Live at Last!

Some of you know that, contrary to all reasonable expectations, I've spent the last couple of months working not on any legal documents, but on redoing Legal Aid's website. The final result is finally live: click here to have a look. (For comparison's sake, the old version is still available here.)


The reason it took so long was because I had to teach myself a number of web technologies of which I had been blissfully ignorant. For the geeky, let the record show that the site is powered by WordPress, explaining the learning curve: my knowledge of PHP, CSS, and MySQL was basically nil when I came to Cambodia, so I had to spend a long time boning up and experimenting.


Comments? Suggestions?

A party

Last week Lou and I went to a party at our Khmer teacher Sokha's house. He and his wife were celebrating the first birthday of their son, Sothearos, a name from Sanskrit meaning "dew." It's also the name of a major boulevard in Phnom Penh, after some king or other. Sokha told us that it's very unusual for ordinary Cambodians to give a child such a grand name, as it's though to be bad luck. He and his wife, however, decided to buck tradition. I'm not entirely sure of it, but I surmise that in Western terms, Sothearos falls somewhere between William and Charlemagne for grandeur and eccentricity. Not positively outlandish, but distinctly regal.


The party was a great chance to infiltrate a real, actual Khmer home---an opportunity that comes along with surprising rarity. Just traveling to Sokha's house demonstrated to us how much of Phnom Penh is hidden from us. Lou and I drove out to a spot near the airport, where Sokha met us on his motorbike. He led us along a series of unlit, rutted dirt alleys along the abandoned train tracks to his house, which seems to be part of the housing development that has exploded in the capital in recent years. Many of the houses seemed new or even half-built, although it was difficult to tell in the dark, especially as I was concentrating on negotiating protruding boulders, mud puddles, and hardened tire tracks with my extremely inadequate headlight (at low speeds it hardly works at all, but flares up when I rev the engine). The houses in this part of the city open onto undeveloped land that must have been a railway easement in the past. They say that Cambodia is restarting its rail lines, setting up an inevitable land conflict with these homeowners and merchants---but that's for another post.


Lou and I were the only Westerners at the party, and were given the red carpet treatment. That meant (1) sitting at a table groaning with grilled meat and pungent sauces, and (2) posing for photos with every single person at the party, whether or not we had had the chance to speak with them at all. The guests seemed to take it as a prestigious thing to have barangs (foreigners) at the birthday party, and wanted to commemorate the occasion. I've never really been a guest of honor, especially in such an unearned way, but I can't say I didn't enjoy playing the celebrity for an evening. Of course, I may have misinterpreted the whole thing. I was undeniably a bit of a physical standout at the party, towering over everyone there, so the shutterbugs may have simply been documenting an interesting specimen.


Here are some photos, as well as a very short video of Sokha's niece dancing. Her hand gestures are very typical. People dance the way she does in the video by the hour at weddings.

Wheels!

This weekend I finally bought myself a motorbike! Here it is, my pride and joy---a Daelim Citi 100, a green hornet of uncertain vintage, with four gears, an unreliable electric starter, and an instrument panel that long ago stopped indicating speed, gear, or fuel quantity, purchased for the grand sum of $340 from the only obese Cambodian woman I have ever seen:

And here, for those who haven't experienced the joys of Phnom Penh's traffic, is a video I shot the other day by taping my camera to my handlebars, much to the amusement of other drivers. It starts in the parking lot of Legal Aid of Cambodia, and shows snippets of the very roundabout way I inadvertently took home. The shaking at the beginning is me jumping on the kick starter, thanks to the temperamental battery. My favorite part is at around 2:05, when you can see two dudes wheeling a rusty bicycle alongside their moto at high speed:

As you can see, the traffic in Phnom Penh is chaotic, to say the least. Of course I wear a helmet, but I consider myself an unusually safe driver here because I never drive into oncoming traffic. I also never transport more than one other person, though it's totally routine to see two adults and several small children on one moto. I also never administer intravenous medication on the moto:

Another road hazard here is the police, who routinely stop Westerners and demand on the spot "fines" for no good reason at all. So far I've managed to avoid being pulled over by veering into the middle lane whenever I see cops ahead, so that they can't easily flag me down.

For all the chaos, motoring around Phnom Penh is super fun. People seem to get a kick out of seeing a Westerner on an old beater like mine, instead of a more modern Honda, so I get lots of smiles and waves, especially from hack drivers with the same bike. 

Trespassing on your own land

Last week I went with the lawyers in the Land Law Program at Legal Aid to Siem Reap to visit two clients, husband and wife, who are in prison, accused of trespassing on their own land.

Their story is pretty typical: they're both former Khmer Rouge soldiers who settled on their farm after the fighting with the government stopped in the '90s. There was a government program, whereby you could take ownership of land by clearing it and removing any land mines in it---a sort of Homestead Act for Cambodia. The villagers did all that, established their farms, and started putting their lives back together.

Unbeknownst to our clients, however, the village chief illegally sold everybody's land to some politician quite early on, maybe ten years ago now. The politician in question (who is now a National Assembly member) bought the land as an investment---his intention was to sell the land for profit, not to farm it, so he left the villagers alone. Over the years the paper value of the land has skyrocketed, and it changed hands several times. Meanwhile, the villagers have continued farming the land, subsisting on their harvests as they've done since the war ended, totally unaware that influential people in the capital were speculating on its value.

That, to me, is one of the most revealing parts of the case. The villagers can continue farming the land, and the speculators can continue trading the land, coexisting in parallel universes, more or less blissfully ignorant of each other. It just so happens that the villagers are the legal owners of the land, but as long as their use of land---i.e., farming---doesn't conflict with the speculators' use of the land---i.e., profit---an equilibrium is maintained.

Our clients, however, decided to assert their legal claim to the land by seeking formal title to it. (Since the Khmer Rouge destroyed all records having to do with land ownership, it's very common for people to have a legal claim to their land without title, an actual piece of paper, recording that fact.) As soon as our clients sought formal ownership of the land, their interest collided with that of the speculators. The actual legal collision here is quite straightforward. The speculators think they own the land, but they don't, because they were defrauded in the first place; they have, in all fairness, been taken for a ride. They have a mess of their own to sort out, sorting out who owes what to whom over this rotten deal. But the villagers own the land---simple as that.

In Cambodia's courts, however, nothing is simple. The villagers may have the law on their side, but the speculators have money and influence. It's the easiest thing in the world for them to exert a little pull---and it really takes just a little---and steamroll the villagers. That's how our clients wound up in jail. The speculators bribed someone, or made a call, or both, and now our clients are looking at a year in prison for trespassing on their own land.

The really crazy part is that there's a whole system of special commissions, called Cadastral Commissions (from the French cadastre, for 'register of property'), charged with sorting out precisely this kind of all-too-common dispute. The only way to get definitive title to land is through that system. The speculators never went through that system, meaning that they have no legal support for their claim that they own the land. In essence, the speculators have succeeded in having two people locked up for trespassing on land that nobody legally owns.

What's worse is that our clients have four children, who are now stranded on their farm with nobody to take care of them. Chheng Ourn, the director of LAC's Land Law Program, filed a motion with the court to dismiss the trespassing charges, so hopefully their parents will be out of prison soon, but there's really no saying. My task now is to try and find some NGO to take in the children, but even that might not happen---they're all overbooked and underfunded, so finding one to take in four more kids will take some doing. Right now, the village is inaccessible by road thanks to flooding from Typhoon Ketsana, so the kids are making do with the food that Legal Aid dropped off last week.

There was a World Bank project to help improve matters. They were resolving land conflicts and issuing titles to avoid precisely this kind of situation. But the day after we got back from Siem Reap, we learned that Cambodia's government has ended the program, which according to a local rights group, was "an abysmal failure."

Back in Cambodia

So here I am, back in Cambodia. This time I'm working for a slightly more rag-tag organization, without the resources to handle my visas, so I had to shift for myself. As a result, I recently paid my very first bribe.

Let me hasten to say that this was a process utterly devoid of finesse. Do not for a second imagine me casting keen glances at stony faced interlocutors, engaging in any kind of savvy negotiations, or taking any audacious risks. Instead of conjuring "Sash in post-World War II Berlin traversing the treacherous zone borders using his wit and guile," think of "Sash learning an unfamiliar filing procedure at the DMV."

Here's how it went down. After disembarking from my plane, I shuffled through all the usual lines. I handed  over my passport and paperwork, and made my way to the cashier as directed. But instead of shuffling along to await my visa, I paused at the counter for an awkward moment, trying to figure out to whom I ought to address my grease payment. You could hardly imagine a less debonair figure dabbling in the less-than-pristine waters of Cambodian officialdom. I even briefly entertained the notion of clearing my throat, as in: "Ahem. Can someone please tell me whom I should bribe?"

But, as I say, this game does not require a light touch. The paper shufflers behind the window, keen-nosed for lucre, spotted me straight away; the same people who had processed and returned my documents without deigning to notice me or return my greetings one minute suddenly showed uncharacteristic solicitude. Anyway, I imagined that I detected a certain heightened energy in the ranks, a straightening of backs and turning of heads, as I cast about for a sticky palm.

I eventually addressed the whole passel of officials, asking nonchalantly "Is it possible to get a six-month visa here?" Sure now what I was after, the immigration officials jockeyed openly for my business, talking over each other and trying to catch my eye.

Eventually, one of them won out. The bureaucrat started answering, "Yes, it is possible. You can---"---but before he could finish, a man in an olive-green military uniform emerged from an office behind the counter and stood behind my bureaucrat, who immediately said "You can talk to him." The uniformed man was the captain in charge of the immigration office at the airport. His inferiors all deferred to him as he led me to different desk.

From there it was entirely straightforward: the captain very politely named his price, which was exactly the same price I had been offered on my first trip to Cambodia, and promised to deliver my passport and visa on such and such a day. I turned over my passport, and received it back in due course, exactly as promised, personally hand delivered by the captain.

As you can see, this particular area of Cambodian corruption is no cloak-and-dagger affair. No surreptitious swaps, no deft conman shuffles. No cynical, cigar-chomping camaraderie. No winking, no shit-eating grins, no talk of backs being scratched. No party lines, no inside connections, no circumlocutions. Nothing that resembled any of the bribes I've seen in the movies, or on shows like The Wire. Just a quick, public transaction with a uniformed officer who identified himself by name using an official document, charged me what appears to be a standard fee, and delivered the goods in a timely fashion.

In other words, this particular bribe was essentially indistinguishable from a legitimate fee. I asked at the immigration office how to get a visa, and an immigration officer handled it for me. In fact, I would point out that when I asked how to get a business visa, nobody mentioned what I happen to know is the actual procedure. Anyone who hadn't done the research wouldn't even realize he had paid a bribe, if he could overlook the suspiciously personalized service. It was predictable, efficient, and relatively transparent, just like a good bureaucratic procedure ought to be. It's just that the procedure that exists on paper and the procedure that happens in practice are totally different from each other---especially with regard to who keeps the fee.

Of course, maybe this is just a rationalization. Maybe I sullied myself with bad karma by participating in such a sordid business. If omens are any indication, I must have displeased some deity, because the airport lost both of my suitcases.

Back in the USA . . . for now

As most of you know already, I am back in the US for about a month. I'm not yet reachable by phone, but I'll remedy that in the morning. Hardly worthwhile news to post at four in the morning, but I am currently suffering from serious jet lag as a consequence of a momentary, unaccustomed lapse into luxury and dissipation.

Ordinarily, I suffer only mild jet lag, especially when I arrive home late at night. On a long flight like the one from Hong Kong to New York, I usually get about two hours of sleep, by forcing myself unconscious through sheer force of will. Leg cramps, general irritation, and in-flight movies generally keep me awake the rest of the time, so that by the time I arrive home I'm capable of little more than a perfunctory greeting to the loving family before I collapse into bed.

But for some reason, I was bumped up into Business Class on my flight home this time. Not for me the grim, silent struggle for knee- and elbow-space, the incessant mewling and puking of babies, or the aching, unfulfillable urge to cross my legs. This time, sated with cognac and fine cheeses, lulled by the sound of glasses and porcelain chinking on amply laden carts, I slept the deep and refreshing sleep of one savoring unearned opulence.

The more fool me. I arrived in New York uncharacteristically perky, just in time for my sister and her fiance (who are putting me up for the night) to go to bed. That is why you find me posting to this nearly derelict blog at four in the morning. Serves me right, I suppose, for straying from the straight and narrow path of Economy Class.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took of the ruined temples at Angkor Wat.

Photo project

I haven't posted for a while because with the end of the summer looming, I actually have to hand in a memo on my research topic. That's about all I've been up to, so I thought I'd write about a great project my friend Beth Rossi is working on for Legal Aid of Cambodia that has started to bear fruit.

Earlier this summer, Beth identified twenty-two Cambodian kids from Battambang who either have already had or are at risk of getting into trouble with the law. After a couple of introductory sessions, she gave them disposable cameras with which to take photos of their daily lives. Once the results came in, she held a writing workshop where the kids wrote captions for the photos and biographies of themselves, which were exhibited along with the photos in Battambang.

I've posted some of my favorites below. One hundred of the best photos are available here. Pictures of the exhibit going up and of the writing workshop are here.

The next step is to have the captions and biographies translated from Khmer into English. Then Beth can hang prints of the kids' photos at restaurants and retailers around Boston (where she attends law school), with the ultimate goal of helping out Legal Aid of Cambodia. If the project is successful enough, it may well be repeated---and as Beth has pointed out to me, it's a very promising way to build connections between at-risk children and sympathetic lawyers.

Donations are, of course, welcome. You can also buy prints of any photos that catch your eye, with the money going to an excellent cause. Beth's email address is elizabeth.a.rossi [at] gmail.com.

Here's Beth mounting the exhibit with a colleague:

And here are all the kids who took the photos: