Debra Groves Harmann
April 6th, 2023.

Deb Used to post on CEO.

We were contract teachers, and because of the presence of bandits — Khmer Rouge, most said — on Route 4, we signed a contract promising not to travel from Sihanoukville up the highway to Phnom Penh.


When the taxi arrived to the hotel in Phnom Penh, I ran up the stairs like a bullet. The shrimp in Ho Chi Minh City had been off, and I’d been avoiding a major diarrhea attack in the car for the last five minutes. We lived in Cambodia and had traveled around Southeast Asia for more than three years.

Long enough to know to avoid the shrimp. I should have trusted my gut and chosen something vegetarian. Ho Chi Minh City is far enough inland that shrimp was a bad choice.

That time, it was bacterial dysentery. I took a course of antibiotics for a week and got to know the white porcelain toilet very well. Too well!
It wasn’t the first time I got sick in Cambodia. I always had some health issue. At first, my husband would say, “This could have happened anywhere, even back in the States.”

In time, I quit believing him and started listening to my own thoughts. He worked so hard to convince me it was normal to be sick constantly. That ‘health and safety’ in Cambodia was the same as ‘health and safety’ anywhere.

It’s not a putdown to say it was not. It is the reality of life in a developing country. It’s why sanitation is important. It’s why travelers must exercise caution on sidewalks that suddenly fall away.

In time, I learned to take care of myself. To be cautious about what I ate, and where.

Don’t drink the water. Don’t get ice in your cold drink. Don’t eat street food. Check the color of the meat near the bone.
I learned a lot.
Hacking off the tip of a coconut and drinking the coconut water was the safest bet. There’s nothing like fresh coconut water.

Sihanoukville is on the southern coast of Cambodia, and long before it was overrun by developers and casinos, my husband and I were posted there to run a small school for the International Development Project.

Australian Centre for Education’s Sihanoukville branch.

Tropical Sihanoukville was a lazy, natural beach town. I spent time every day after teaching classes at the beach, running and biking the little roads to get there. After some time, I got a Honda Dream motorcycle and rode around town. Sihanoukville became home to us.

We were contract teachers, and because of the presence of bandits — Khmer Rouge, most said — on Route 4, we signed a contract promising not to travel from Sihanoukville up the highway to Phnom Penh.

Not that we would have. Six young westerners were murdered in the weeks before we began our contract work in Sihanoukville, and served as a glaring example of why not to travel Route 4 or take the train.

In Sihanoukville, we had an apartment I loved, a standard open-air place with metal decorative bars on windows to keep robbers out. During monsoon season, the rain beat down on the banana and mango trees just outside. The sound of rain reminded me of home in Oregon, and I woke up to the sun cooking the wet ground and trees. Humidity rose like steam.

Our little school didn’t have air-conditioning, and the children and adult students would say, “Teacher! it is hot. Do you feel hot?” and they would smile. How can one not smile back?

I loved our students, who brought plastic bags of rambutan fruits or Longan berries for me. My adult students who wrote poignant essays of their family members killed during the Pol Pot years, 1975–1979. Many of them remembered the cruel years of starving, being beaten. The interrogations at the torture facility that ended in death. All sorts of essays.

In 1994, just fifteen years later, these students asked me with such care, “Are you hot, teacher?” How I loved them.

One night I went out to The Angkor Arms, a British-style pub in town. Four of our friends had the idea to go in on a pub, and they had fish n chips, Angkor beer — that brewery was just north of town — and the environment was a meeting place for the twenty or so expats living in town. I had a couple shots of Bailey’s with Jack, an occupational therapist from Scotland, and we chatted a while.

The next morning, I woke up extremely ill. Dysentery, no doubt, or perhaps worse. Salmonella? I was terrified, as I was losing fluids fast from both ends, and couldn’t maintain consciousness. One minute I was sitting on the toilet and the next Ken was carrying me. He came in to the bathroom when he heard my head hit the floor.

My pants were around my knees, and watery fluid was coming out of me. I was mortified.

Then, my body began cramping — first my legs, then my forearms, drawing my hands into little claws. I cried and Ken was moving fast.
“Don’t get off the bed,” he said, “you’ll black out and crack your skull.”

Within forty minutes, I’d gone from relatively healthy to ‘is she going to die of dehydration?’
He ran out to find a doctor.

The father of one of my students was a doctor, and lived down the street. We were so lucky! He arrived with IV bags of saline solution and several vitamins to inject with them.

At first, I refused. I was out of my head and incapable of making decisions.

“Everyone wants to stick needles in you and put in vitamins,” I said, “What good do they do? It’s ridiculous.”

Ken said, “But this time you need them. You will die. Let him take care of you.” I agreed. I was floating in and out of consciousness.

I spent the day in bed, with IV fluids going into me through my arms and legs. A few days later, I was better. My Scottish friend was fine, although he’d eaten the same basic food. He hadn’t gotten sick at all.

You never know when you’re going to get the dirty glass. There’s no way you can predict such an event.

Later, when Route 4 was safe again, Ken and I were living in Phnom Penh. We decided to take a bus down to our old stomping grounds, so we could take a good look at the land. En route, the bus pulled over so we could use the facilities. I had to pee, as did everyone else on the bus.

Whoops. I forgot my sarong.

I watched the other women wearing sarongs — wrapped long skirts — loosen them around their waists, squat down and pee. They were concealed behind these hidden tents of fabric. I was wearing typical western pants, and would have to bare my backside. Great. Clearly I hadn’t planned ahead.

I walked behind the bus with Ken about twenty feet, and we looked back at the bus to see about twenty faces plastered against the window.
They wanted to see how ‘farang’ peed!There was no respectful turning away to allow modesty, no sir.

Ken snickered and said, “You’re being watched very closely.”

I don’t remember how I dealt with it, but there may have been a bush involved. I worried about going off-trail in Cambodia, as there are so many bombs scattered about.

Not kidding. Even when Ken said, “I don’t think there are bombs here,” I knew he was wrong. All the amputees in the markets would disagree with him too. In time, I learned to trust myself — not Ken. In part, that’s how I was able to leave him, when things got so bad.

When he made claims that weren’t true. When he lied.

I’m sorry things didn’t work out for us, but it’s good I left. Cambodia isn’t a safe place for longterm. To visit, it’s fine. For some odd reason, most expat men there lived to the age of 58.

Ken was 59 when he drowned in the Mekong River. At the time, he was trying so hard to leave Cambodia. He missed the boat, as it were.

I left Cambodia in 2001, and I miss adventures there. I miss running our publishing company with my ex, the cultural differences I learned.

My Cambodian friends. It was in Cambodia where I learned my street smarts.

It was there I learned to trust my gut. For sure, I take my sarong when I travel anywhere now. A good lesson for anyone.

I’ve only just seen this.
She also posted on Khmer440 for awhile after the death of her ex in an unfortunate accident in PP.

She is writing a lot from what I see elsewhere. Nice of you to share this here.

violet wrote: ↑Tue Apr 18, 2023 5:49 pm I’ve only just seen this.
She also posted on Khmer440 for awhile after the death of her ex in an unfortunate accident in PP.

She is writing a lot from what I see elsewhere. Nice of you to share this here.

I never knew LTO or Deb although we exchanged pm's about certain aspects of being in Cambodia in the nineties - I quite liked Deb from what she posted and our few exchanges. I suspect her time on here and TOF was largely driven by the want to tap into an audience so as to promote her book, but I think that's fair enough as she contributed to the forum and the subject matter of her book was of interest to most.