Tata.

Ming Visal had extended the invite for Josh to come eat dinner with us at the house, and last night was the night. On the moto ride down, my driver Veasna in front, me in the middle and Josh on the back, we hit a red light which happened to be manned by a handful of police officers and when the light changed they kept traffic in its place.

It was at the street that comes into town from the airport, and we soon discovered that the King had just returned from his travels in China and France. His escort was something to behold as a bunch of matching black cars streamed past, led by police cars with flashing lights, followed by a swarm of police motos clustered around one not at all conspicuous black car in particular, and then several other black cars, police cars with flashing lights and then Land Cruisers and finally more police motos. I had always thought that when you have some sort of an important person in an escort out on public streets you wanted to make it a secret as to which car he was actually in, but maybe I just picked that up in Clear & Present Danger.

The original invitation for my brother to come eat dinner was to entail rice and whatever else at the house but as it happens, we went out to eat. It was a great place and I was ticked that the batteries in my camera had died earlier in the day and I had left the camera back at the house. The place was a huge restaurant on the other side of the river and just outside of town, and our table was up a couple flights of stairs and overlooking an open-air dining area directly in front of a stage with live karaoke music entertainment. But the thing that sets this restaurant apart, above the rest, was the retractable roof over the stage that is capable of closing over the dining area below in the event of foul weather. It looked like something right out of one of the new-fangled ballparks back home. But a close second to the retractable roof were the ladies at the door who are sitting down on either side of the exit and then stand and bow as you pass. I wanted to tell them I was not the president or anything, and never could be, having been born an American citizen in Guatemala (unless of course Arnold is able to change that law). But then I would tell them, those girls at the door, that I really don’t want to be president anyway.

Anyway, so as not to allow the technical difficulties with my camera to thwart your viewing pleasure, I have done my best to recreate what my photos might have looked like, using a black Pilot G-2 05 pen and a pad of paper featuring the former logo of World Relief Cambodia in both English and Khmer. These works of art might even be better than photos because they are stunningly realistic and have captions built in. Enjoy.

Snakes On A Stick.

I should preface this entry by saying that due to the particular nature of the details within, photos and miscellaneous anecdotes will serve to further enhance your reading experience, and I have decided that including these as appendices would serve our purpose well. I don't know how to do superscript numbers like you see in legitimate publications, so I have developed my own slightly different (and inferior) system. Whenever you see a bold letter in squarish brackets, such as [x], you know my system is at work.

Well, Brother Josh [a] has been visiting for just over a week now. He spent most of last week at two WR offices a few hours from Phnom Penh, where he was working on computer stuff with the staff, giving them bits and pieces of his computer engineering degree from RIT [b] for free. I, meanwhile, was here in town, working hard to crank out the final stories and especially a brochure.

Friday night, as per Engchy's recommendation, we went to eat at an Indian restaurant called Chi Cha's [c] near the riverfront. My only regret is that I didn't know about this place sooner. For two bucks, you get all-you-can-eat rice and that amazingly tasty Indian bread, along with whatever meat dish you want, a bowl of lentil soup, a plate with some mixed vegetables and then another plate with tomatoes and cucumbers. For an extra 25 cents you can add a bottle of Fanta. As if the food wasn't enough, the oscillating fan mounted on the wall above the table had a remote control for Pete's sake [d]. Just before leaving, the waitress gave us their business card, saying we should know they did free delivery. I asked if they delivered to America, and she said no, just Phnom Penh. I am not sure if she knew I was joking or not [e]. She didn't look very Indian, but then again neither does my Indian friend Rebecca in Lancaster, so I went ahead and asked her if she was Indian. She kind of laughed at me like I was dumb, and said she was Cambodian. I was hoping she could have taught me some words in Hindi, but it was not meant to be.

The riverfront area in Phnom Penh is where the young people all go in the evenings with their special someones. They park their motos and sit on the little ledge overlooking the river and it is all pretty romantic, until a guy a few feet away, oblivious to the idea of ambience and public etiquette, lets loose and starts urinating. Josh and I walked down along the riverfront, and after stopping for fraps at a trendy café I like [f], we continued on past the royal palace before turning around and walking almost all of the way back to the hotel. We were talking about all kinds of things, including theology and community development, so we just kind of last track of time I guess. Josh noticed, and I photographed, cooked snake on a stick, all zig zagged and crispy [g]. We were walking back on Street 70, north of Boeung Kak lake, and shortly after I told Josh how this area had traditionally been brothel central until it was forced underground, down hallways and such, we passed a bonafide brothel right out in the open, complete with scantily clad teenage girls sitting under a fluorescent light glowing red. At about this time the area delved into a deeper level of shadiness, so we got on a couple of motos for the remaining part of the trip. Back in his hotel room I showed him on a map just how far we had walked, and it was concluded that we'd walked more than a quarter of the way around the perimiter of the city, which is pretty impressive [h].

Early the next morning we got on a bus and headed to the beach at Sihanoukvile, which, if you have been reading my blog with any regularity, has been mentioned a few times before. This was my third time there, but I never tire of it. We stayed at the same bungalow place where I stayed my first time down there [i]. This time the wooden thatched roof bungalow we got was half-way up a hill and raised up on stilts, allowing for a pretty cool view of the ocean. I read one and a half books over the weekend, and while the currently jelly fish-infested waters didn't allow for swimming, God put on a pretty remarkable show for us with wind and rain and a rip-roaring but brief thunderstorm on Saturday afternoon. You don't normally think of the words rain, beach and good as belonging in the same sentence, but sitting in that little beachside open-air thatched roof bar, safe from (and yet exposed to) the elements, and watching the islands in the distance disappear into the mist struck me as about the coolest place in the world to be at that moment.

I was feeling sick over the weekend, with a fever and aches and such. I was fearing that my negligence in taking my malaria meds [j] had caught up with me, but fortunately today I feel just about back to normal. It did occur to me, however, that if one has to be sick, the kind of sickness I experienced was just about ideal. I was tired and achy, but it was not miserable. It was the kind of thing you can comfortably sleep off. So I did just that, sleeping maybe 11 hours Saturday night and then another 9 or 10 last night, not to mention some dozing off on the bus.

On Sunday, before returning to PP, Josh and I went to the Snakehouse for lunch [k]. The Snakehouse, as the name would suggest, is pretty much a house with a lot of snakes. They say the owner goes out into the jungle and catches the snakes. I can think of about six billion occupations I would prefer to the one he has chosen for himself. Looking at snakes from behind the glass is creepy enough, if you ask me [l]. And what was even creepier still was how every few cages you'd see the sign for a pit viper or whatever and there was no snake to be seen. Sure, it is possible that the snake had died, but that kind of thing still does make you wonder what kinds of critters happened to be lurking in the gardens around the path you're on [m], preferring freedom and access to human flesh over glass boxes.

Insert Twilight Zone music here.

APPENDICES!

[a] This is Brother Josh purchasing papaya for himself yesterday while I sit in the shade because I am sick.

[b] RIT = Rochester Institute of Technology (www.rit.edu)

[c] The sign in front of Chi Cha's:

[d] That's right, Pete. That remote-controlled oscillating fan goes out to you.

[e] This is a loose reference to a film I recently saw, titled Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. Much of it takes place in India where an American comedian realizes his sense of humor is not funny to Indians. You can watch the trailer here.

[f] Cafe Fresco (www.cafefresco.fcccambodia.com)

[g] Snakes on a stick.

[h] This map of the city shows you the basic route we walked, starting with Dot 1, Chi Cha's restaurant, then down to Dot 2, Cafe Fresco, then eventually back up past Dot 3, snakes on a stick, and then to Dot 4, moto pick-up. The grey line then follows the moto route back to the hotel where Josh is staying, and where I had left my backpack, represented by Dot 5. Finally, the blue line is the moto route I took to get home, at Dot 6. Stalkers and other unsavory creatures, Dot 6 is not placed exactly in the right place, so as to throw you off. Don't even try to find me. I blend right in with the locals anyway.

[i] Coaster's (www.cambodia-beach.com/coasters.htm)

[j] Geof, health advisor and male nurse, who knows more about these things than you and I, said that taking malaria meds in Cambodia this time of year was a waste of time.

[k] In the photo of the dining room below, please note that the under the glass on the table is a big ol' snake to further enhance one's dining experience.

[l] One of many slithering serpents to be seen.

[m] See what I mean?

Eulogy.

I read an article in the paper today about an American guy who just died here in Cambodia. He was in prison, charged with pedophilia after allegedly molesting young girls. The article said he reached through the bars with a mop handle and slid an officer's gun into his cell and then blew himself away. He was just cremated at a pagoda, and his remains are being sent home to his family in the States. Besides the guy who did the cremation the only other person on hand was the ambulance driver who had brought the body and served as the witness. No mourners, no one.

If this man were to have a funeral, what would people say? Honestly. What can be said? I can't even imagine the family's pain in this moment, to have lost their son, their brother, and to have lost him in a way that will not garner much sympathy from anyone. You feel sympathy when a mother of three dies of cancer or when a kid is tragically killed while playing sports on Saturday at the park. But what do you say when a pedophile shoots himself? That's just sad and shameful.

But this man, this pedophile, started off as a kid like anyone else. Maybe he had a happy childhood, or maybe he was caught up in a cycle of abuse like all too many. Maybe his upbringing brought him to this. Or maybe he grew up with loving parents who cared deeply for him and maybe at some point there was some small but powerful event that drove him off the deep end. Maybe a bully, or a careless word, or one small bad decision. The article didn't say. Or maybe this man was just particularly evil and a lost cause all along. Is that it? Or are all of us, given certain conditions and circumstances, prone to the same kind of thing? Am I capable of evil like that?

You just wonder.

Then I also wonder, what will people say at my funeral? And will they mean it, or will it just be a bunch of nice stuff you're supposed to say at funerals because it is not polite to sound like the person who died was actually a selfish jerk or a piece of scum or whatever? It's sobering to think about these kinds of things, but in a way, it is also invigorating. Why? Because I'm not dead yet, and judging by the fact that you're reading this, I'd guess you're not dead either. Maybe death will come knocking tomorrow, or maybe it will be fifty years from now. There's still some more of the story left to write. Maybe if I were to die tomorrow the eulogy would be positive and sincere, but if I lived a while longer and never did another good thing and never cared for anyone from tomorrow until the age of 80, why should anyone say anything good in my memory? "The Tim who just died may have been a jerk, but he started off well, and that counts for something." Who cares, really, about the first 24 years if the remaining 55 are characterized by self-indulgence that made everyone around miserable?

It would be great, wouldn't it, to live the sort of life that when you die, whether "prematurely" or not, people would be able to really mean it when they say that you were one of the most loving people they have ever known? What if the first thing they were to say about you had to do with your vibrant relationship with God, and how your joy was so cantagious?

We get to asking these kinds of questions and slowly, a lot of the things we put so much value on in our everyday lives tend to kind of fade into insignificance. I heard someone say once that if you reach back into eternity past, all you have is God. If you reach into eternity future, you have God and people. It only makes sense, then, as people of God, to place a pretty high value on people, to be concerned about who we are becoming personally, and intentional about how we live in relation to those around us.

Death is not the end. It is a new and never ending part of the story, for better or worse. But the story is already underway, and while you and I may not have control over very much in this world, the decisions we make today, and even the small ones, really add up.

Let's write a good story, people. Let's not leave people lying about us when the fat lady sings.