Straightjacketstudio - Cambodia

The following is a short lecture presented at the inaugural Hungry for Change Gala at the University of Western Ontario on 30 April 2008.

I was asked to speak to you tonight largely because I spent most of last year working in Cambodia. In the next 15-20 minutes I want to share some of my experiences and reflections with you.

One of the most important lessons that I learned in practice was this old one that most of you, I imagine, are familiar with:

Today, 16 of April 2007, I saw the ocean floor for the first time. More precisely: today, for the first time, I saw the ocean floor more than 20 meters from the shore. It turns out there really are fish there. Lots of them and at the depths I was at (about 90 smurfs or 4.5 Jacques Cousteaus below the surface) still remarkably colourful despite the bleaching effects of the seawater filtering out the warm tones of the sun. And yet it was anticlimactic in a way that I had anticlimactically predicted. Firsts aren't all they are made out to be. I have wanted to dive for a long time.

From Six Memos for the Next Millennium Chapter 1: Lightness.

I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold the values of lightness. This does not mean that I consider the virtues of weight any less compelling, but simply that I have more to say about lightness.

(Note: Title from Milan Kundera. Written between the end of February and now.)

This is not a comfortable place and the discomfort is much more widely felt than I realized. It struck me only very recently, after 3 months here, how so few people can remain sober after work. The number of bars run and catering to foreigners here is staggering even if you disregard most of the tourist establishments on the waterfront. On the waterfront the bars have patios where you can watch the people and traffic flow and beyond that the river. They are places for watching.

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." -old prayer

I have been thinking a lot about that kind of wisdom, courage and serenity recently and how one can go about trying to acquire them. I have been trying to keep an eye out for situations that really call for it. Two recent ones have involved the American Army (Pacific Command) and a rooster respectively. This is going to be about the rooster.

As of this past Monday, I was supposed to be learning lots of surgery-related things this week in Kep, (a very poor rural area by the water, near the border with Vietnam) with the Children's Surgical Centre (CSC), a charity started by a Canadian which offers free surgical services mostly for children, as well as training Cambodian surgeons (who now do most of the operations at the centre). The only foreigners are the founder and guest specialist teams that come for short periods to do the really extreme cases and train the local staff on new techniques.

This brief addendum is necessary because in my last letter I forgot about the bats. The bats are important. I don't know how they escaped my mind.

I. The Bats

I. I, racist

I have been avoiding writing this for the past week since there is a lot to cover but it gradually dawned on me that the longer I waited the worse things would get so here we are.

Hello. I hope you are all well.

I. The Foreigners & I, a Foreigner

Dear Yea all who may or may not be concerned about my survival,

1. I live.

2. I am in Hong Kong, no Jet Lag. (I think I inadvertently induced jet lag in my last two days in Toronto through sleep deprivation)

3. To my boorish North American taste buds, not ever having been to Japan, Hong Kong sushi tastes fantastic and is quite cheap.