domenica 21 ottobre 2012

Amp




This evening I should publish a post about temples, rice paddies and children ...
I should write a nice page on Cambodia describing places that make you dream.
But I will talk about a page of my life, and I will devote it to an angel I met tonight.
It's 10 30 pm and I am in a remote village near Bangkok.
I left from Cambodia at 7 am and I was supposed to get to Bangkok at 7pm...On time for a very important skype interview at 10 pm.
But that’s what happened:
- phone lost on the first bus:
- seven minivans changed on the way to Thailand;
- accident with a truck overturned on the road,
- four-hour delay;
- Almost missed my job interview (for which I gave up three days of relax on an island...)

What happened then ...?
I met one of those angels who wait at the roadside, who doesn’t speak your language but understand your heart, who doesn’t need your ID card to trust you and  watch your sadness healing your pain…
My angel’s name is Amp, she doesn’t speak English and doesn’t even know my name.
I met her on the street: she was coming home from work, I was walking on the roadside, desperately alone, seeking for an internet cafe '.
After realizing that I would never be in Bangkok before midnight I went off the bus in a remote thai village.
Amp saw me, tried to understand what I was saying and finally took me to her house.
She gave me the keys (!) and guided me into a fantastic internet point.
...
Tonight she will to sleep at a friend’s: I will sleep in her house, a perfect stranger that she has welcomed home. The only thing I managed to say was the warmest thank you form my heart…




lunedì 8 ottobre 2012

Phnom Pehn






Describing Phnom Penh is difficult: you end up with a bitter taste in your mouth, sucked into an inevitable memory, submerged in a future development, insatiable and unchecked. Radical chic restaurants and bio-ethical shops, wide streets and shopping malls, Lucky supermarkets and Happy Herb Pizza.
It’s easy to find yourself lost, disoriented, wondering in which part of the world you happen to be. But there are a couple of things that can help you to make up your mind: the Tuol Seng Museum and the Choeng Ek killing fields are places that you will never forget.
April 17, 1975: the Kmher Rouge entered Phnom Penh establishing a new government. In three years of power more than two million people were killed.
"I am legally responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand people and I pray for their souls." We read in the testimony of a hierarch of Democratic Kampuchea.
How to accept, how to understand this?
Let’s drink the bitter cup of the memory, swalloying it with Angkor Beer, while listening absent-mindely to a Coldplay song. We stare out in front of a city that we cannot understand, without identifying its boundaries of sense, wondering if it is kneeling to capitalism or hiding its true nature in narrow streets, drowing it in open sewers, forgetting it in fashionable clothes and mixed fruit shakes.
We are leaving tomorrow, heading to Siem Reap, to admire the enigmatic smiles of Angkor temples.