet and moto prominently labeled “POLICE” reduced speed as he motored through the red light.  He was, albeit, cautious/ This was a stark contrast to the rebels who audaciously careened through the same light a few moments earlier. The three young helmetless boys were on a single mission, weaving their way through and leaving a wake of older people shaking their heads and the young girls giggling with their daring and foolish bravado.  

I’ve become both resigned, weary and demoralized by the various traffic transgressions all around me every day: no helmets, going the wrong way down the street, U-turns across 4 lanes of traffic, texting on a motorbike, driving a moto so fully-laden that the handlebars meet the sternum, and naturally the generally charming and happy  families of 5 balancing on a single overloaded bike- the smallest babe tucked in vertically with the breeze ruffling through the fluff on her head.

Postcards from Cambodia

There are times when I just have to say, "Life here is so dangerous.  I cannot understand these rules." I saw a man leaving the gym with a q-tip sticking out of his ear.  Workers who were toiling at one of Phnom Penh’s many construction sites were killed when a ill-constructed “elevator” dropped them from five stories up.   On every road trip south from Phnom Penh, if you leave the town around 4pm, you will see dozens of trucks loaded with girls getting ready to return to their villages after working in the factory.  Just yesterday, at least 20 were immediately killed and likely a dozen more to die from serious injuries when their overloaded factory-sponsored minibus (36 people in a vehicle intended for 12) was hit by a bus.    “Cambodia is open for business! “ says the Minister of Commerce.  No one should have to risk their life, everyday, to earn income.

There is also a new traffic law that has some people worried.  There will be limits-   only one passenger one (plus child) on a moto.  Everyone wears a helmet. Fines for drunken driving are going up. I am starting to see some impacts of this.  There is no widespread enforcement, but those who have the money are starting to comply and I wonder if there will be hope for change.  Perhaps the deaths of the young girls, the second accident this year, will create more awareness.  On a recent trip south, I saw 2 girls out of 20 strapping on their helmets after boarding their cattle truck for the ride home. My heart went out to them- such a small, naive and  likely futile gesture of self-protection in a very dangerous world. If only their employers would give them a seatbelt.


There are times that I head out into the fray myself and enter with my bicycle into the fantastic, flowing confluences of 5 streets that is the traffic circle around Independence Monument. In this land, one often moves from the inner lane to the outer lane with impunity.  Cars and motos and bicycles flow in and carry  out, slow down and speed up, nudge and sometimes wait motionless when the drivers are dumbfounded with the  patterns of their fellow drivers. 

On one workday on my way home from the gym, I approached the motodup taxi for the ride through the swirl of traffic around the Monument up ahead.   The young man handed me a helmet to use. This is the first time this has ever happened in 30 months of living here. I looked at him, smiling and dumbfounded, blitzed with a happy surprise of safety and compliance,glowing and basking in the glow of someone following the law.   In that moment, I  witnessed the moment of social change.  I  pulled my helmet out from the tote bag on my shoulder and saddled up for the short ride home.  

A young man at work stringing telephone

wire amonga beautiful vista in Koh Kong

province.  He clutches a piece of metal

rebar in his flip flop to ascend the pole.

Photo by Barbara Devine.  

Grace

The "trail" on our last day  in Halong Bay, 
just outside the
Viet Hai village on Cat Ba island. 

My boot slipped on the mossy rock and the cicadas screamed in the tangle of vines that surrounded me.  I felt a single drop of sweat balancing on my forehead, a sweet moment of clinging before it determinedly dripped into my eye.  In a moment of unsettledness, I sucked in my stomach and cursed my current state of physical being.  

On the last day of this trip, ten days in northern Vietnam with my good friend Gwen, was the end of a combination of a beautiful foray into mountains and sea and an exercise in humility and balance.  I taught the VIetnamese guide the definition of the word "clumsy".  I forgot a couple of items, I stumbled and fumbled for equilibrium. I  barfed in the back seat on winding mountain roads, lumbered up the side of mountains, tripped over uneven decking at a fish farm and crawl-twisted sideways out of a kayak.  Both  physically and spiritually, I harkened back to earlier times.

Fish farms and our kayak in Halong Bay.  This area desperately
needs a management strategy. Tourists

In the years between 1992-1995, I journeyed  in the deserts of Big Bend (spring), Alaska (summer) and the mountains of Colorado (winter) and then for a few years following I worked office jobs all winter and guided all summer.   I was nimble and deft, organized and personable.   Merrily busy, I spent days rowing by and watching the turkey vultures perched on barb wire fences, their wings outstretched to dry with the cactus blooming below after the rain storm.  I cooked pancakes while watching whales offshore. I rowed and paddled against headwinds, slept outside or in tents, hiked and ventured.   I grew trim legs and massive shoulders, blonde hair, and brown skin.  I told a lot of stories and jokes, explained ecosystems and history. It was life filled with happenstance and a strong web of connections to place and people. Not all wine and roses however as managing my diabetes was always an afterthought. In my mid-thirties, another level of aging reality caved in around me. I got a great job and moved to Anchorage. I bought a house. I weekend warriored.

Articwild.com photo 

Finally in 2008, a window opened and I found myself guiding a  late season trip on the Marsh Fork of the Canning River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was a rough transition. Gloves fell out of my pockets and into the river current because my field jacket was strained from extra weight gained since the last big adventure, I left behind a special gift from a long lost friend from a moment of not taking the time to put it back where it belonged and checking the site before I left. I was feeling rushed and later regretted it.  

However, in a crystal moments in that crisp August air, as I held  the guide paddle strong and true and navigated through the river's rock gardens with ease, I caught  a sideways fleeting glimpse of a grayling emerging from the shade of a small eddy. The sun caught his scales and reflected a prism of color back to me. A tiny gift of insight, a moment of serendipity, a validation of all that I believed in about nature and spirit, of purpose and being and of luck and fortitude.

Market day in Bac Ha. The town was sleepy until action started on
Saturday night. Shops and restaurants opened,
people flooded into the town, wares were unfurled.

I recalled that moment as I hiked up from the bottom of the river valley to our lodge at the ridge line in the mountains north of Sapa in northern Vietnam.  Gwen and I were accompanied by a team of middle-aged Red Dao ladies.  We met them at the gate outside the lodge as they approached us hoping for a sale.  We set off down the road with a very clear and cheery, "No buy today", but four women decided to tag along when I told them where we wanted to go.   

Lunch time first aid. A splinter is removed with a needle hidden
somewhere in the bag. 

Dancing along on the trail down, they showed us short cuts and offered a basic interpretation of the culture of farming and their lives.  Dau and Fan held my arms on the muddy spots, their feet confident in the cheap white plastic slip on sandals through a steep decline through dense brush and young trees. With gifts of rambutan from Hanoi (their first taste), we lunched in the cool shade at the restaurant at the river with our stolen sandwiches from the breakfast bar and the ladies's purchases of sweet bread from the bakery. After a short visit to cool water gushing from very large rocks, our team began the long traverse to the top.  It got hot.


The ladies just snapped off a couple of young bush branches with lots of leaves and distributed to the team, who proudly carried them aloft for shade from the midday heat. I had my trusty, decrepit umbrella. It was a long climb. The ladies began to show a mild sweat on the brow while I was awash in a sheen from every pore, the body reaching outside to a hope for a small breeze of evaporative cooling. There was a brief discussion on the crossroads and then we headed into the depth of a bamboo forest.  

http://www.scribblesnaptravel.com/how-not-to-trek-in-sapa-our-two-day-trekking-nightmare/
Wimp. 

In a land where nearly every square meter is cultivated into agricultural production--as the ladies said, their families grow and want more land for their own-- the forest was a precious place. Cooler by several degrees, filled with bird songs, providing habitat for unknown creatures. The trails were well-worn switchbacks populated by local people carrying harvesting tools, who seemed to comment on my now drenched physical appearance. I was on my last legs. "Are you hungry?" they asked,"No." I gasped. "Just hot."

Sights like this were common in our treks through northern Vietnam.
Our guide in Bac Ha (Mr Tung-- tungbachatour@gmail.com) was
not the only interpreter to mention the increased pressures of
population and development. 

Moments later, the ladies proclaimed that happiness lay ahead. They mimed a vision of easy striding with a big smile, and soon we reached the level road that led back to our lodge and their "stores"- the bamboo shacks next to the road just outside the lodge gate. We met for a few moments afterward, "Away from the others", they said. We paid them first as guides and again in small purchases.  It was money gladly shared.  I found myself humbled by their fortitude and grateful for their kind support.  I was envious of their physical grace and ease, from their life- long familiarity of place, a slight body build and a spirit that would willingly head down and back up again to make a sale and have a small bit of refreshment in the river. 

On the market day in Can Cau, the piglets screamed as they were
placed head first into grain bags.  There are some days
 I feel like this at the office. Any office. 

I am envious of their grace. In this next stage- firmly set in middle-years and now in my reduced workload and hours, I am compelled to move again, breaking free from the shackles of self-induced pressures, immobile hours at the desk and the tugging, nagging feeling of being restrained from creative work, it is time to flex the muscle.

Yesterday, I finished a series of laps in the pool and as I walked back to the chaise lounge and towel my foot slipped with a tiny moment of uncertainty. This small reminder that I find a life well-lived involves pushing boundaries and testing limits, bumbling and stumbling our way through physical, emotional and social adventures. We must be unsettled and exerted for a while before we can uncover the power of grace.

View from the top of the hill on the last day hike.  Humid was
an understatement as the clouds were drifting in around us but there was a nice breeze
at the top.  Not many people see this view of Halong Bay.  The trip ended with a wild water 
water taxi ride to the  Bai Ben harbor, in a small craft buffeted big swells.  A moment of
concern as the engine sputtered in the midst of waves on the starboard side crashed 
against the karst cliffs and the boatman laughed a bit manically at the time. 

Total System Reboot

The feeds appeared on my friends' Facebook statuses around the 20th of March. It was the trifecta of astronomy- a spring equinox, a lunar eclipse and a supermoon.    There was conjecture that a new energy would emerge as the zodiac cycle moved into its last degree and started anew. Mystics proclaimed that is time  to feel the energy of change and new circumstance.  Tides were high, the earth and sun and moon interacted in dynamic ways. So why not embark on new steps and reboot life, start over and begin again?

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/03/march-solar-eclipse-total-system-reboot/

 I made the official request to reduce my work hours, effective 1 April.  This has been discussed since December and slowly I have been shedding staff who report to me.  Now, I only have to oversee 3 instead of 7.   Reports and budgets will be replaced by inviting people to support a cause I care about, crafting a strategy and tactics for engagement. Hopefully bringing more resources  in all forms.  I will be in the office 4 days a week, with one week a month for  only three days.  I will come in later and leave earlier.  I will ignore the work emails after hours.  I will use my extra space to create. Describe. Exercise. Eat more vegetables.  Have mental space for human conversation that is rich and meaningful.  Work on the writing project that has been on my mind since 2011.  The horizon appears richer, filled with potential and light.

A glimpse of the inner workings of
the public works system,  The new drainage
pipes  are juxtaposed against the
old system built by the
French in the 50's.
Not a great smell from
that black water! 

The blush of January and February's fresh air have now left, filled with the residual vestige of a slight breeze in the morning.  We are now in hot season.   I am finding the smells around town a bit oppressive.   The noxious fumes of the ill-maintained diesel truck mingled with the small puffs of moto exhaust on my leg in the traffic.

There's a clear piercing aroma of dust as the  young man stands strong and tall on the first story remnants of an old Colonial building, swinging his sledgehammer and knocking off brick by brick all day. Perhaps the developer likely couldn't schedule the machine to do it, or the boys were cheaper.

The waft of the trash that has rested too long in the street in the early evening, where on the outskirts of the city, the cattle will wade their way through the plastic and forage for leftovers.

I can smell the faint aftershave on Mr Picadeh (my regular motodup) in the morning or the beer on the tuk tuk driver's  breath on a late Sunday afternoon, I politely decline a ride from the would-be driver and his friends laugh as he returns to the card game. A babe swings in the hammock under the shade of the tree as.the nonplussed mother observes me and touches the bulk of her fanny pack filled with cash and phone cards from the day's sales.

From the article printed in 2012: Women irked by men who urinate
in public.The article quoted one Cambodian woman who urged men
to find a toilet. Like women have to do.

The smoke of a charcoal fire from the neighbors below wafts  up to my kitchen window and I can hear the girls chattering and the thunk of the cleaver chopping vegetables when I do the dishes. There's an occasional wisp of a perfume of lovely young girls strolling the promenade of riverside, juxtaposed against the acrid smell of stale urine accumulated  from the habits of men in this country.

After a particularly effluent evening walk, I was glad to
see the boys having hosin' er down. Now, for the rest of the city. 

 The water in the river now appears a nearly sea green hue and the rice fields in the highways are brown and fallow, the occasional ibis rummaging for crickets or mice.I find myself longing for the rain, hoping to relieve that holding pattern of drought. Find something to wash the city clean and water the fields and have the verdant grass come again.


Thecoming days will bring this change.  And I will have the space and time and energy to dedicate time to craft.  A new relaxed attitude.     A commitment to to churn through my creative process and see what emerges.

Rise of the Jumbotron

The street light on the nearby corner fickered one evening as I was on my way out for a walk.  As I settled into the rthym of the exercise,  I remembered that I used to patrol the streets of my suburban neighborhood as a child. At the age of 8, I studiously noted the numbers of the poles where the streetlamp was burned out and called the city to report in.    In this expat life, I have no idea who to call. If I did, I could easily be dismissed.

alisoninasia.wordpress.com

Over the past six months,  I've been considering a call to the Ministry of Advertising and Signage to ask them about who decides where to place digital billboards--Jumbotrons-- in the city limits.  I first noticed the impact walking home from the movies one night, a light grey pallor on the night sky. Not the single beam of the spotlight on the heavens, which lights up the sky for big events at casino near the river, but a cool blue haze in the night sky, flickering as a huge television behind a thin curtain in the neighbors window.

The Jumbotron near my friends house shines into her living room every night until 9pm, forcing the purchase of dense window coverings and the loss of their beloved patio for evening reflections and visits.  The luxury apartments under construction next door to her house are slated to have the light facing into the living rooms.  Situations like this make me wonder how the advertiser and the developer reconcile these conflicts- will money be involved?   Do they duke it out in a game of chicken in their luxury SUVs?   Or perhaps if expatriates are renting the apartments, the complaining will become dim background noise in the squander for profits. Easily ignored for a year,  as the lease was signed already.  With a fake smile the landlord will shake his head and say, "There is nothing to be done."

www.cbre.com.kh

In recent weeks, the Vattanak Building, a distinctive skyscraper in Phnom Penh, installed a jumbotron on the 30th floor.  This building has been heralded as a distintive symbol of  new Cambodian investment, shaped like a dragon's back and incorportaing elements of feng shui and naga motifs (Phnom Penh Post, Dec 2013).   Now, the light from the billboard is visible throughout all areas to the south of the city, a beacon of advertising and an obvious sign of marking territory.  A brilliant spot of urine on the largest tree in town.

The tragedy for me is how the quality of the light pollution changes everything in this small, once quaint city. On the way home from an evening event last week, I passed through the traffic circle around Independence Monument. Nearby to the momument, , the memorial to the King Father stands in a golden glow. The digital advertising sign placed high on a building to the west places created an eerie fog that changed the spirit of the place, casting a toxic hue over history and the brilliantly colored water fountains.

Turning the corner onto the street to my apartment that same evening, I see a young man riding a moto alone. The street is relatively empty.  He bends his head down to look at something in his lap.  I assume that he's checking his phone.  As my tuk tuk overtakes him, I realize he is looking down on his daughter, held in one arm on their way home.  I'm reassured that human connection is present, an antidote to our love affairs with screens.

2014 Year in Review