That is indeed a pretty white glass of milk surrounded by the lovely green leaves of cannabis sativa. Marijuana milk. Pot juice. Call it what you will, but it won’t make you high. Though hemp milk is made from the pulverized seeds of the same family of plants that addle the brain and alter consciousness, the seeds have no psychoactive power. The milk could, however, make you very healthy (it has the grassy, pasty taste of something that must be horribly good for you). Studies confirm the drink is a reliable source of protein, fatty acids, calcium and various vitamins. Plus, people don’t seem to be allergic to hemp milk in the way that many are to cow, soy or nut milk. It’s actually illegal to grow hemp (and thus the seeds) in the United States, but it’s legal to buy the milk. (Most American sellers import the seeds from Canada.)
This particular glass, however, I sipped in the cool shade of an open-air dining room in northern Vietnam. Remember Shu? She’s started Sapa’s first Hmong-owned homestay and restaurant in Lao Chai village near Sapa. Her little place is ringed by tall, bushy cannabis swaying in the breeze. Its wispy clumps of leaves almost reminded me of the desert willow growing in our New Mexico yard. Shu brought out a glass of the milk, which was earthy and herbal and contained little brown flecks of seed. She said the plant has long served as an important part of the Hmong diet, particularly because of the nutritious oil that emerges when the seeds are heated. “If you cook, you see a lot of oil coming,” Shu said. “In the past, people were very poor, and people used to cook like this for tofu.”
Ya carries her basket of beef along the road between Ban Lung and Ou Chum in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province.
As some of you know, I’m at work finishing a collection of travel essays to be published next year. In the past few months, I’ve wandered aimlessly (and pointedly) for hours through old notebooks and files I’d long forgotten. This is something I love about reporting: it allows me to live at least twice. I have an experience. I write it down. And ever after, I retain access to the details of that event. Years later, I’m sometimes shocked at how much of my life slips from the forefront of memory until prodded with photos and notes.
Ya, pictured above, is a Kreung tribal woman in the far northeastern corner of Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province. She was 40 years old when Jerry and I met her nine years ago. I’d almost forgotten the encounter until I stumbled across her photo hidden in a pile of neglected files on my laptop. Yet as soon as I read the photo slug—Woman with Meat—I knew exactly who she was. And I vividly remembered the day we met on a slick muddy road to Ou Chum. Jerry and I had left the capital, Ban Lung, on foot—an unusual thing for a couple of foreigners to do, especially in a steady rain. But we donned our ponchos and walked the long route in search of an old woman who made copious batches of rice wine. We never found her—but here’s a bit of what I noted that day:
We walk and walk. The son of our hotel manager has told us Ou Chum has a woman, 104 years old, who makes rice wine every day. We walk to find her, and the chunchiet (tribal villagers) along the way think we are very strange. We pass a parade of women with baskets as we all huff up a red-dirt hill. The woman in the lead says her name is Ya, she’s 40, she has seven kids. “I don’t speak much Khmer,” she says. She tells us she has no rice, but her basket is filled with beef and a young boy beside her carries a small water bottle with fish inside—dinner. The girls walking behind Ya say they’re all going to Ou Chum, as they often do. We pass them, they pass us—again and again along the road.
All the chunchiet carry their daily needs in tightly woven baskets with little straps around their shoulders. Oranges, beef, rice, clothing—it all goes into the basket. The older folks, men and women, have drooping earlobes, sliced in two or shaped from giant plugs stuck through skin. Each man stashes over his shoulder a machete with a long wooden handle, a shoulder rest, and a sharp curved blade. The machete is his companion for any long walk.
The road twists and turns into gullies and gorges. The rain plows through earth, creating an orange landscape resembling the American Southwest in miniature. If 1,000 feet equaled an inch, this path could be the Grand Canyon.
We walk past huts, bucolic fields, a man with a pig strapped to a board behind his moto. (He has a moto, but most people walk.) We pass cows, ducks, chickens, dogs and boys on bikes. We pass through rubber trees, tapped and collected, shading the way. Past a turquoise butterfly wing, glued in mud. Past screaming babies, men toting corn. Past families draped over the railings of their thatch huts. Past little foot paths leading to thick jungle. Past indigo and ginger and hibiscous and frangipani. Past the stench of manure.
Two little girls run up beside us. One says she went to the Ban Lung market at 5 a.m., and now she returns with pomelo. She doesn’t go every day—but often. For food, for the family.
We pass another clump of girls, and one asks us where we’re going. We tell her Ou Chum, and she asks where we’ve hidden our motorbike. Do we have a moto? No moto? She can’t believe it, as though she expects us to pull one from our pocket.
Later, after Jerry and I give up on finding the old woman and her wine, we see that girl again near her house. She calls us over. She tells us she’s 12 years old, and she introduces us to her sisters — 15, 10 and 4. Their mother died four years earlier, and their father has gone to market to sell something. They have two thatch rooms—one on stilts for sleeping, another next door for cooking. The girls say they don’t go to school, they work in the fields instead. Young green rice grows around the home. A banana tree, a gourd vine, a pile of corn. No pigs, no cows, no chickens, no other fruits or vegetables. What we see is what they have. We leave them a bag of peanuts and a small wad of riel….
*****
I read my own notes, and I’m back in Ratanakkiri. That’s the magic in keeping track of life’s intricate details (I consider it a job perk). I’ve come across so many little tidbits, many of them dealing with food. And many of which will never see print—in book or article form. Yet I’d like to do something with them.
Starting this week, I’ll be posting little food-related blurbs on the Rambling Spoon Facebook page. Most accounts will be much shorter than this—great dinners, interesting kitchens, market excursions, mealtime conversations. I’ll call them “More Better Food,” taken from the title of my forthcoming book, This Way More Better. These postings are in addition to the nibbles and bites I’m already putting on Facebook. So, if you haven’t already, check it out—and stay tuned for more. You can also follow along on Twitter—just look for @RamblingSpoon, where I’ll tweet these under #morebetterfood.
A villager named Haum waters her onions, growing in an American cluster bomb casing in Kunpho, Laos.
Laotians everywhere have turned war scrap into useful tools. The large metal casings from cluster munitions can sell for upwards of $40—a near fortune to many rural villagers. But some gardeners prefer to keep the casings, turning them into sturdy raised herb gardens. Village to village, province to province, Laotians insist: the bomb is the bomb when it comes to gardens. Read the story in The Faster Times.
Onions grow in an American bomb casing in Gnommalath, Laos.
A villager in Boualapha tends her herb garden, planted in a type of bomb dropped during the early stages of the American war in Laos. Boualapha, near the Vietnam border, remains one of the country’s most contaminated regions.
A pig feeds from a bomb casing that has been used as a trough for years in Ban Pakeo village.
Children stand beneath a rice storage hut built atop posts made from bomb casings in Xieng Khouang province.
A bomb casing serves as a planter in Najat village, where scrap-metal collecting is one of the community’s largest—and deadliest—sources of income.
A while back, I posted my account of eating for nine days in the northern Lao village of Sophoon. That was an example of what comes to the dinner table when the hosts know they have guests to feed. A few days ago, we trekked to the Hmong village of Ban Pakeo, several hours on foot from another Hmong village outside of Phonsavanh. We went there for a variety of reasons (old jars, for one), and you’ll have the opportunity to read much more about this in the future. But first, let’s consider dinner.
Ban Pakeo has no electricity (though that might change if villagers agree on allowing solar panels into their community). When we visited five years ago, villagers had to walk up and down steep hills to retrieve small buckets of water (that’s changed, thanks to a couple of water taps installed by Engineers Without Borders and a man named Don May at Fort Lewis College). Ban Pakeo has a cell phone, but it takes an afternoon hike to charge the phone in the nearest roadside village. Bottom line: no one knew we were coming for dinner. We had no way of notifying them. When we arrived around 5 p.m., all but a handful of kids and a few adults were still working in the fields. This is so all across Laos–the rains have started and it’s planting time.
So the villagers offered a live chicken, and our guide found a few young women to cook (presumably they killed and prepared the chicken–we never saw it again until it appeared as pictured above). They had no vegetables, but they did have steamed rice (the Hmong traditionally eat mountain rice grown in slash-and-burn fields; and some of the families here also grow wetland sticky rice). When dinner arrived on the table, around 8 p.m., it was soup, rice, and two leftover jaeows we had bought before the trek began. We finished it off with fresh mango, also purchased in town before we started hiking.
The broth was delicious–very salty (much needed after hours of sweating) and infused with a forest herb that tasted to me like the fragrant essence of Christmas trees–piney, green, minty. We were told this was a local herb eaten to restore strength and cure illness.
But where did half the chicken go? We got the head, the feet, the neck, some of the innards. But the breast? The meat? Nowhere to be seen.
Breakfast the next morning was sticky rice, more leftover jaeow, and more leftover soup. This, we know, is what most villagers eat on a daily basis–or some variation thereof. They eat what they have, they have very little, but they survive on what the land around them offers.
Last month, we spent nine days in the field with Jim Harris’s team in rural Phongsali province. We camped at the local dispensary and showered with cold river water, which was piped uphill to the village. The team hired two young women to cook, clean and launder. Our meals were served communally, outside, on an old red table. There weren’t enough benches and chairs, so we stood around baskets of sticky rice and the plat du jour. Each person paid 30,000 kip ($3.50) for three daily meals.
In those nine days, I kept a diary of what we ate. With a few small exceptions (late meals, off trekking), I managed to record almost every meal. I present that diary here because I find it a fascinating telltale of village life, its limitations, its repetitions and routines. Villagers bestowed the team with little gifts of homegrown garlic and backyard tamarind. But after the novelty faded (Sophoon is unaccustomed to foreign guests), I don’t think our cooks quite knew what to do with us. I would have loved more of the roots and vegetables that villagers collect in the forest, as well as the greens they grow in their garden. I offered to pay extra for fresh lettuce, spinach, herbs and other greens–but the residents of Sophoon almost never sell their vegetables, so the concept somewhat confused them. When something new appeared on the table, it likely had come strapped to the back of a dusty moto, driven by itinerant peddlers who make the daily trek from Dien Bien Phu, not far across the border. These sorts of travels make me a more appreciative person. The surprise of a fresh mango or mustard leaves tickled my palate with delight.
I’m a lover of simple, spicy farm food; homegrown and homemade. But it didn’t take long for my tongue to tire. By Day 3, I was sick of fish (and egg, which neither Jerry nor I eat). Of course, repetition is a matter of life in Sophoon. Villagers eat what’s in season, what falls off the tree, what pops through the soil in the forest, or what comes through on the occasional truck to Vietnam.
On the other hand, Sophoon is an organic locavore heaven. When a cook walked into the kitchen hut with a chicken, we ate it for dinner that night. And Michael Pollan would approve: nothing on this menu contained more than five ingredients. With a couple of canned exceptions, absolutely everything originated in the hills between Sophoon and Dien Bien Phu.
Dinner ’round the red table
So goes our week of village sustenance (with comments in parentheses):
DAY 1
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow(or jeow—spicy paste made with toasted chiles. More on this to come.)
-Minced fish with chile
-Plain boiled cabbage
-Green & yellow beans with tomato, onion, chile, garlic
DAY 2
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fried egg with green onion, garlic, tomato, chile
-Boiled cabbage with garlic and chile
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red Jaeow
-Boiled cabbage
-Fried small fish
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fragrant fish soup with lemongrass (which team leader Vilaisack plucked from a field after a bomb demolition)
-Fish laap
Team leader Vilaisack with lemongrass cut from a field near a bomb demolition
DAY 3
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Very garlicky red jaeow
-Boiled cabbage and tomato with garlic
-Small fried fish
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow, super garlicky and juicy
-Omelet with tomato, chile, onion
-Spicy slightly bitter fish (from Dien Bien Phu) stuffed with lemongrass in a soup of tomato, garlic and local sour fruit
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Omelet
-Fish/tomato/lemongrass soup (This is getting old and the team is griping. Only fish and egg, egg and fish. We lobby for more vegetables.)
DAY 4
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Omelet (This is really old. And skimpy. We try to get the cooks to buy vegetables from the locals. It costs 3,000 kip, 35 cents, for a kilogram of any vegetables. We offer to pay extra if necessary.)
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Pork with boiled garlic, tomato, chile
-Mustard greens soup with chile and black pepper (Variety! A distinct improvement.)
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Steamed cassava leaves (which the team collected after a demolition)
-Dried salty crispy beef
-Pork with tomato, yellow beans, chile, garlic
DAY 5
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Dried toasted buffalo skin strips (hard as rock)
-Yesterday’s leftover pork cooked with garlic, chile, spinach
-Minced pork fat cooked in tomato garlic broth for a Lao khao soy-style sauce
-Bowl of fresh raw lettuce leaves (A pig was purchased before yesterday’s lunch, and we’re still eating it).
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Fresh green roasted chile jaeow, super hot
-Pork fat with shredded tomato and cabbage
-Mustard green soup with hunks of pork fat
Dinner (Jim succeeds in organizing “Mexico night.”)
-Raw cabbage leaves to use as tortillas
-Canned black refried beans cooked with fresh garlic
-“Salsa” of cooked tomatoes, onions, chile (Jim uses the cabbage to wrap the ingredients like a taco. It works. The guys each try one and declare it sep, meaning delicious. Then they eat their sticky rice, pork fat with greens and green chile jaeow and deer meat of mysterious origins.)
Jim explains “Mexico Night” tacos to the team…
…which everyone enjoys before reverting to the usual sticky rice.
DAY 6
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow
-Mild bok choy soup with chile and garlic
-Dark dried beef (we’re told beef, but it looks distinctly like the previous night’s deer) fried with bok choy, garlic, onion, a bit of tomato and pork fat
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Dried beef pieces
-Beef, bok choy and garlic soup
-Fresh sweet mango
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fish soup (only fish and gingery broth, no vegetables)
-Watermelon (which I bought off a truck that stopped in the village and dumped its stash)
DAY 7
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow with added tamarind
-Cilantro and green chile soup
-Steamed cassava leaves
-Canned sardines and tomato
-Omelet
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow
-Papaya salad with peanuts
-Mustard greens soup
-Green beans fried with chicken, chile, garlic
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Green beans with chicken
DAY 8
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Boiled mustard greens soup, just a little chile and salt
-Plain boiled green beans
-Fried meaty bacon with little fat
Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Tamarind chicken soup
-Chopped “grenade” chicken with green beans (In addition, I cook canned tuna, tomato, onion, garlic and chile.)
DAY 9
Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red juicy jaeow
-Fresh lettuce leaves
-Canned sardines in tomato sauce
-Sweet potato ginger soup (This is good. Mild, young, fragrant ginger slightly sweetened from the potatoes. I think of making it at home: start with chicken stock, some small fresh garlic and garlic greens and/or chives, ginger, potato chunks, dried red chile, salt. If not using regular potatoes, add a pinch of palm sugar.)
Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Melon soup with green onion and grenade chicken
-Papaya salad
-Fried forest ferns with chile, garlic, fish (Borneo-style but these ferns have a leafier consistency… now why couldn’t we have had these sooner?
Sokheng is 16. She grew up in Prey Veng province but left home to work in a bread factory, cooking meals for 20 or 30 sweaty, hungry young men who make the little baguettes sold everywhere on Phnom Penh’s streets. She tends the charcoal fires in a dark nook beside the blazing ovens that inspire magic: several times a day, steaming, crackling, hot loaves of bread tumble from those ovens in a gush of heat. Though everyone here makes bread, no one really eats it. They eat the food that brought them through childhood on the farm: rice, fish, soup, curry. “That’s bread, this is rice. I don’t eat bread. I eat rice. Everyone here does,” Sokheng tells me.
Check back later this week for a story on this factory, a photographic miracle of light. Such a striking place with such tough stories (and such a luscious scent of fresh-baked bread). But first, I wanted to run this little snippet of Sokheng’s life because Monday is International Women’s Day, a holiday recognized and celebrated far more openly in Asia than it is back home in the States. Barely a woman herself, Sokheng, like so many others, has pretty much skipped adolescence and jumped straight into the rigors of the adult working world.
In this way, she differs from the global norm. She lives and works on site and gets paid a daily wage. She does not work in the field or the shop or the office, then return to her family to work her second job at home. Worldwide, women make up 46 percent of the statistically recognized workforce (a.k.a. paid labor). We’ve all heard about the wage-related gender gap—women get paid 16 percent less than men—but of equal concern is what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the “invisible and unmeasured” work for which women get little or no recognition. We’re talking cooking, cleaning, caregiving and all the other household chores that deprive women of education, sleep, and outside jobs that pay (and subject women to the increased risks of respiratory illness, thanks to indoor air pollution). This issue is not confined to the developing world. By some estimates, European women spend twice as many hours doing household chores than their male partners. Take a look at a survey of American time use, and you’ll see the same holds true across the Atlantic, too.
So here’s something to note. This is a blog about food, with a great many pages devoted to the wonderful stuff I find in the market, cook in my kitchen and put in my mouth. True, I do spend a lot of time examining other corners of life, and I admittedly find food stories far more fascinating when coupled with the people behind them. But when I sit down to dinner (and Jerry can vouch), I’m savoring flavors and dissecting recipes and examining all the mysteries that mingle with my mouth. And that’s a luxury—to spend so much time and brainpower thinking, researching and dwelling on food because that is what I choose.
I say this because the vast majority of people I interview about food cook because they must. It’s a chore, it’s what they do, and despite my fascination with their creations, they frequently find nothing remarkable about them. My mother has cooked through her entire married life, and she’d rather not. Certainly, there are chefs and “foodies” and plenty of people I meet who share my obsessions with all things edible. But the Khmer woman who fries her fish and serves it with green mango? The Kuy villager who tromps through fields and returns home with a bundle of bitter greens? The Naga woman who cooks her chiles in ash and makes tree-tomato chutney? The Timorese fisherman who grills giant tunas with garlic? Inevitably, when I start asking questions, the answer is: “It’s normal, it’s “everyday food,” it’s what they do—and they eye me in a way that says they’re unaccustomed to such attention to their work. Though a little bit mystified, they are pleased with my interest in what they perceive to be, simply, life.
So this is what I’m thinking about on International Women’s Day 2010: all the women, all the world over, who cook our food for work, not pleasure. The women who tend the fires and clean the stoves and turn out nourishing things to eat, day after day, because cooking is what they do—and they have never really envisioned another life. Thank you for your work. You have fed me fully, and fed me well.
While much of the world celebrates December with feasts and festivities, millions still go hungry. If you’ve followed food blogs for a while, no doubt you will recall Menu for Hope, the annual campaign in which food bloggers around the world unite to raise money for the World Food Programme. It began in the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated parts of Asia and Africa five years ago this month. You can read the whole Menu for Hope history on Chez Pim, the online home of food connoisseur and author Pim Techamuanvivit, who organized the whole shebang.
How does this work? It’s really simple. Bloggers everywhere are offering up hundreds of delectable items. All you have to do is select the item(s) you would like and buy as many $10 raffle tickets for as many chances at winning your selected item(s). This year, the money will benefit a new WFP program, called Purchase for Progress (P4P), which helps small-scale farmers to supply food to WFP’s global programs.
The campaign begins today and runs through Dec. 25. Items are divided by region, but you can bid on anything you’d like. Check Chez Pim for a master list of all available bid items. In years past, The Rambling Spoon has been listed in the Asia Pacific region. But this year, yours truly is stationed in the United States through early January, and you’ll find The Rambling Spoon’s items on the West Coast list, with host Shauna of Gluten-Free Girl.
This year I’m pleased to offer you a personal selection taken from the fruits and labors of my dear husband Jerry (the professional responsible for the photos on this blog) and his mother, Jenny Redfern. We’re presenting seven of Jerry’s colorful prints, taken along our recent culinary journeys through Asia. These pictures, printed on 8 1/2 x 11 premium photo paper with archival inks, will take you to tea in India and Burma, and an onion market in Mandalay. They’ll introduce you to a Mandalay man with his chicken; and they’ll feed you momos in Darjeeling, a fish along the Mekong, and a glass of pomegranate juice in Kolkata. In addition, Jenny is offering six half-pint jars of her homemade Meyer lemon marmalade. No artificial sweeteners; only sugar, pectin and lemons straight from her backyard tree. (That package of Christmas lemons? Yep, the same bountiful tree will produce the lemons for your marmalade.)
See the bottom of this post for a glimpse of the photos on offer. If you’d like to bid on these items, please select prize code UW43. And follow the instructions straight from Pim:
1. Choose a bid item or bid items of your choice from our Menu for Hope main bid item list.
3. Please specify which bid item you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write in the number of tickets per bid item, and please use the bid item code.
Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02 – 2xEU01, 3xEU02.
4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.
5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.
And that’s it! Check back at Chez Pim for the announcement of results on Jan. 18, 2010.
I was reminded this morning that today is World AIDS Day, and I immediately thought of David in the clutch of his grandmother’s skinny brown arms. Four years have passed since we last saw the little boy in a hot, cramped neighborhood on the edge of Phnom Penh, just off the road leading to the Killing Fields.
David (pronounced Dah-VEED) would be 7 now, but when we saw him he was just a little boy with a teddy bear. Missing from the scene was David’s mother, Phala, whom Jerry had met the previous year while assigned to shoot a story to coincide with World AIDS Day. I never met Phala. She had AIDS, and she was undergoing the pre-treatment rigmarole before receiving antiretroviral drugs. I remember the European editor who called Jerry at 3 a.m., forgetting the time difference; she wanted to make sure he would shoot uplifting pictures reflecting a positive side to the story of AIDS in Cambodia.
But this was not a happy story. Phala died a few months later, and David was left with his grandmother, Yiey, a kind woman with lots of love but no money. David’s father—whom everyone assumes had infected Phala—left long before she died. The good news was that David showed no signs of sickness. “Yes, he is very healthy,” said Vaneth, a friend and neighbor who looked after the family.
I asked David if he remembered his mother.
“Yes,” he said.
“Where is your mother?” I asked.
“In Pet Longson…. She died in Pet Longson,” Kossamak Hospital, where she was taken at the end.
Vaneth told us that David’s father, Narith, was living nearby. “He went to sing karaoke today,” Vaneth said. “He does not go to work.” We went up the dirt road to meet the 26-year-old man at his house—plywood ceiling, broken tiles and bricks. He was skinny, and all grins, with wine on his breath at 11 a.m. “He drinks and smokes so much,” Vaneth said. “Now his health is going down…. I want him to go and test his blood but he says no.”
Narith looked toward Jerry and said, “If you take care of me, I can go to test my blood.” Then he announced: “I never touch the women.”
I asked Narith if he helped take care of his son. “No,” he said. “Only Yiey, because she is loving. She has compassion. She wants to take care of David until she dies. Then we can pick up and take him to an orphanage.”
Later that day, Jerry and I accompanied Vaneth, Yiey and David to the nearby temple where Phala’s ashes were kept. We searched through so many shelves and glass cases of urns stacked among little statues of Buddha. There sat the remains of all those who had passed away without family, money or the means for a proper burial.
Tacked to the wall was a UNAIDS poster showing a global map of HIV infection at the end of 2003: 38 million people worldwide. Cambodia was colored orange, meaning somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent of the population was infected.
After a few more minutes of searching, finally Phala’s ashes were found. Hers was a 10-inch golden urn with a string tied around it, her name written in marker on the inside. Yiey handed the urn to David, who grasped it silently, then hid behind his grandmother. “He knows this is his mother,” she said.
“When we have big ceremonies, we come to pray here,” Yiey said. “I always miss her very much, but I don’t have money as a gift for the monks, so the monks can pray for those who died.” If she had money, she said she would offer food to the monks and come to the temple every week so they could pray for her daughter’s soul. She returned the urn to a cabinet, then lit a handful of incense. She swooped her arms around David and together they placed the incense in a pot.
The Venerable Luy Bora entered the room, and Vaneth and Yiey bowed. This was the monk who had taken care of Phala’s bones. He managed an AIDS project in the Stung Meanchey commune, where 127 orphans needed care. “I saw my community is very poor and sick.” Some of the kids stayed at the temple, others lived with relatives. The numbers were growing, he said. When he started the project three years earlier, he worked with 47 kids. “Every month, I find more.” But AIDS remained a sensitive issue among older monks, and Luy Bora had a hard time working with them. “They don’t understand,” he said.
I asked him how many people in his commune had died of AIDS. He didn’t know. “I never count,” he said. “But many.”
***
Now, four years later, I’m ashamed to admit so much time has passed since Jerry and I visited David. I wonder where he is and what has become of his family. On that hot, sticky day when we all met in Phnom Penh, Vaneth asked us if we would follow this story through to Narith’s death, whenever that might be.
Jerry’s photo assignment ended when the lifeblood still pumped through Phala’s thin body. But her story outlived her, in the form of a little boy. Every AIDS death leaves a trail of life in its wake.
Two Indian boys, the children of tea plantation workers in Darjeeling, gather plant trimmings they will use to heat their homes. During winter months, the tea plants are dormant, but plantation workers trim the dead branches for fuel.
This week marks 20 years since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It was the first international agreement recognizing that kids are human beings, deserving the full range of human rights: the right to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life. They also have the right to rest and leisure; to play, to learn, to express themselves.
This anniversary comes at a time when we here in the United States are preparing for the nation’s greatest feast. Meanwhile, I’m thinking of the many ways in which kids participate in bringing food to the global table.
A boy hauls a load of firewood gathered near a tea plantation that crosses the road connecting Sikkim and Darjeeling in India.
Around the world, kids hunt and harvest. They collect firewood for the kitchen. They tend their families’ cows. They make the lacquered dishes in which food is served in Burma. They rake salt into neat little piles, which end up in kitchens across Cambodia—and as far away as New Mexico, where I keep a jar full of delicious Kampot salt.
Boys pose for a portrait in the middle of the night at the Indian truck-stop restaurant where they work serving food and cleaning up, in West Bengal.
Kids work through the night at truck stops in India and Burma. They boil tea and serve it to customers in Burmese tea shops. They clean restaurant tables and chairs, then sleep atop that furniture in the dead of night. When running water is not available, kids wash dishes in the river.
A boy washes the pots from a tea shop using only the sand and waters of the Brahmaputra River. Raw sewage from Guwahati, India, a city of one million, dumps into the river above this point, leaving the sand and water tainted with a foul, black muck.
And even the children who do not work often suffer the consequences of parents who have jobs in the food industry. Some kids spend their entire childhoods as economic refugees, denied the rights to education or health care or sanitary living, as their parents peel shrimp in a country to which they were smuggled, in search of a better life. This week, I chatted with a Burmese colleague who is working on a follow-up story to last year’s incident in which 54 Burmese migrant workers suffocated in a fish truck bound for Phuket. My journalist friend interviewed the families left behind in Burma—wives without husbands, children without fathers, struggling to survive.
Local kids watch as American Jim Harris of Phoenix Clearance LTD reviews a video of the destruction of a pair of phosphorous bombs by his team. The bombs were found and reported by a pair of young boys tending cattle.
In Laos, the job of a child farmer takes on a dangerous dimension, as kids frequently stumble across bombs in their fields—remnants of the U.S. air war 40 years ago. They either work around the ordnance or inform a clearance team to destroy the bomb (as pictured above).
In most the world, a child’s life is not easy. And neither are these issues simple. Two years ago I wrote an article, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, about children who work in Cambodia. The story was an extension of a photo exhibit that Jerry had in Phnom Penh. We tried to examine the complexity of child labor, and the myriad ways in which different cultures view the issue. No easy solutions exist. Most children who work fall somewhere in the middle, in a vast sea of gray between right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. Here, in honor of kids this week, is that article:
Laek, 8, rakes salt crystals while working with her mother and young brother in a salt field in Kampot, Cambodia. Their family came from Svay Rieng province for the seasonal work. They work barefoot all day in the sun raking and hauling the sharp crystals in hot water. The vast majority of Cambodian children work. Their labor is imperative for their survival and the survival of their families.
The Working World
Had I been born as Roeut Sokang, who is precisely my age, I would have three kids – 14, 8 and 5. For the hottest four months of every year, my family and I would live together in the salt fields of Kampot, in southern Cambodia. We would make the journey from our small farm, in Svay Rieng many hours away, to camp in a wooden hut with dozens of others. The families here would come in droves, driven by necessity but never choice. I would dream of a time when my kids could go to school uninterrupted. All of my neighbors would share that dream.
My youngest child would play around the house, hunting for recyclables, still too young for the fields. But the rest of us would toil in the shallow ponds beneath a non-stop sun. We would shovel thick wet salt into baskets, one after another. We would lug those baskets, more than 40 pounds each, two at a time, on a bamboo pole. Back and forth we would trudge, from field to warehouse, where the salt would sit in piles 20 feet high.
If we could afford socks, we would wear them to protect our feet from the gravelly salt and its hot, oily film. But most times, we would go without socks and our soles would grow so calloused we would forget to flinch at the sharp pinch of crystals on our feet.
That salt would be bundled into 50-kilogram sacks, then shipped to Phnom Penh and Thailand and points beyond. We would work each day until our muscles grew strong, our bodies lean, our arms and legs chiseled by repetitive motion. Each sack of salt would sell the equivalent of $2 on site. So cheap, our boss would let us take a small bag home for free. All that work, all day long, and the three of us together would earn just $5 a day.
If I had been born as Roeut, this would be my life every dry season for 12 years straight — through the births of two children, through the end of war. I would go to work these days in peacetime, no longer scared of attacks by Khmer Rouge soldiers. I would take my children with me — or else we could not eat.
And had Roeut been born in my shoes instead, she would sit at restaurant tables far away, where the food is cooked in Kampot salt. She would lift a shaker over her plate and sprinkle her food with little white flecks. She would season her dishes with salt from a harvest that maybe, just maybe, my children and I helped shovel.
The differences between Roeut and me are manifest in countless ways; not just what we wear, where we sleep or the money in our pockets. But also in how our cultures interpret the image of her children working beside her, sweeping salt in the mid-day heat of a tropical sun.
I come from a part of the world (the West) that advises Roeut’s part of the world (the developing) on how best to raise her children. I come from a place that, for better or worse, classifies the Cambodian salt fields as “hazardous” work venues; and deems the job itself one of the world’s “worst forms of child labor.”
Mahp, 11, sells drinks from a cooler along the river front promenade in the evening in Phnom Penh. She lives with her family, attends school during the day and works every night.
Nearly 250 million children around the globe work. Nearly half of Cambodia’s kids – 44.8 percent – are among them, the U.S. Department of Labor reports in a 2006 study. For most, that means planting rice, tending cows or otherwise helping on the farm (paid or unpaid, family-owned or work-for-hire). But many Cambodian children, like Roeut’s, work in salt production, fish processing, portering, brick-making, garbage-picking and other realms determined to be hazardous to a child’s mental and physical development – they are back-breaking, dangerous and foul.
As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as the International Labor Organization’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, the Cambodian government is obligated to stop kids from working these jobs. It’s participating in a $4.75-million program, funded by the US Labor Department, to that end. Since 2000, routine labor inspections in Cambodia include questions about employees’ ages. Yet, despite the presence of more than 2 million kids in the Cambodian workforce, the US Labor Department reports, “No employer has ever been prosecuted for violating child labor laws.”
Perhaps it has something to do with culture and necessity.
Chuon Mu, 10, gathers water spinach with her mother to sell at the local market in Kampot, Cambodia.
Hazards or no hazards, the idea that child labor is wrong stems from modern-day Western polemics on the meaning of childhood. The guiding principle is a “concept of childhood as a biologically driven natural phenomenon characterized by physical and mental growth stages that are everywhere roughly the same,” writes William E. Myers, a scholar and former official of the ILO and Unicef. But this presents a problem. As Myers points out, there is “infinite variation” in how cultures view children – and how societies view children at work.
In the West, most children are not expected to work toward the household economy; usually, food appears on their tables three times a day until they are 18. But in countries like Cambodia, many kids don’t eat if they don’t work, simple as that. It’s hard to tell a struggling Cambodian parent that a job is inappropriate to her child’s development. Such notions, Myers writes, “do not adequately fit with the realities of developing countries.”
Say Sen, 13, and her 6-month-old brother Song Ly, beg for money from customers at the riverfront restaurants in Phnom Penh. She lives with her parents in the Tonle Bassac squatter camp, and says she also goes to school every day.
The Oxford anthropologist Jo Boyden, in the 1990s, was among the first and loudest to critique a global concept of childhood. She would argue that my upper-middle-class, Midwestern, Catholic, American upbringing does not necessarily qualify me to tell a young widowed Khmer woman, living on a few dollars a day, how best to raise her kids. But policymakers were (and frequently still are) applying Western values to child-rearing across the globe.
Boyden cited a classic example of thousands of child factory workers in Bangladesh who were fired after the United States prohibited imports of goods made by children. The children did not return to school, as U.S. authorities had hoped, but found work in more dangerous situations. Boyden essentially argued that shutting kids out of the workforce is not their best protection. If they must, let them work. But let them work well – with food and shelter, education and hope for the future.
These are, after all, the precise goals for which many children work in the first place.
It’s why, back in the salt fields, 11year-old Ri sweeps the slushy white grains into small piles for her father to carry to the nearby warehouse. They come from a small house in the countryside an hour away, where the earth doesn’t give them what they need to eat, to survive. So they come to the salt fields to work. “It’s hot and it’s hard and I don’t like it,” says Ri. “But I have to work.”
Her father, Chaw, stops for a quick smoke before lugging more baskets. He doesn’t like this life either. He would prefer a different childhood for his daughter. “Maybe when she gets older she can go to school all day and graduate,” He says. “At the moment she has to help me so we can earn more money.”
Whether shoveling salt, tending cows, picking spinach or sorting garbage, the children of Cambodia – and most developing countries – work to live.
Like Hong, a 10-year-old boy selling paintings – his paintings – on the Sihanoukville beach not so far from Kampot. Hong has been an artist for about two years, but it’s not what he wants to do in life. It’s just a step. When Hong grows up, he wants to be a tour guide. But for now, he sells little painted planks of wood for $3 and gives the money to his auntie for “rent.” His parents died several years ago. When I ask how, he says his mom was sick and “my father drove a motorcycle and then a boy came with a gun and went boom, boom, boom. And then he died. In Phnom Penh.”
There’s a lot of love in Hong’s paintings – lots of boyfriends and girlfriends standing side-by-side or eating at restaurant tables in the sand. Lots of families, too. He hands me his cheeriest picture, all yellow and red, which depicts a family of crabs: a mama, a papa and their nine little babies.
I keep that painting in my office, its yellow background brilliant as the sun. It reminds me of Hong: a little chipped on the edges, but sturdy and bright.
What with the hullabaloo this week, I neglected our return to NYC and Pittsburgh. Hectic days, indeed. Our mornings began early, in an hour of lovely light, as seen from our hotel.
We had a good location, near the Queensboro Bridge, which sandwiched us smack dab in the middle of our many appointments across the area (thanks, Eric, for the recommendation!).
Here, we have the group gearing up for a full day of visits to magazine offices, followed by an afternoon at the UN.
They made history that day, as the first Burmese journalists representing local media to enter the United Nations offices—which entailed lengthy searches and security procedures in order to get through the compound, followed by a whole lot of waiting for sessions open to international print media.
By late afternoon, the group had seats in the press rows of the upper balcony overlooking the UN chambers, where Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered his summary statements on the Climate Change Summit. He showed his humanity that afternoon, going beyond his speech to play a touching video clip of the first time astronauts saw the Earth from the Moon.
Afterward, Ban Ki-moon and Denmark’s prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, answered questions from the press in another room.
Our alarms buzzed at 3 a.m. the following day, in preparation for a 6 a.m. flight. First stop: Dulles International Airport, 5 hours. Not enough time to see Washington, but ample opportunity to visit Smithsonian’s nearby Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum.
Less than a day after viewing a UN exhibit on the atomic bomb, here the participants stand before the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945.
Bonus: no one had expected the chance to see the space shuttle Enterprise on this trip.
Now, then: welcome to Pittsburgh.
We found ourselves in the middle of a Free Tibet demonstration….
Pittsburgh had its own Mounties that week—and every other conceivable form of cop.
How eerie, to walk alone along a highway on-ramp, not a single moving vehicle in sight.
When President Obama gave his closing press conference, our group was there, front row and center. The participants hadn’t expected to get so close. Neither had they expected such a short press conference, with the President calling on just a handful of reporters by name. Such lack of spontaneity! “It is worse than my country,” one participant said. Still, the group walked away—with blistered feet and weary eyes—filled with once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Now, what does any of this have to do with food? It turns out, quite a lot. While demonstrators took to the streets around Pittsburgh, protesting injustices across the globe and the missing voice of developing nations, G-20 leaders assembled a joint statement addressing the future of a global economy. The 10-page document is heavily peppered with reflection on poor countries, their access to resources and the steps needed to ensure people have food:
PREAMBLE
22. To take new steps to increase access to food, fuel and finance among the world’s poorest….
23. Over four billion people remain undereducated, ill-equipped with capital and technology, and insufficiently integrated into the global economy. We need to work together…. To start, we call on the World Bank to develop a new trust fund to support the new Food Security Initiative for low-income countries….
REFORMING THE MISSION, MANDATE AND GOVERNANCE OF OUR DEVELOPMENT BANKS
24. We agree that development and reducing global poverty are central to the development banks’ core mission…. The World Bank, working with the regional development banks and other international banks, should strengthen:
* its focus on food security through enhancements in agricultural productivity and access to technology, and improving access to food….
* its focus on human development and security in the poorest and most challenging environments….
27. …it will be important to protect the voting power of the smallest poor countries.
STRENGTHENING SUPPORT FOR THE MOST VULNERABLE
34. Many emerging and developing economies have made great strides in raising living standards…. This process was interrupted by the crisis and is still far from complete. The poorest countries have little economic cushion to protect vulnerable populations from calamity, particularly as the financial crisis followed close on the heels of a global spike in food prices…. The UN’s new Global Impact Vulnerability Alert System will help our efforts to monitor the impact of the crisis on the most vulnerable. We share a collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis and to assure that all parts of the globe participate in the recovery.
38. Even before the crisis, too many still suffered from hunger and poverty and even more people lack of access to energy and finance. Recognizing that the crisis has exacerbated this situation, we pledge cooperation to improve access to food, fuel and finance for the poor.
39. Sustained funding and targeted investments are urgently needed to improve long-term food security….
41. We commit to improving access to financial services for the poor….
CORE VALUES FOR SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC ACTIVITY
* We have a responsibility to invest in people by providing education, job training, decent work conditions, health care and social safety net support, and to fight poverty, discrimination, and all forms of social exclusion.
* We have a responsibility to recognize that all economies, rich and poor, are partners in building a sustainable and balanced global economy….
*****
Now, what in heck does all this mean? Well, if you read the whole document, you’ll see it means the UN and other international organizations did not heed my advice a few years ago when I gave a talk in Borneo about using clear, concise language to convey global messages. But it also means the G-20 leaders have a responsibility to fight global poverty and ensure everyone has enough to eat. They have promised to do so.
How? When? Using which means? Affecting which people? In what ways? Who knows. These questions remain before the G-20 convenes again in Canada next June.
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Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
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