Eating Breakfast in Siem Reap

I flew into Siem Reap, Cambodia, on a steamy afternoon in rainy season. Traveling from Bangkok, it was hard to imagine Cambodia as something other than a new leg of Thailand-perhaps a slightly modified cuisine, and of course the famous temples of Angkor Wat, but how else could it be different from its Southeast Asian neighbor?

Cambodia, it turns out, is vastly different from Thailand. The Thai tourist industry is highly developed, equipped to host thousands of westerners with pockets full of strong currency. And Thailand had a fairly placid political history in the second half of the twentieth century, while Cambodia was the target of U.S. aggression during the Vietnam War. In its more recent past, Cambodia suffered the crippling effects of the Khmer Rouge regime. That government perpetrated genocide against its own people.

So while Cambodia serves up the same steaming coconut curries as Thailand, and is also well equipped to accommodate its privileged white guests, the poverty I encountered there remains unspeakable in my memory.

Siem Reap is a modest city that has blossomed into the bustling tourist center servicing Angkor Wat, that famous compound of Buddhist and Hindu temples. Throngs of westerners truck through every day, leaving behind their $40 temple entrance fee and the cost of a hotel room and some Khmer food. Most visitors also leave behind many U.S. dollars-the currency used in Cambodia since their own legal tender bottomed out at 4,000 to one dollar- in the hands of begging children.

The streets of Siem Reap are packed with them: they are small and dirty, and the four year olds carry one-year-old siblings on their backs. They beg for themselves and for their families, as well as for the amputee adults who employ them. In Cambodia, an untold number of people are landmine victims. It is impossible to walk through city streets without encountering someone missing a leg or sometimes two, or an arm, just a hand, both arms, or, occasionally, both arms and both legs.

We spent one afternoon at the landmine museum- an internationally known site, despite it being just a hut with newspaper clippings and piles of disabled explosives. Beside the museum were bunkhouses in which twenty or thirty children-most of them landmine victims-lived together. In a field across the way, many of the children were playing soccer, and after reading the newspaper articles and learning about the international movement to ban landmines, I wandered over to watch them. Many played without arms, and a few played with just one leg. Much smaller children, not landmine victims themselves but probably orphans, were also afoot, thrilled at the very presence of a westerner. They held onto my legs and demonstrated their knowledge of English-numbers one through ten-for my benefit.