Finding a smile here is never difficult
Finding tampons is Giant pale people on billboards tell you to drink more beer Beer costs 50cent Cereal is hilariously expensive Coffee is served over ice with condensed milk and will cost you 2000 real There are loads of French people here Its really hot The evenings are nice The mornings are better Afternoons are a right off All drinks cost 50 cent It's always loud Nobody walks here If you are walking you will be harassed by Tuk Tuk Drivers every few feet money is handed over with two hands Babies born in the city leave their fathers to go and live in the provinces You don't speak about politics here You don't dare Westerns get paid 4 times more than Khmer staff for the same work 4000 Cambodian riel is worth only 1 American Dollar Coffee comes in plastic cups with a straw and a plastic, handle bar handle. Buildings are tall The stairs are steep There is no limit to how any people you can get on a moto Construction workers live on site until the job is done A man got shot at a petrol station for speaking up against the government Pineapples are cut into lollipop sticks You get fined on the stop for not wearing a helmet Funerals happen in the middle of the street and they last for at least 3 days People honk before they are about to do something stupid, Lunch times are sacred noodle soup is for breakfast Pale skin is good, dark skin is bad The word in Khmer for ‘cheers’ and ‘F*** you’ are dangerously similar Bamboo is used for scaffolding For one dollar you can look like a Khmer Justin Bieber Old ladies with wagons collect recyclables from the rubbish at the side of the road Hammocks can be hung up almost anywhere And pineapples are cut into fancy lollipop sticks
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At hope for justice there were two main sites that I was based in. The dream Home where the girls lived and received counselling and care and it's where I would plan, have meetings, eat lunch. The second is Shine School where I would teach. Therefore, this means that I would say this sentence quite frequently “First I am going to Dream and then I am going to Shine’ (cringe). But...
The girls final performance was an example of a group of extraordinary girls shining. I couldn't tell you how many of the girls told me they weren't going to dance, that they weren't good enough,that they were too scared. With no time to do a dress run in the space, the audience (all the staff from dream home and shine school) sat waiting on red plastic chairs at the stake park. The girls all huddled around getting ready to perform and last minute words of encouragement were translated. The girls were fantastic. Naturally the performance did not go as smoothly as I had wanted but it was a joyous event! Staff were beaming and so were the girls. And they all performed, even the ones who told me quite adamantly that they were not going to dance. The girls showed their great strength, creativity, flexibility, ability to work in a team, ability to improvise. So many amazing skills were demonstrated by these girls this afternoon and I was so proud. The following day I had my goodbye circle, together we made a huge collage of photos of our time together. Some of the girls made me cards and wrote beautiful messages inside. It's safe to say I cried a lot that day, as you can imagine I became very attached to these girls. Some of the girls even spoke to the staff at HFJ expressing their interest in continuing dance classes at Hope for Justice. If this is something which could be organised I have no doubt of the long term benefits of dance for these girls. I have never been close to experience what they have been through and I am fortunate enough to say that I will probably never experience what they have been through. But to experience a climpse into these girls lives has been an absolute privilege. When you are teaching a class when one girl has returned from her counselling and is crying for the first hour in the corner with her back to the room then later stands up and declares that she wants to dance you see the true strength in these young women. Women of such strength and such power. And when you receive messages like this one, suddenly all the hard work and challenges all seems worth it. ‘I would like to thank Caroline that spent time to teach me. What you have taught me is very valuable. I would like to thank you very much and I hope I meet you again on day.’ -Srey Pin (Names changed for the protection of the girls) !!! Your wife and 3 year old child.
A man in a suit on a business call Your 4 young children 2 sets of willow shelving units 3 teenage boys Many wicker baskets A monk smoking a cigarette A washing machine A sofa and a chair A gang of moving chickens hanging from their legs A large TV monitor A fizzy pop shop A lilac wooden bathroom door A tall red ladder Several pigs 6 body sized sacks of cabbage Your partner in crime and the stollen bag of a young French women. An empty space for your next paying passenger A young girl in a black lace dress and high heeled shoes on a Tuesday afternoon An empty space for your lover who's working far from home Your sweetheart Your Mother Your brother Your niece Many sacks of varying vegetables An American woman on her way to work Your constant fear of the police A Sheep Your Post traumatic stress disorder that still clings to your back A tuk tuk with two travelling American film makers inside A shop selling sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves Your elderly grandmother wrapped in purple skirt The weight of your country's recent history Your fear of the government and your fear of change The fear for another war The fear of losing it all again A candy floss and popcorn shop THIS IS THE STORY ABOUT HOW I CAME ABOUT DOING THIS PROJECT. A QUESTION PEOPLE ASK ME A LOT. THE SHORT ANSWER IS THAT I ASKED, AND I MADE THE OPPORTUNITY. FOR ANYONE INTERESTED HERE IS THE LONG ANSWER….
Epic Arts, An international inclusive arts NGO registered as a charity in the UK and based in Kampot, Cambodia where they provide inclusive arts education for young disabled and non-disabled people to promote the value that every person counts. Epic Encounters, an inclusive performance company of disabled and non disabled dancers. Graduates of the Inclusive arts course at Epic Arts, Encounters are a professional touring company. Back in 2014, I was searchung for jobs online and I came across a job that caught my interest. Inclusive education manager for Epic Arts. I read the job description and the information about Epic Arts. location, Cambodia.The job didn't interest me as much, but the organisation sounded amazing. I admit, I had to do a quick Google search to know where Cambodia was on the map. Then I realised that I knew nothing about this small country (in south east area, south of Thailand and on the Laos and Vietnam border) A highly comprehensive Wikipedia search told me a little about Cambodia’s recent history and I have fascinated. Why didn't I know about this? Why have I not learnt about this tragedy at school like we leant about the genocide in Haiti or 9/11 or the holocaust? I became hooked. I had just started my internship at the Attenborough Arts Centre working with the Education and outreach team. Epic Encounters are doing a UK tour in a couple of months. But I couldn't find any further information online. It said email us for more information, and ended up programming them to come to the Attenborough Arts Centre, almost by accident. The company came to Liecester in November of 2014, but I also saw them in Cardiff as part of the People Dancing conference and again in Birmingham where the company taught me some Cambodian sign language, I learnt to say ‘I hope to go to Cambodia’ It was at this time that Epic Arts advertised for an inclusive arts tutor, for a year long internship. For anyone who knew me at that time, you will know what a knock it was when I didn't get this job. But I always had a sense that I wouldn't be disappointed, that this wasn't all for nothing. My fascination of the country didn't stop, ad I started to fall in love with Cambodia and its people from afar. The best way that I can describe how I felt is with the German word 'Fernweh'' which means 'homesickness for a place you heave never been to' And I knew that I was still going to Cambodia, just not in the way I was excepting. It wasn't long after this that I learnt about the anti-trafficking organisation Hope for Justice. At their marketing stall I picked up a piece of jewellery “made women who were victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia”. They told me about the education and rehabilitation programme in Cambodia. Do the girls have any dance training? I asked. I was given an email address for the Cambodia office and sent an email explaining how I wanted to come to Cambodia to teach some dance with the girls. During this time, Epic Arts and the Attenborough Arts Centre became official partners. And while Laura and Anthony Evans, EA directors, are in the UK they are now based at AAC. During catch up conversations in late 2015, I told them about my plan to go and work with Hope for Justice. Anthony's face lit up and said “well if you are in Cambodia, will you come and do some work for us?” Plans were put into action to get this project off the ground, the first was getting time off work to come here for 2 months, then it was 6 months of hardcore fundraising to raise enough money to go. This part of the journey I would not have been able to do if it was not for the incredible support, love and generosity of all my friends, family and strangers. (I would like to say another massive thank you). Then there was flights to book, lessons to plan, accommodation to find, languages to learn, projects to plan, the list seemed endless. It's so strange how these things work out. Now I am writing this little narrative while I am in Kampot, in the middle of my 3 week project working with Epic Encounters, as a guest choreographer. I still have to blink sometimes. Coming here has been a dream 2 years in the making, and it has been even better than I could have imagined. I have seen more, done more and learnt more than I ever thought I could in such a short space of time. Was the wait worth it? Yes. Was I disappointed? No way. All you need to do sometimes is confidently voice a ridiculous idea to a group of creative minds and things just happen. I want to dance all around Phnom Penh and improvise to my surroundings. And I want it to be filmed so I can make a dance film.
A few days later at 5am, with a rucksack full of water and varying costume changes I left the house to meet Shuntake. We want to meet the sunrise, over the river by the palace . @casadetake is an iPhone photographer from Japan and living in Phnom Penh and today he was shooting video for the first time. Balancing on the wall by the river, I moved as people around me were doing thier Sunday morning things, group aerobics by the river, feeding the pigeons, meditating. The sun rose orange and yellow and I felt alive. I danced by the royal palace and with the statues outside the national museum, at the bottom of the hill towards Wat Phnom, The Independence Monument, the small streets at Lakeside with its street art and red walls. My favourite, the Central Market. To dance in the middle of an everyday place, where everyone was buying and selling and getting on with their day. I was there, dancing to my heart's content. Many people stopped, staring at me in bewilderment, or in enjoyment I am not sure. Some took videos. A strange sight, a white girl doing a foreign dance in the middle of the market. This is the start of what will be a bigger project in Phnom Penh, headed by artist and project manager Janneke Hoogstraaten (AKA Jn/nk) . My contribution? A small capturing of a body in motion in a city I have come to adore. I explained in a previous blog post about how this amazing opportunity came to be ,and honestly when I came to Cambodia I didn't once think that I would be leading a contact improvisation session with such a beautifully cultural and age diverse group of people, nor have the privilege to do it in such a stunning place as the Lotus Centre. We had a two hour session, the first hour I led a workshop, to awaken the senses, warm up the body and introduce moving and connecting with a partner. The youngest in the group was 10 years old and our fantastic photographer. And the eldest, i am unsure of her age because of her glowing youthfulness, but we all danced together. There is something so special to me about connecting with strangers through the language of dance. Some moments were quite, everyone zoned in, concentrating, when nothing else exists outside of your body and the body of your partners. Other times we were loud and silly and playful. A group of young boys from the village observed us inquisitively for a very long time, commenting on and trying to make sense of what we were doing and bodies balanced on backs and people span and traveled together in space.
While we were dancing somewhere close there was singing and chanting and music being played. That, and the noises of the insects and the birds were our soundscape for what was an amazing opportunity to dance with others in a such a peaceful space. Common Sole, the improvisation community which hosted this event will from now on be hosting monthly contact Jams at the Lotus Centre. Eric will invite other visiting artists each month to run a workshop. I am very excited to see this community grow and develop, and look forward to getting involved again when I come back to Cambodia. I feel so privileged to be the first guest artist to launch the start of regular contact improvisation in Cambodia :) At the end of the workshop, we all came together as the sun started to set and feasted on heaps of fruit and drank lots of hot tea. It was quite a magical afternoon and a day what I will never forget. Thank you everyone who took part and came along and for making this event possible :) Its 5:30pm, the sun is about to go down. The power is out. I am in the main hall at the precious women school, its a small space. I have 63 garment factory workers all together ready to dance. I have the next hour to lead a dance workshop. What could possibly go wrong!
I wanted to lead a creative workshop which brought factory workers inner confidence out. And In a small space hall, with no light or electricity was where I would do that. With a fun group warm up and a few creative and performance tasks every person in the room danced in front of the audience around them. A simple but great task which I learnt from Celia Mcfarlane, an inter-generation inclusive dance practitioner from Cambridge. Any body part is your paint brush and any plane in the air is your canvas and you write your name. For me a C is a huge arch in the air with my arm, an A a turn and flick of the hips, an R with the knee and an O a circle of the head. Everyone performed these small personal creations, carving these names in the air to a raucous appaulse after each one. Here patience was important. With a group so big it was too easy for the shyer participants to hide and not join in. With space, time and encouragments from staff and peers almost everyone of the 63 participants danced thier solo. On the journey out of the factory area and back into the City, Neary (the founder of precious women) told me how when the women arrived after work, she asked them how they were. They said there were tired and bored after a long day in the factory. After the workshop, everyone was smiling, and the women said they had let there energy out, and had a sense of release. I only taught this group of amazing people for an hour in the dark and I am under no elussions that this will bring about any life changing or lasting effects, but if I could give at least one hour of escape and release from the relentless soul distroying work of a garment factory worker in Phnom Penh then I am grateful that I could do that. I only spend a short about of time with these women, but I learnt so much from them. These women (and a few men) work up to and over 12 hours a day in very poor working conditions for a tiny wage. Most of these wages they send back home to thIER families who are very poor and very far away. Many of the women have been forced to work here by their families crippling poverty, they drop out of school at a young age and from then on , factory work is their life for 6 day's a week. Yet the positivity and the smiles of these women was astonishing. After a long day, they come to the precious women school to better thier education and start to hope for perhaps a better future. Their ability and capacity for positivity and gratefulness in what seems a bitter situation is something I feel we can all learn from. That's something I have come to realise here, you always receive more than what you give. The openness, and welcoming and joy of the people and the lessons that they teach me. Always stay open, always be ready to learn, and meet every person like they have something to teach you and you will come away with more than you could ever imagine . At the end of each class I have started going round to each and every girl, looking into there eyes and tell them how amazing they are. "You are beautiful" "You are a superstar" 'YOU are Amazing'. Some girls laughed, some girls avoided my eyes, others rejected the compliment with sour facial expressions. But on Friday, the girls started to copy. Whether they were copying me to tease it doesn't matter. They were going round to their peers, looking them in the eyes and telling each other they were amazing. Smiles broadened, it was a magical moment.
On the Tuk Tuk drive to the Killing Fields the only feeling I can liken it to was the feeling I experienced while catching a train to my grandads funeral. It wasn't the same feeling, but the closest thing to it. Every time I thought we have arrived i was filled with dread. Relief flooded over me when I realised we have further to go. I didn't want to arrive. I didn't want to see the place were 1000's of bodies lay after being tortured and murdered. I felt sick. But, I knew it was something I had to do. To see for myself this place, to pay my respects to a people I have fallen in love with. 'Cambodia is the most dangerous country you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it and eventually it will break your heart' I've have been trying to write this blog post since I got here, and every time I didnt know where start. But without this information my reason for why I needed to come to Cambodia makes no sense. The reason my heart aches so much for this nation is empty. No words seem big enough to encapsulate the horror and the terror that this nation suffered. No words seem enough to explain the fear and the pain that seems to come out of the ground here. I can't describe or even hardly begin to understand the pain of watching your family be murdered, being ripped away from your home, and undergo forced labor, torture, rape, starvation. The Khmer Rouge, Pol Pots regime happened between 1975-79. Everyone in Cambodia was forced at gun point to leave there homes, there towns and there city and had to march to the countryside where they were forced into hard labor. The new rulers of Cambodia referred to the year 1975 as “Year Zero.” To them it marked the beginning of a new order in which there would be no families, no emotional connections, no expressing of feelings, no hospitals, no schools, no music, no holidays, no money—only work and death Anyone who may challenge this regime where tortured and killed. After this time the country still suffered continuing conflict, starvation, death from diseases while trying to rebuilt there lives and the country after a third of the population died, when schools and hospitals were destroyed, doctors killed, currency demolished, books and music records were burnt. There wasn't single person in Cambodia who wasn't affected by the tragedies that took place. Over a third of Cambodia's entire population died during this time. And this is recent history, if it didn't happen in your life time, it happened in your parents. And for so many this isn't history yet. Everyday they still life with PTSD and terror and fear. A spoke to one of the older Khmer staff at work and she explained how see still lives in fear, always scared that there will be another war. Fear seems to just be a part of Khmer life. Fear of the rich, fear of westerns, fear of anything which could challenge Khmer culture, fear of the police, fear of the government. The history of the Khmer Rouge is something which I have been researching since late 2014 and yet its still not a truth which I can truly fathom. The S-12 security prison Toul Sleng was a trip which I will never forget. In a place which used to be a school was turned into one of the most notorious torture prisons during the Khmer Rouge. Everyday 100s of people were arrested under suspect of being "skies"or other 'enemies of the state". they were tortured until they made a confession for there "crime" when they were then taken to one of the killings fields to be executed. If they didn't made a confession they would be tortured to the point of death. Toul Sleng is not a place you would expect to survive. The Killing fields, a 45 minute drive away from the city, where the prisinors of S-12 would be taken in trucks in the dead of night. On arrival they would be exicuted one by one and thrown into a pit with the rest of the bodies. Women and children would be killed too. On my walk around what is now a memorial museum, I saw the tree which was used by soldiers to kill the babies. Swung by there legs there heads hit against the truck, in front of the eyes of their mothers, who were then raped and killed and thrown into the same pit. This is not something which I want to talk about, nor is it something which people want to hear about. I still don't know fully the weight of which these events have shaped Cambodia today and its people. You can watch as many documentaries, read as many books and go and see the museums, but it still doesn't seem to cut it. My heart has been hurting for this country for so long now, for the injustice and suffering of an innocent people. And Its a truth that you cant get away from. Its everywhere, its in the eyes of an old women, its in the American dollars in my pockets, its in the lack of education, its in the crisis of sex trafficking, its in the old man sat searching for treasure in the rubbish pile. Cheam Chansovannary was one of the few singers who survived the Khmer Rouge. When she returned to Phnom Penh, she was found and asked to sing on the radio straight away to let people know what it was safe again to return to the city. She sang this song, Oh Phnom Penh and sang about the grief and the pain for the loss of what was once a thriving beautiful city. We hit the factory areas just past Phnom Penh airport at4pm on Saturday when factory workers came out in there hundreds like a mix matched colourful tired female army. Smiles are harder to find here. Hordes of motorists try and push through. We sat behind a Buddhist float fundraiser in a traffick deadlock.
Everyone finishes in the garment factory at 4 on a Saturday, whereas Monday to Friday the women will often work over time working 12-13 hour days. As we made our way through the crowds Sophorn pointed out the different factories. This one makes shoes for Adidas, this one clothes for H and M, Gap, jeans for Levi, Abercrombie and Fitch. There are 650Thousand garment factory workers Cambodia most of them are women who have come from the provinces to live in the city and work 6 days a week for $127 a week. Many girls start working as young as 13. They are made to leave school by their families and go and earn money to help support there families. Of the $127 salary, most of these women send a lot of these earnings home. On top of this,the working conditions in the factories are terrible and the number of fainting and fatalities over the last few years has been staggering. Driving up street 2004 towards the airport I was reminded of why I am in this car going to visit a school called Women of Hope. On both sides of this long stretch are KTVs and karekoe bars one after another, lines of girls sat on red sofas applying make up and brushing hair, getting ready of their night of work. 66% of the women who work in the entertainment industry (KTV girls, karekoe bars) before used to work in the Garment Factories. And it was this statistic which moved Sovanney Lan to start Women of Hope. To Love, Educate, encourage and distil Hope in , .the lost women who work in the Factories, to prevent the far too common story of factory workers going into sexual exploitation. Finally the traffic started moving again and we escaped the crowds and the busy market and made our way to the Women of Hope School. I was warmly welcomed with many smiles and hellos and was whisked away for a tour of the school. English class upstairs, Khmer class for the children downstairs, counselling in a small peaceful room upstairs. I sat in Thida’s English class. Once a factory worker too, she now works as an English teacher. The women and one male in the class were wonderful. I was used as a real life English person to practice with. How many brothers and sisters do you have? How old are you? Where are you from? Do you have a husband? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you like to cook? What's your favourite animal? All the important questions. I told them I have one brother and one sister, I am 23, from England. That no I don’t have a husband, but I do have a boyfriend,. I love to eat and love eating even more and that my favourite animal is a monkey. ( although I am not sure the last one is true, I panicked). I also told them I was a dance teacher and that I will be coming back next week to lead a dance workshop. The response was very positive with lots of excited faces! Leading a dance workshop for up to 50 garment factory workers on the theme of confidence is my brief. Using the power of movement and creativity to encourage self confidence and self belief is my aim. To have fun, work together, perform in front of others and give these women a reason to raise their heads high. |
Caroline RowlandI am a dance artist from Leicester who is teaching dance in Cambodia with Girls who are survivors of sex trafficking and with young disabled Khmer people ArchivesCategories |