One set of new chopsticks

Jerry left me in Boulder with a tiny kitchen and dishes for one. He shopped at a local culinary fun house (which I’ve yet to explore) and found a pretty set of new chopsticks, Japanese style, with bright red tops and little yellow squiggle designs. But only one pair.

Only one set of chopsticks, on purpose. Though we’ll both be traveling to and fro in the next 8 months, I am, for all practical purposes, on this particular journey alone. I’m only one week into it, and I’m discovering my comforts and annoyances. Things I’m happy to have, others I miss. I’ve been taking mental notes from a largely ecological perspective. In no particular order, these are

THINGS I LOVE:

- This open-minded, educated, forward-thinking community. Its brain jibes with mine.

- Trails. Everywhere—for feet and wheels. All I do to find the view below is head half a block downhill, turn left past the nature center, and there it is: covered in myriad paths up and into and around the Flatirons. Heading there right now with my coffee….

- Drivers, who more or less are courteous to the cyclists and pedestrians who—almost—dominate Boulder’s roads.

- Fitness. I thought I was in reasonable shape (and I know I am). Yet I sputter in the wake of so many pro and nearly-so runners, bikers, hikers and all-around athletes who scale these mountains with barely a breath. But I’ll get closer—I’m walking or cycling everywhere these days.

- The Boulder Farmers’ Market, a beautiful sprawling tapestry of fresh foods and colors, accessible by bike (it’s right on the Boulder Creek Path, another new commuter’s love).

- The Chautauqua Dining Hall, a first-class restaurant one block out my door. Huge wrap-around porch, the perfect place for a glass of wine and sunset. (Plus, residents get 10 percent off!)

- So many restaurants and pubs with live music and general liveliness all around. Welcome back to college!

- And last but definitely not least, the Scripps program, one of the greatest contributions imaginable to journalism and the environment today.

The Flatirons, from Chautauqua

THINGS I MISS:

- My husband, of course. Family and friends. Remember the song, “Make new friends, but keep the old….”

- My big, open kitchen with room to maneuver and the appropriate dish or utensil for every idea in my cook’s mind.

- New Mexico food, wine and beer prices. Period.

- The ability to buy all of the above at one store.

- Perea Farms, El Mezquite, Valencia Fresh Fruteria, my neighborhood farmers’ market, fresh tortillas made daily, honey and eggs for sale around the corner, the scent of roasting chiles in the air everywhere this time of year. I know the local food scene has a lot to offer Boulder, and I have much to explore. But I do miss the down-to-earth nitty-gritty feel of food plucked straight from the dirt—a benefit of living so close to so many farms.

- My garden. Right now, right this very minute, I am missing loads of grapes, peaches, tomatoes, eggplants, chiles, chard, collards and arugula.

- My herbs. It’s a jungle out there among the dozen basil plants, oregano, onions, chives, parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary and mint. I’ve bought a few little plants for my Boulder porch (below), but I no longer have the option of chopping down a bundle of onions or a heap of basil and mint for a proper batch of laap.

- Dark and quiet. Previous residents have raved about Chautauqua’s peaceful nature. But I’m spoiled, already having the experience of living and staying in some of the world’s most serene locations. I’m liking my cozy cottage quite well, but this park is a tourist destination and a favorite of anyone in hiking boots. I get foot traffic through my little yard all the time. At home in New Mexico, I almost never need to close the drapes. Here, I feel just a bit as though I’m living in a glass house.

- Patio dining. Cooler nights spell perfect times for BBQs. Miss that.

Small herb garden in the making

AND A FEW RANDOM ECOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS:

- My graduate-level environmental studies class watched a video clip of Rachel Carson this week. The last time I’d seen similar footage was in Burma for an Earth Day celebration last year. Here, 20 percent of the class had never heard of Rachel Carson.

- Laundry. I’m actually less efficient living alone because I brought few clothes. I’m having to wash smaller loads more often. The machines here are not ENERGY STAR, and I can’t adjust for load size. Plus, I have no laundry line, which means I’m using the dryers.

- Garbage. I’m tossing more, more often because Chautauqua does not yet have composting facilities (we’re told they’re coming soon!). At home, we are able to compost or recycle almost all our waste. Some weeks, we have but one little bag in the trash can. Since I’m also tossing food scraps here, I’m having to take out the garbage more frequently because of the smell.

- Attitude. Despite the notes above, it’s a given in Boulder—people consider the environment in their daily actions. Bags aren’t immediately given in stores. Shops everywhere sell organic, biodegradable, compostable items. (Just bought a biodegradable plastic file folder.) Living green is the community norm.

- Cooking for one. Either I must change my habits, or I’ll have to start giving daily dinner parties. After so many years of cooking for at least myself and a hungry husband, it’s hard now to think and shop in terms of one. I can’t believe how long a single dish lasts—through the next breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. Must. Think. Small.

A farmer in Sepon, Laos, stands in his field, which he cleared of ordnance by himself. He said he found many munitions. The small banana behind him grows in a bomb crater.

An international treaty banning the cluster bomb takes effect today. Cluster bombs are large weapons that hold up to several hundred small explosives designed to scatter across the land when dropped from the air. They are deadly hazards to farmers in postwar societies around the world.

Farmers in Laos have faced these dangers for decades. Millions of cluster munitions remain in their soil since the U.S. bombing campaign ended nearly 40 years ago. Since then, more than 20,000 people have been killed or maimed in accidents involving unexploded ordnance (UXO). Aside from soldiers, farmers account for the majority of UXO accident victims in Laos. Note: the United States has not signed the treaty banning cluster bombs—but 107 108 other countries have.

My story on Banning the Bomb runs today in The Faster Times. It’s part of our ongoing project to document the effects of UXO across Laos. Earlier this week, we had an article in GlobalPost examining the many ways Laotians turn bomb scrap into tools. This is all part of our forthcoming book, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos, to be published next year. This work is written and photographed with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

A boy in Xieng Khouang digs for ant eggs on a hillside that was heavily bombed. Many locals have found bombies nearby. When a teacher tried to warn the boy about UXO, he said he was not afraid because he had dug in the area many times before.

Part of a cluster munition found in a farm field in Khammouane province in 2009. Farmers placed the bombie near a tree stump in the hopes that a clearance team would return and demolish it. It was still there in late April 2010.

A woman weeds her garden while a clearance team searches for bombs behind her. The woman did not want to stop working. That day, the team found a bombie in her neighbor’s field.

A boy in Khammoune sits in his family’s field, which they have set afire in order to clear the land for planting. Fires can cause buried bombs to explode, and many people do not stick around for the burning. Another boy in the area said he finds UXO every dry season. “When we burn the rice field—BOOM, BOOM! Explode. Every year. When we burn the field, we run away.”

It’s not what you think.

Well—it is but it isn’t.

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.”

Hemp tofu? That definitely sounds like something my new friends in Boulder might enjoy.

We have much to celebrate and even more to ponder this weekend, as many happenings converge. So pull up a chair and pour yourself a glass of this: nimbu pani, an Indian “lime and pepper refresher,” with recipe courtesy of Christine McFadden and her book, appropriately named, Pepper (wonderful book, and I can’t wait to try her recipe for homemade peppery truffles—yes, the chocolate kind). This simple drink is relished as a perfect antidote to hot weather. Though Jerry and I didn’t drink this nimbu pani in India and Sri Lanka, we downed myriad spice-infused beverages revolving around a sour/tart base. The combination quenches the thirst while cooling the body with a zippy kick.

Just four or five small-ish limes, a tablespoon or two of sugar, a pinch of salt, lots and lots of freshly ground black pepper, a bit of chilled water and ice—that’s all you need to serve two. Squeeze the limes, mix with the rest, pour over ice and top with water. Add more pepper if you like. This is one helluva zinger drink.

I served this to a couple of friends last week. Usually, when the four of us gather, we dive straight into a barrel of adult content—no non-alcoholic drinks in our little crowd. But I wanted them to savor this—and savor we did, smacking our lips at the hot limey goodness.

And then we got to thinking.

Tequila.

Oh yes.

Oh yes, yes, yes!

Add a jigger of tequila to the above recipe and you have what the four of us believe to be the best summer creation so far—perhaps of all time. So pull up that chair and take a swig.

Now, then, what are we celebrating? And pondering?

Saturday is the 65th birthday of Burma’s most famous lady, whose name is least uttered within her country. (She’ll spend the day in detention, as she has many birthdays before.) Sunday, in these parts, is Father’s Day. It’s also World Refugee Day. And Monday is the official start to summer, the Solstice. I’m not sure how these events need or need not intertwine for everyone. But I’ll raise my glass in praise of dads, and this wonderful universe that gives us summer every year. And I’ll wish for a world of calm, with peaceful homes and happy birthdays for all.

Thanks to everyone who has sent good vibes and healthy wishes this way. If all goes as planned, in a few hours we’ll be on a long-haul plane, leaving Thailand to its messy future. No one predicts an easy recovery from yesterday’s bloodshed and the weeks of protests leading up to it. In fact, I doubt this is an end at all—but merely a beginning. Too much anger remains in the burnt, bitter ashes of yesterday’s clashes. The history runs long and deep.

For four days preceding the worst of Bangkok’s violence, we escaped. We flew north to Chiang Rai and rented a car. We traveled the serpentine roads to Mae Salong, a little town high in the mountains of Thailand’s tea country. It’s a fascinating history that led former Kuomintang soldiers into these hills. No longer fighters, they’re farmers growing some of the world’s most renowned oolong tea from Taiwan. Culturally, Mae Salong is Thailand’s Little Taiwan.

We rented a lovely bungalow perched on a hillside overlooking miles of tea plantations. Nothing but chatty birds and happy insects disturbed our peace and quiet. By day, we made the rounds of the many many Mae Salong tea shops, sampling dozens of varieties. You’ll have the opportunity to read more about this in the future.

For sampling, oolong tea is poured first into an elongated cup with a small round cup placed on top. The ensemble is flipped and the longer cup removed. It’s rolled between the hands and lifted to the nose for the full scent of that particular tea. And then, the cup is lifted to the eyes in order to steam them with fragrance and heat. (Next, of course, you can drink the tea.)

This was new to me, the eye maneuver. But once I started doing it, I couldn’t stop! Almost an addiction, I kept wanting to steam my eyes for clarity and life. I’m sure I must have imagined these effects (at least in part), but the steam seemed to cleanse my vision and lift the weight from my lids.

As I prepare to leave this country (for now), I wish its people a future of peace and clarity.

A vendor on Thanon Lad Krabang fries noodles for a hungry crowd less than an hour before curfew

So much has happened in the past week—our reunion with Shu, the death of our friend Manophet, the eruption of Bangkok—I can’t process it yet. But here we sit, surrounded by concrete walls in a quiet, air-conditioned hotel amid dark and smoldering streets not long past curfew.

We arrived in Bangkok last night, around midnight, on the eve of a military crackdown on protesters who had occupied the city core for weeks. “What are you doing in Bangkok now?” the night desk man asked when we checked into our usual hotel, eerily quiet even at 1 a.m. We told him we were trying to go home (to finish our own work), but we’d left several bags at the hotel in February before departing for Laos. Jerry and I are not here to cover this story (many others have risked and sacrificed their lives already). But we had to make our way to the edge of urban warfare in order to get out.

From that vantage, on Sukhumvit Soi 2, the day progressed quietly despite the acrid scent of burning plastic and rubber, and towering black plumes in the distance. Our street was blocked, no traffic in or out. How strange to be two of only three guests at a normally packed hotel. We monitored the news minute by minute, watching the Bangkok Dangerous map and weighing our options: Should we stay? Should we go? We debated (and not always in the friendliest manner.) The hotel was just beyond the “no-man’s land” between soldiers and protesters, and we felt relatively safe inside as long as the violence didn’t spread.

But it did. After the military crushed the main Red Shirts protest camp, we began reading reports of fires scattered around Bangkok. We found a reliable taxi driver who squeezed through barricades and sweet-talked his way past soldiers to get us out and into a hotel near the airport. By the time we settled there, CentralWorld, one of Southeast Asia’s largest shopping malls, burned uncontrollably (you can watch the movie on YouTube or join the Facebook fan page). It’s apparently gone now. (And to think I’d hoped to buy new Tevas there before getting on the plane.)

It was a rush of activity tonight on Thanon Lat Krabang, near Suvarnabhumi. We ate pad thai at a small stall hurrying to fill big orders before the curfew went into effect. Dozens of customers buying last-minute beer filled the adjacent mini mart before the shop gates closed.

And now we wait—to see what the night brings, to see what the day brings, to finally board our plane (we hope) to San Francisco late tomorrow night. Meanwhile—because this is Bangkok, a city with infinite levels of surreal—we flip through channels and find the news in Burmese. It’s not Bangkok on the screen, but images from Cyclone Nargis, which struck two years ago. I listen to the voices and watch the shaky pictures, instantly reminded of where we were and what we were doing just a year and two weeks ago.

And then I look at another surreal set of images from Bangkok, May 19, 1992—precisely 18 years ago today.

The same Lat Krabang vendor juggles several noodle orders.

Irony on a black shirt.

WTF? Jerry discovered these while scrounging for a snack this afternoon. He said, “I had no idea what to make of them. They are crunchy potato tubes with gobs of salt and MSG.”

A soldier on Sukhumvit directs our taxi driver away from the trouble spots.

It’s been one of those weeks of heat and fatigue, and a scratchy throat that won’t clear. A week of dusty boots and sweaty shirts and sunburned cheeks, after chatting with farmers in hot, dry fields. A week of crazy traffic, choking exhaust, and a blanket of air with perilously high PM10 levels.

But then I chat with a young Burmese woman who left home at 19 and has lived in fear and danger ever since. She tells me how she secretly returned to Burma last year, to retrieve her passport; how she hid and covered her head and faked an illness while riding a bus—just so the authorities would leave her alone. How she spotted her sister, briefly, until a neighbor recognized her and she was forced to flee. And how her heart thumped with fear the entire trip until she landed in Thailand and knew she had escaped arrest. She lives in limbo. Home is neither here nor there, she says. She is never truly safe in either place. She pays a lot of money to live here on the sly. So she sinks herself into her work, and spends her happiest hours quietly, in her room, alone. She used to wish for greater freedoms; for the chance to go outside and move around without thought. But then, she says, she met refugees on the Thai/Burma border who have never left in 20 years. Can you imagine? Twenty years in the exact same place, no chance to roam. This brave young woman is thankful for the life she has. I ask if she has ever published her story. No, she says, it’s not nearly as important or poignant as the stories of so many others from her homeland.

These are the reasons I write this blog: the people I meet, the things they teach me. And the food, of course, that intertwines our lives. (The conversation above took place over a simple plate of rice, a bowl of vegetable soup and a serving of fried bamboo.)

Yesterday, I learned that Saveur has nominated Rambling Spoon for Best Culinary Travel Blog in its first-ever food blog awards. Thank you, readers, for that honor. And thank you, Saveur, for the recognition.

Have a look at all the blogs nominated in nine categories. And if you feel inclined, you’re more than welcome to register and vote.

In just a few weeks, a very important man will return to Laos. His name is Jim Harris. He’s a retired school principal from rural Wisconsin. He’s the only American working in the field to clear U.S. bombs from the soil in Laos. That’s Jim in the picture above. He’s standing among his boxes and bins full of Lao artifacts, all part of his living museum (currently homeless, aside from this basement storage room) depicting daily life in Laos.

If you’ve been following the Rambling Spoon for a while, you’ll know that we’ve been documenting the effects of unexploded ordnance (UXO) remaining since the U.S. bombing campaign 40 years ago. It’s a grim situation. We met Jim a couple of years ago in Khammouane province, where he worked with a clearance team that went out every day to investigate bombs found by local villagers. (Most of those villagers are farmers, and most of the bombs were found while working in the field.) You might recall my post about a couple of phosphorous bombs that Jim’s team destroyed after local kids pointed them out in the field. Once again, here’s a photo of that detonation:

We had a chance to see Jim again a few weeks ago while investigating Hmong food on his home turf in Wausau, Wisconsin. He updated us on his plans. When Jim gets back to Laos this time, he’ll be heading into the far north, into territory where other clearance groups won’t work. In theory, Phongsali wasn’t bombed enough to warrant clearance. It’s true, just a small portion of the overall area of the province was bombed. But that southern stretch suffered a torrent of explosives that continue to hurt and kill people today. Jim’s going out there to remove the problem.

For the past several months, Jim knocked on American doors and traveled the country looking for donations to fund his work. He’s been on TV, radio and in print. He’s hoping his fellow Americans will feel moved to give since it was the U.S. government that dropped the bombs on Laos in a secret, unauthorized war decades ago. He’s raised enough money to fund a month in Laos—but not the two additional months he hopes to work.

“You don’t get up day after day and go off to do bomb removal unless you are either suicidal or unrealistically optimistic,” he recently wrote to me. “I love life. I guess that makes me unrealistically optimistic. A blessing or a curse?”

Jim and his wife, Marty, have a website for their nonprofit, We Help War Victims. It includes a donation page.

You might notice a couple of wee changes on The Rambling Spoon today. Check to your left, and you’ll now find buttons for Facebook and Twitter. Yep, RS is now connected and I hope you’ll join. If you like this site, become an RS fan on Facebook and follow the Spoon on Twitter.

If you’d asked me a few months ago, I wouldn’t have seen this coming. I’d have probably kicked myself for even thinking of it. But times change, and like it or not, this is the way society now moves.

But here’s something else: these two venues will give me more room to post little ideas as they come to mind as well as quick links to intriguing information. When I worked for Gourmet, it was part of my job to feed food and travel news blurbs to my editor. Frequently, those bits ended up in his tweets. I’ll continue to hunt that news, but now you’ll find it on Rambling Spoon’s own pages. You know I have a particular eye for food news from the developing world. I’d like to promote more discussion among readers about food security and food politics—and I guarantee those subjects will be front and center on Twitter and Facebook.

Got a travel question? Many of you do; I get emails all the time asking for dining and travel advice. I’ll start sharing some of my answers with Rambling Spoon’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

So, let’s connect! Friend me on Facebook, become a fan, tweet with me and tell me what you know. And may all of us become better-informed people.

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.