Clowning, Not Swimming, to Cambodia

by Susan Parenti

Thirty-six hours to get to Cambodia from Washington, DC (4 planes). I grumbled to the other clowns: Why do we have to go so far in order to clown with suffering people? Seems like the US is full of them; we can stay right here.

Who are we? We are 'humanitarian clowns' which means we use the antics of clowning for purposes of change. Like activists and medical practitioners, we try to change the condition of suffering, going to hospitals and orphanages as well as checkpoints and refugee camps. In the airport we arrive in full-clown costume with some accordions and fiddles. We clown with the airline staff, waiting passengers, and at the security stations (NOT in the US, we'd be guillotined). Pain? Boredom? Deadly serious "power over"? Here we come. We try.

I'm an accordionist, a beginning clown. On this trip, we were 13 people: 11 clowns (two from Italy), and two cameramen from Chile who couldn’t resist clowning at times.

In the Phnom Peng airport, a French journalist angrily said to our clown group, "I don't know how you Americans have the nerve to come to Cambodia. Are you aware the US bombed this country for 180 days, night and day? That bombing ruined the irrigation system that had been so carefully set up here for centuries??!!"

I recognized in his voice a performance that I would have done, too, if I were he: helpless anger, accusation in confronting the revolting innocence of the perpetrators. "Yup, yessirree, we're just a bunch of carefree Americans going on a tour of this here oriental country; heard it was cheap, women are purty, gee did people die here, don't know anything bout that; lots of old feuds I guess, barbarians fighting barbarians, I'm an American, I pay a lot for my ignorance, yup."

So the French journalist was right to be mad. Right on, brother.

Only in this case, I told him, we WERE aware; we humble clowns went to places to counteract the damage done by our bullying country. He was mollified, almost friendly. I think the sheer fact that Americans KNEW about the US bombing in the 1970s was a relief to him.

When we finally arrived in Phnom Penh, the country took my eyes: the streets wildly busy with motorbike travel (up to 6 people on one bike), the people seeming small to me, slender, graceful, and not pugnacious. A common Cambodian greeting gesture: people put their hands together to their chest in a prayer-like position, which looks like a gentle "At your service" gesture.

How could one out of four people have been killed in this country, mostly by Cambodians themselves (Khmer Rouge soldiers), between 1970 and 1995? Statistics I was told: In 2003, 60% of the population is under age 24; and of that, 50% are under age 15, a consequence of the terrible last 30 years of the country. One out of four people were killed in the time period between 1970-1995, partly as a consequence of US foreign policies (excuse me, I mean the foreign policies that the US people do not know about but the men in power do), which killed between 300,000 to one and a half million people, and partly as a consequence of the dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Twenty-four percent of the women can read; 36% of the men can read. There is 80% poverty, with people living on 50cents a day. Rachel Snyder, our guide, said: Women and children have no rights. There is law, but no justice. Cambodia is riddled with corruption (but who will solve this riddle, who?).

Beggars all over; some sliding on the ground when they have no legs. The voices of beggars, of shop women in the market, trying to get your attention (your 50 cents, their food, their survival).

What if you were too shy to beg? To starve from shyness. (There is a story by Chekhov of a starving father and son, and the father too ashamed to beg, and the starving son who on a dare eats oysters fed him by rich men).

Financially, our trip was sponsored by the actress Angelina Jolie, mother of an adopted Cambodian child, refugee-camp visitor, and poster child for UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees). Organizationally, the trip was sponsored by Patch Adams and Wildman Adams of the Gesundheit! Institute, who both did a huge amount of detail work to bring 13 people to Cambodia, and who had the vision for the trip.

On the first morning of our visit, we visited the actual 'killing fields' and the prison camp where thousands of Cambodians were murdered. I was grateful to our guides, Rachel and Paul, for starting the trip this way—showing us the traces of suffering created by "power over" and violence. Though visiting hospitals also puts us into contexts of suffering, illness is quite another thing from avoidable humanly-caused misery. And that is what we witnessed. A detail I can't forget: we were shown a tree against which babies were killed—-in order to save precious bullets, the Khmer Rouge battered the babies against the tree until they died. "In order to save precious bullets."

We visited children with AIDS (Cambodia has the highest rate of AIDS in Asia, people who had been hurt by landmines, and children who had birth defects (some a result of the chemicals used in warfare). We clowned in a huge school (formerly a factory) for street children where they learn trades. The organization that runs this school has three parts: one part is out in the streets trying to help the children, the second part is the running of the school, and the third part is follow-up work to keep the children in jobs so they donp’t return to the streets. Our guides said this was the hardest part—drugs, despair, and poverty working more quickly than education. We ate in a fine restaurant run by street kids.

The strangest sight, the one my eyes won't easily digest, was our clowning at a school which is IN the city dump for the children who scavenge there. As a huge number of kids spend their lives in the city dump looking through the huge 30 feet high mounds of garbage for salvageable things to sell, this French agency set up a school right there, IN the dump. When our bus of clowns arrived, hundreds of smudged and semi-naked kids ran towards us. Normally I bend down, accordion to my chest, to meet the eye level of the kids. In this place, I was so overwhelmed by anger (hiding inside was grief), I couldn't meet the eyes of the children. I couldn't look at any one of them directly. In the background were the mountains of garbage smoking with dust, with little figures on them (the kids). Who is to take care?

Eating a nice dinner in a hotel, and the dinner's cost is $2.00. What is this? My stinginess gratified (wow, a bargain), my brain kept thinking, What? What? What? Take care? Maybe the garbage is taking care.

Who is to take care?

It's tricky, this 'humanitarian clowning'. My impression is so strong when I'm there, the desire to help so strong, and then I come home, and Christmas in this country is brewing; I get a stomach flu and other things happen, and there I am. TV and newspapers smirk at me in their slick grind of producing one more day of expensively calculated ignorance.

Political Analysis/Paralysis. Why? Why did this happen to/in Cambodia? Why this genocide? The question 'why' arises strongly if you're thinking while you're in Cambodia. Or if you think about it afterwards. The people seem especially unwarlike.

The explanations that people give you constantly bring up Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and very rarely the US or other countries.

I don't trust the question ‘why’.

Why? (ahem, hmmm, errr, whoops, walked into my own trap).

See vignette #3: "Attempts at a Political Analysis".

*(reference to the movie "Swimming to Cambodia," made in 1987 by Spalding Gray, while he was working on the movie, "The Killing Fields." "Swimming to Cambodia" is really worth seeing).