Feb 1 Phnom Penh

I flew to Phnom Penh this afternoon. I took a tut tut to the airport for $3 and Brandon my travel partner from JWOC was nervously pacing in front of the airport because he could not get me on my cell phone. This is a typical phenomenon here that sometime the calls just do not connect. Sometimes there is a rational answer that we make up that in the early evening the high volume mesees things up but mostly it is unexplainable. I must say I am really now adjusted to life here so take a flight to Phnom Penh when I did it about 3 weeks ago is like taking the shuttle to NYC.

We checked into a large gaudy hotel right on the Mekong river built by a British company as all fo the electrical outlets required adapters. Had to pay for wireless in the room and never would have been able to hook up if I did not have the IT guy present as the code to turn it on interpreted a U as a V!!!

I got an appointment with Sopheap.Pich who is an American Cambodian that chose to return to Cambodia after getting a master's in fine arts from the Chicago Institute of Art. He is 39 years old and was "born into the eye of the storm" and lived his early life in a Thai border camp before immigrating to the United States and ending up in Amherst Ma. He is now a world renowned sculpture and works in bamboo and rattan and has a studio on a Lake with three assistants. He is articulate and thoughtful. He explains that he tried to teach art but his Western background of utilizing critical thought as a means of teaching his students to be " daring" backfired and the number of students attending his classes diminished. He said that his students were "slow" and he literally and "metaphysically" slapped them so they would learn to question. But it did not work so he no longer teaches. His work is in galleries in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Chelsea.

Then I met Boomer at the Metro cafe. Boomer is now 27 and is another American Cambodian who was born in a Thai border camp but he did not chose to return but was deported. He lived in Stockton California and was a gang member. He sports a large tattoo on his forearm, identifying himself as a gang member. He arrived in Cambodia at age 20 with "$80 in his pocket" He is now married with a 2 and a half year old daughter and he has a project where he teaches rap and hip hop to kids to in this way intervene and take them off the street. He has three of these kids living, ( " adopted" ) with him now and this is the second group that he has taken in. He is very much driven by God and doing God's work. In response to my question about the Government he said" Gotta live here, need to keep my mouth shut and go by the rules, a whole different ballgame ". " I believe in developing the country and Khmer ( pronounced Khmai) believe in developing their pockets". So we went to Happy Herb Pizza where we are told the franchise in Siem Reap will put a little illegal weed on the veggie pizza, but this remains unsubstantiated!! I will let others more inclined to confirm this. By the way Boomer had a burger and fries, the only food that I refuse to eat here given past experiences of food poisoning scarily suffered by Lyman last year.