Kung-fu Hillbilly wrote: ↑Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:51 am

By Charles Rollet
18 May 2017,

Inside the Dangerous World of Homemade Rocket Gambling

The gamblers' site was a large clearing on top of the thickly-forested Dangrek Mountains in northern Cambodia, just a five-minute drive from the Thai border.

Unfortunately for the Cambodians living in the valley below, the cloudy sky did little to dampen the spirits of the hundreds of Thai gamblers who had gathered there to launch around a dozen 30-foot-long bamboo rockets in the space of a couple hours.

Suddenly, the countdown began, and a massive puff of white smoke erupted underneath a rocket. A few earsplitting seconds later, the missile was already thousands of feet high, screeching across the Cambodian countryside like a bamboo banshee.

At stake are vast sums of money and the spectacle is undeniably captivating. But, amazingly, the gamblers don't seem to give a damn about what happens to the rockets after they're fired off. And, apparently, neither does the Cambodian government.

Rocket gambling has grown increasingly common in Thailand's northeast as a corruption of the traditional Bang Fai festival, during which rockets (some shaped like penises) are fired into the sky as part of an ancient fertility ritual to herald the rainy season.

"The authorities in countries like Cambodia act as gatekeepers, ensuring that those who pay win, and the poor lose," he said. "It's setting fire to people's homes and property, and never having to say you're sorry."

full.https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/znga ... t-gambling

Seen this in Thailand great fun a Pattaya bar girl took me back to her home and we stopped on the way to see this her perants were selling drinks at the show another amazing experience you can get from bar girls.

Sary Sothearoth and William Masters. Photo: Ryan Plummer

Love conquers all

By RYAN PLUMMER
2009

Mixed marriages in Cambodia often carry layers of suspicion

In 2011, the government set an upper age limit of 49 for all foreign men wishing to marry Cambodian women in an effort to promote what it labelled “honest marriages”. The law did not apply to foreign women and Cambodian men.

Mixed marriages in Cambodia often carry layers of suspicion. Is the Khmer partner more interested in foreign citizenship and a foreign work permit? Will the barang partner suddenly pack his or her bags and leave? “Initially we faced a lot of cynicism from both sides of the cultural divide,” says Clifford. “We had to show our friends and his family we were committed to each other.” They married in early 2008.

Many couples prefer not to marry and thus save time, energy and money. “It was simply too complicated and expensive,” says a 45-year-old English teacher Raaj Sing of the $600 unofficial price tag attached to the marriage certificate he was offered.

Other unmarried couples complain of the “processing charges” for licences that add up to anything from $10 to $1,000 but amount, in reality, to little more than corruption. “In the end, we decided not to bother,” Tina Kim Pheng, 32, owner of Bites restaurant, says. “We have no plans to move to Canada, so there is no real need for us to legalise the marria

“He likes to talk about everything in great detail,” says Tina. ”She likes to talk in code, it takes a long time to get any information,” says Sing. But the arguments fuel the passion that keeps them together. “We love to make up,” they both agree. On their first date eight years ago, Sing took Tina out for dinner and ordered a bottle of wine. A less common tipple for many Cambodians, it was a first for Tina.

full.https://southeastasiaglobe.com/love-conquers-all/

An elderly homeless Cambodian man sits near his ramshackle home on a city street in Kampong Cham, Cambodia.

HOMELESSNESS IN CAMBODIA The Terror of Gentrification

By Simon Springer
December 2015

"Those bums and beggars no longer live [in] anarchy along the streets, which affects our capital’s beauty" – Sok Sambath, Daun Penh District Governor.

Cambodia’s flirtation with free market ideas in the wake of the United Nations mission of the early 1990s has, since the early 2000s, been transformed into an unhealthy and often tragic obsession, marred by aid dependency and authoritarianism (Ear 2013; Lim 2013). The penetration of neoliberalism into Cambodian society is a stunning example of how the politics of regional competition for investment and tourist dollars can lead to a profound disempowerment.

Gentrification is an expression of urban entrepreneurialism, often proceeding in a top-down fashion that simply furthers a neoliberal agenda (Lees et al . 2008). Like all gentrifying processes, beautification is effected in the name of aesthetics and profit, where political activity is sanitized and reduced to the performance of a commodified spectacle of accumulative practices and place
Simon Springer236marketing (Mitchell 2003).

This trampling of marginalized people comes through a negation of their ownership claims to long-held possessions because they lack the “proper” documentation that confers legitimacy on property (Springer 2013). Such dispossession is enriching local tycoons, who are easily able to acquire the land in question through the complicity of the Cambodian courts and only subsequently offer it for lease or sale to private foreign companies (Amnesty International 2008).

I’m not a beggar, but when people tell me not to beg I don’t know what to do because I have no money. I have no identity card so I can’t get a job and no one can guarantee for me so it is very difficult. I’m ashamed of myself. I feel hopeless. One day I dream I will have a better life than this, but for now I’m just hopeless. (Interview, Homeless Recycler, Male, Age 21, 27 May 2010, Riverfront, Phnom Penh)

Those homeless individuals who are captured are not sent back to their home provinces for reintegration or to those communities where relatives may reside. Instead, they are simply dumped off in random locations deemed to be far enough away to prevent return to Phnom Penh. Over the past eight years of researching this phenomenon I have talked to many people who have indicated that they have been personally victimized by this process. Having no opportunities to make a living in the sites where they are abandoned, homeless Cambodians inevitably make their way back to the capital city, sometimes walking hundreds of kilometers

Not satisfied with seeing only the eastern side of the center, and knowing that there was something going on over on the western side, despite assurances from the manager to the con-trary, I decided to walk over and find out for myself. At this point the manager, who had been denying that the western building was being used, got on his walkie-talkie and was frantically telling the person on the other end to open the doors. As I got closer, the doors to two large rooms swung open and people started pouring out, most of them making a beeline for the central lagoon to relieve themselves from the heat. I started taking pictures, ...

full. https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... rification

Bt Mark D faram
Feb 2017

Race riot at sea — 1972 Kitty Hawk incident fueled fleet-wide unrest

The black sailor continued to beat the mess cook, urged on by the rest of the group. The onslaught continued, ending only when the white seaman was thrown down a ladder well.

It was not a good time for the carrier Kitty Hawk as it steamed across the South China Sea toward Vietnam in October 1972. The ship already had been deployed for eight months, and was on track to spend a record number of days at sea with a grueling pace of flight operations to support U.S. troops in Vietnam.

By now the group had grabbed makeshift weapons such as broom handles, wrenches and pieces of pipe. Unwittingly, a white mess cook ran right into the group, freezing in his boots as the black came rushing towards him. "Get him," someone yelled and the crowd began to pummel the sailor until his clothes were soaked with blood.

According to the congressional report, sleeping sailors were pulled from their racks and beaten with fists and chains, dogging wrenches, metal pipes, fire extinguisher nozzles and broom handles. The report went on to say that as they beat their white shipmates, many shouted, "Kill the son-of-a-bitch! Kill the white trash! Kill, kill, kill!"

Approximately 50 sailors — all but six white — were treated for injuries sustained the night of Oct 12. Three were so serious they required evacuation to onshore medical facilities while the rest were treated aboard the ship.

Full. https://www.navytimes.com/military-hono ... de-unrest/

The War Hotels

By H.D.S. Greenway
Feb 2009

During the war in Cambodia, the Hotel Le Phnom was where the journalists and NGO workers filled rooms after the tourists fled in the early 1970s and the war began in earnest.

Vignettes are frozen in the mind's eye like scenes from a play. There was Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times standing on his balcony playing badly on an old French bugle that the Khmer Rouge armies had left on the battlefield. There was the curt note in formal French asking that the photographer Al Rockoff — later to be played by John Malkovich in "The Killing Fields" — remove the hand grenade from his bedroom. And I can still see, while tip-toeing by the front desk upon returning late at night, the hotel staff sleeping cocoon-like beneath mosquito nets in the lobby.

"The lobby was in pitch blackness except for a single moonbeam, which shone like a spotlight on to a huge luminous chrysalis spun around the naked brown larvae of a human body. 'Vous desirez, monsieur?' a voice asked softly. It was the night watchman asleep under a mosquito net ... A note is waiting. 'Darling, I am in room 28 and lonely. Come see me, L.'"

When the Le Phnom Penh was about to fall, "the bombardments were so intense that journalists abandoned their rooms at the top of the Phnom, which were fully exposed to rocket and artillery fire," wrote British journalist Jon Swain in his memoir, "River of Time." The Red Cross attempted to turn the hotel into a neutral zone, and bathing was forbidden in the swimming pool. "It was thought that if there were a long siege, the pool water – turgid and soupy after months of neglect — might have to be drunk. "'C'est la guerre,'" said the manager, "with a wring of his hands, as if anyone didn't know already."

Stanley Karnow, then working for TIME Magazine, remembers trying to file from up-country in Laos in 1960. The tiny town of Samneua was being threatened by communist insurgents. "The telegraph office was a bamboo shack manned by a sleepy native," Karnow recalled. "Showing me a stack of mildewed papers, he asked: 'What should I do with these?' They were pieces by a colleague who had been there earlier and had proudly cabled his editors that he was the first reporter to reach the 'strategic city' of Samneua. When I informed him that his triumphant scoop had been gathering dust for three or four weeks, he went out and got drunk."

Full https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-02-28/ ... s-le-phnom

great thread, kfh, as always

thanks

Restriction or Resistance? French Colonial Educational Development in Cambodia

Thomas Clayton
Institute for International Studies in Education
University Pittsburgh, USA

"it [was] as if a great deal of Cambodian life...was carried out behind a screen, invisible and inaudible to the French"

By 1944, after eight decades of French colonial control, only a small percentage of eligiblestudents in Cambodia attended French schools. Several scholars argue on the basis of suchevidence that the French purposefully restricted education for Cambodians in order first toachieve and then to maintain power in the colony.

Before the French arrived in Indochina, education in Cambodia was limited to boys and was carried out by Buddhist monks in wats, or temples While not standard from one school to the next (Bilodeau, 1955), wat-school curriculum usually consisted of "reading and writing Khmer [the Cambodian language], principles of Buddhism, rules of propriety, [and] some arithmetic" (Gyallay-Pap, 1989, p. 258)

[Boys] learnt to read the [Buddhist] sacred texts...and copied out the written characters. In actual fact, the texts were learnt by heart, as a result of endless repetition, and the pupils were quite incapable of reading the words separately. A Cambodian boy leaving the [wat] school had his memory stocked with edifying passages, but could neither read [nor] write.

Most scholars state simply that France ignored or neglected education in Cambodia in the19th century (Chandler, 1993; Gyallay-Pap, 1989; Smith, 1965, 1971). However, while leaving the wat schools to their own devices, the French did establish a small system of "modern"Franco- Cambodian schools in the decades following their arrival in Cambodia. The first of these was the French-language School of the Protectorate, opened by a French infantry officer, FerryRolles, in Phnom Penh in 1873 (Morizon, 1931, p. 178).

Of central importance and value to the French was the ability of the new men to speak French and act as bilingual intermediaries in French-Cambodian interactions. Chandler (1993)comments that most French administrators in Cambodia could not speak Khmer, even after years in the country, and as a result "it [was] as if a great deal of Cambodian life...was carried out behind a screen, invisible and inaudible to the French"

Most Cambodians, on the other hand, kept their children away from Franco-Cambodian schools, perhaps to minimize contact with the children of Vietnamese immigrants, whom they disliked and distrusted (Forest, 1980; Osborne, 1969), or perhaps simply out of resistance toFrench innovations. In this resistance, they may have been following the lead of Cambodia'sKing Norodom, who "displayed no interest in assisting the development of French-sponsored education" (Osborne, 1969, p. 255) and who, with the rest of the royal family, "looked down on all that was foreign" (Vickery, 1986, p. 5) and "resisted the French language"

There were 160 modern [that is, controlled by the French] primary schools with10,000 students by 1925....But even by 1944, when 80,000 [Cambodians] wereattending [some sort of] modern primary schools, only about 500...students per yearcompleted their primary education certificate. Those enrolled even now made up lessthan 20 per cent of the male school- age population (few females were enrolled). Inthe same year, 1944, there were only 1,000...secondary students.

..the sole ambition of the [Cambodian] peasant [was] to settle his son on his rice-field, which supplie[d] all his needs. He himself [had] never [gone] to school, and [was]quite happy. [It was] natural for [him] to think that [his] son [could] acquire little useful information at the state school, where much French [was] taught but no agriculture.

full.https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Education

Cambodians and Their Doctors

A Medical Anthropology of Colonial and Post-Colonial Cambodia
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
First published in 2010

In 1894, Adhémard Leclère stated that ‘Khmer medicine is not a science; it is a mixture of vague notions of the medicinal properties of certain plants and a lot of superstitions, mystical practices and ridiculous invocations’

The Khmer were seen as docile, gentle, and friendly, but also lazy and therefore not dependable as wage labourers (Forest 980: ). The French orientalist ‘discovery’ of, and fascination with, the ruins of Angkor gave rise to the idea of the former glory and cultural sophistication of the Khmer that had now declined irretrievably (Edwards 007)

Gregor Muller’s study (006) of the early entrepreneurs who tried to make their fortune in Cambodia has shown that their dubious personal reputations were commonly matched by repeated economic and personal failure; quite a few of them were eventually offered ‘honourable employment’ in the colonial service in order to save the white race from further embarrassment (Muller 006: 83–85).

To begin with, concubinage was actually encouraged for members of the colonial administration, which felt that such arrangements had several advantages: staff members were kept happy and became less inclined to leave their Cambodian postings; costs were reduced, as a European wife required additional expenses for travel, board, and lodging; and last, but not least, the relations provided the French with a way into native society and mediated communications for the benefit of colonizers and colonized alike (Muller 006: 33).

The first municipal clinic, opened in May 908, was the Dispensaire Sisowath, named after the king. It was located in the Cambodian quarter of Phnom Penh in order to attract more Khmer patients; the chief medical assistant as well as two nurses were Khmer. Its greatest success was in dispensing medicine free of charge; the report noted the Khmer predilection for certain products, such as quinine, antipyrine (aspirin), potassium iodide, sodium bicarbonate, iodine, and skin lotions.

In the countryside, the mobile vaccination programme only took off in earnest in 1896. Firstly, transportation was difficult: the doctors had to make use of a variety of means, from steamboats, canoes, sampans, and oxcarts to elephants and horses. Some locations could only be reached during the wet season, others only in the dry season.

The procedures consisted of isolating the sick person, vaccinating his/her family and keeping them under observation, burning the house and either burning or chemically disinfecting all clothes, linen, sleeping mats, and other belongings. To begin with, these draconic measures were zealously adhered to by the French and, naturally, resented by the natives; the risk of having your house burnt down, your belongings destroyed, and your family split up did not make the population favourably disposed to the medical authorities.

A registered prostitute working on her own must not solicit customers on the street; breach of this rule would result in imprisonment between eight days and one month. The same applied to prostitutes working in brothels, in which case the owner of the brothel would be fined 5 piastres; in case of repetition of breach of this rule, the establishment would be closed down.

• All prostitutes, whether employed at a brothel or working privately, must present themselves for medical examination once a week, at such time and place as the authorities decide; failure to do so would result in eight days in prison and a fine of 5 piastres.

• Girls found to carry a venereal disease must immediately be sent to the prison infirmary where they would be detained and treated until their complete recovery.

• The annual tax to be paid by the owners of the brothels would be: 5 piastres for Khmer and Vietnamese establishments; 50 piastres for Chinese and Japanese establishments.

full. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/d ... TEXT01.pdf

Thank you for taken the time and effort to share