The Struggle to Save Teen 'Love Huts' in Cambodia
MAR 25 2016

For the Kreung ethnic minority living in Cambodia, the practice of building “maiden huts" allowed young women to experience courtship on their own terms—and sometimes led to true love and lasting marriages. But now, the traditional sleeping huts have all but disappeared.

When Cha Bai was 15 years old, in the early 1960s, she stopped sleeping in her parent's house. A few strong boys from her village, Krolah (in Ratanakkiri, Cambodia) had gone into the forest, where they gathered brown leaves, split bamboo, cut branches, and then built her a small sleeping hut within the protective enclosure of the village. For the next five years, before she married, Cha Bai slept in the hut. Some cold nights, her sisters or a friend would join her to keep warm and gossip. Some nights she slept alone. And some nights, if she felt like it, one of the young men in the village would sleep with her instead.

Kreung young people are different these days, says Ha Youen Thong, a village elder in Krolah. They streak their hair red and orange. They wear jeans, and they listen to popular music. They've stopped learning to hit the gong or play flutes. Even more worrisome to him and others in Krolah, they're getting married earlier than ever before.

"These days, girls at twelve or thirteen are married already," says Cha Bai. "They sleep together early—then they have to marry. It's not like before. Mothers and fathers don't know much about their children, and they don't have ways to restrain them."

"We try to tell our children, 'Don't walk so much like the Khmer,'" says Thong. "But they don't listen."

To those who live in the high blue mountains of Cambodia's northernmost province, Khmer culture often represents material modernity: money instead of bartered goods; motor scooters from Thailand and Japan; colorful, mass-manufactured fabrics to use for clothes and wedding tents. But, as the elders of Krolah are quick to affirm, it brings with it a set of values as well.

Khmer culture can be fastidious about cleanliness. The words for "beautiful" and for "clean" are the same, perhaps because in a nation where so many are vulnerable to the elements, dirt reeks of poverty. Khmer culture is even more fastidious about purity—at least when it comes to women. A Khmer saying goes: Men are gold and women are silk—only one can be wiped clean of a stain.


Kajeanh Mom, 20, shows one of the maiden huts still standing in Khoun village, Ratanakkiri. Photo by Eduard Merigo.

In the days of Cha Bai's youth, the Kreung people did things differently. Every girl who came of age left her parents' house to sleep in a small, low hut nearby. Kreung people call the huts the "maiden huts," or "houses of the young women." They've been building them for as long as anyone can remember, long before the decades when Khmer people came to settle the far reaches of Ratanakkiri.

They build them to allow young people to experience courtship on their own terms, says Cha Bai. "We were shy of our mothers and fathers! They knew young men were coming over to sleep with us!"

Back in those days—the late 1960s—the village would fill with music and conversation when night fell, as young boys from nearby villages sat on the steps of the girls' maiden huts. They'd pipe wavering love songs on flutes or sing and pluck stringed gourds. If the girl wasn't interested, the two would chat for a while, and the boy would eventually meander on to other huts in the village. If she was, though, she'd invite the boy in to talk privately for a while. "The usual stories of men and women," Cha Bai laughs, remembering what it was like.

If the girl fell in love, she and the boy would sleep together, says Cha Bai. She is delicate about what this means.

Sometimes the affair—"sleeping together"—would last a few nights, says Yan Vuy, the village chief of nearby Kacheung. The couple would come together, then part without blame. Sometimes, though, it would last weeks or months. That's when the parents came in.

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Rutiger wrote:
To those who live in the high blue mountains of Cambodia's northernmost province,

Kradih Julang, another village elder, explains, "When there weren't Khmers to come and affect things, it was different. Our people—we could sleep together and not break the woman. Khmers? When they sleep together? They do things differently."

There's a price to misunderstanding. The Kreung weren't just mocked. In the early 2000s, Ratanakkiri was a frontier. It took two days to reach its capital, Ban Lung, from the nearest big town. Men came alone in large numbers, to cut rosewood and mine diamonds in the province's red hills. Some of them heard certain things about the Kreung culture.

"The men would come from outside during our sacrifices, during our festivals," says Ly Sam Oeun. "Lots of them. And they'd follow our girls around. They'd try to take them away."

In 2003, a Khmer businessman raped an indigenous girl from a village near Krolah. It was about then that most in Ratanakkiri decided to stop building the maiden huts. "We stopped. All of us, we stopped. We couldn't do it anymore," says Ly Sam Oeun.

"We regret it, but we can't," says Cha Bai.

Now, in the Kreung villages of Ratanakkiri, maiden huts gather red dust in front of wood houses, and decay with the seasons...

Duncan wrote:

bolueeleh wrote:doesnt exist anymore, paid 50$ for info to the nearest love huts, went in, girl says "buy me a LD?"[/quote]

That would be cheap. The one I went to see said '' You buy me smartphone ''

prahkeitouj wrote:I've listened to it, but It is still interesting! And nowadays such their culture is change by women.

Rutiger wrote:It's a fascinating aspect of one human culture when so much of the rest of the world is hell bent on safeguarding young female virginity. It's difficult to understand the logic behind the concept of maiden love huts, when pregnancy of unmarried teenage girls makes an already difficult young life much more difficult. I don't see how it benefits or empowers young women. I'm not surprised the tradition, if it really was a tradition, is fading out.