Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Almost Final Reckoning


The Cambodia Fundraiser pictured above tells only part of the story of the amazing crew of international supporters behind Camb(l)o(g)dia who number, lessee:
- 27 direct Cambodia Fundraiser donors
- 20+ Women's Media Group Chicago bake sale contributors (and their hundreds of customers)
- 30 Cambodian Grrrl purchasers
- the 48 young women in the dorms
- and the readers and general supporters of Camb(l)o(g)dia, some of whom are listed to the right

The above shows that I made $942.20, which is not true: I have raised in fact $4,017.20, with one fundraiser still outstanding, of my original goal of $5,000. 
I deeply appreciate this support and look forward to sharing this work with you, once ready for public view. I also want to thank Mo., our one-and-only Boy Correspondent, for his great contributions, as well as the occasional distraction-free moment in which to do this work.

Pre-order Holiday in Cambodia


Holiday in Cambodia, a limited-edition zine put out by the good folks at Annalemma, is now available for pre-order. I sort of can't believe all the cool people involved: Todd Dills of 2NDHAND, Liz Grover,  Ryan Bradley, Cassandra Lewis, and former occasional Chicago zinester and musician Al Burian.

Of course I'm gonna think it's a great project—it was set up to benefit my work in Cambodia on young women and media making, which you can read about more below. But I'm also excited to read the zine. I mean: "Christmas Fax From Dad's Lawyer"? That will be great.

Apparently it's wise to pre-order  now.

The New Batch


I haven't been avoiding sharing these: I've actually been avoiding reading them myself. Well, not avoiding, but since my return to the US I've been unbelievably sick and barely able to root through the piles to find, you know, a clean pair of underpants, much less take a step back to deal with the secondary trauma of being in a hostilely cold environment without benefit of giggling young women everywhere. Not to mention in the US. How's a girl supposed to deal with that, anyway?

But today, as I used to say when I was working as an accountant, which I actually did, is a day of reckoning. I said it every day then, and every day I thought it was funny.

All in all, after the opening of the new dorm, I was able to conduct one workshop, of less than an hour, to approximately 12 new students (three—Meng Hun, Raksmey, and Sreyhak—had taken it before and jumped in with questions, suggestions, and clarifications.) This was cut short due to the kind of unforeseen circumstances one expects if one works in Cambodia. I had time for one follow-up email, pretty much a reminder of when I was leaving the country and when I would come by to say goodbye and pick up any zines they may have completed.

Given the insanity of this time period at the dorm complexes, that was pretty much what I could fit into the ongoing proceedings of Dry Season, 2010.

So I was excited and impressed to come to say goodbye and have 17 new zines, and girls working furiously on them—asking me to wait a few more minutes, pose for a portrait, checking spelling, wondering if what they did was OK—waiting for me there. Some of the zines are pictured here.

Funders, supporters, and the generally interested are welcome to contact me to arrange viewing options. A display will go up at the Bucktown Branch of the Chicago Public Library during Women's History Month, and further exhibitions are in development.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

AL Jazeera report on youth employment in the Cambodian building boom

Monday, January 25, 2010

Please.



The sign says: "Please don't walk through the mass grave!"

Sunday, January 24, 2010

A German-Khmer Phrase Book for Socialists (1987)

[Another post from Mo., our intrepid boy contributor. Hooray!—ed.]

A Situationist author whose name I forgot famously suggested one should hike through the Harz mountains in central Germany using a London city map for orientation. An adventuresome traveller can achieve similar incongruencies if she or he lets the 1987 Gesprächswörterbuch Deutsch-Khmer (German-Khmer conversation book) by Ngen Yos guide their communication in today’s Cambodia. The book was published by VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig (people-owned publishing house Leipzig), as one in a series of publications on Cambodian language and culture. Written in the last years of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) socialist regime in the East of Germany and in the last years of the Vietnamese-run People’s Republic of Kampuchea in Cambodia, the book was intended primarily to assist “German-language readers who have the opportunity of using Khmer in their jobs, because of their studies, or because of personal connections” (according to the author’s introduction, it was meant also to be useful for Cambodians learning German). Starting out from German, it provides translations into Khmer and pronunciation help in the phonetic alphabet.



Many phrases featured in the book continue to be useful and up-to-date, including the sections on measures and weights, on months according to the traditional Khmer calendar, on illnesses, city tours, and the human body. Others, less so. Anachronistic as they are, though, they offer a window into the socialist late 1980s, or at least onto a small, largely unknown, and, to me, profoundly weird aspect of that time, international socialist solidarity and cooperation. 

In the first section, for instance, Ngen Yos explains the intricacies of greetings in Khmer culture, listing factors such as age, gender, type of relationship and degree of familiarity which determine the usage of greeting forms and the choice of the appropriate first person pronoun.



But should a good socialist even learn these terms? Socialist culture everywhere was quite concerned with transforming rituals that represented and reproduced traditional social hierarchies, be they feudal or capitalist. In Cambodia, these concerns were carried over from the Khmer Rouge years to the non-genocidal variety of socialism after 1979. Thus, the translator explains that “samamit” and “samamit neri”, the male and females form of “comrade”, “are not only the official greeting forms among members of the Revolutionary People’s Party of Kampuchea, but they are also used quite frequently among people without party membership. Guests from socialist countries and members of other (i.e. international, Mo.) communist parties should also be addressed in this manner.”


Significant chunks of the book are dedicated to agricultural and industrial production, where the GDR specialists or party delegates were expected to provide advice.



Marx’s central categories are listed, such as “means of production” and “relations of production”, as are really-existing-socialism’s inventions like the “five-year plan”. The focus on “heavy industry” and the “nuclear power plant” documents ambitions for industrial development; concepts of rationalization and efficiency get represented in phrases such as “we have developed a new machine which does the work of three people” or “Is your factory output in accordance with the plan?” If the visiting socialist professional seeks to find out about the progress of Cambodia’s working class, the phrase book suggests – scripts – a brief conversation:



“The workers spend their vacation time in the country’s most beautiful resorts”, “Who pays for this?” “The company”. (Other options are not given, resorts are not specified). One thing is clear: Shame on you, on-looking capitalist, whose workers pay for their vacations, if they get any at all.


However little these phrases may have to say about Cambodian life in the 1980s during civil war, post-genocide trauma, chaos, and extreme poverty (and I assume it is very little), and however flawed the concept of socialist internationalism and solidarity turned out to be, maybe we should also take this example of anachronistic phraseology and think of what a future reader, say 35 years from now, will make of the language used by today’s agents of international cooperation, cross-cultural exchange, and global commodity production, whether it’s the neoliberal, the journalistically brief and sober, the legal, the snotty blogger, or the morally-well-intended-neo-paternalism variety.


And now that Cambodia is beginning to have a larger industrial working class (laboring in a small but not completely insignificant part for German corporations such as Adidas, Puma or Beiersdorf/Nivea), maybe some workers will actually be able to fight for things like paid vacation days. And not just be allowed to go home over Cambodian New Year, like the garment factory workers we spoke to. 

Nowadays, however, they can probably expect little linguistic assistance from their foreign employers’ phrase books. If they even have phrase books.


One more thing that I found useful on my travels:



“I did not order this. I ordered Schweinebraten” (Schweinebraten = German pork roast).

More Girls Workin' on Zines

Images from the follow-up zine session at the Teuk Thla dorm, Friday January 22, 2010.





This time, there were no questions like, "Why do people do this?" "What is the purpose of zine?" and "What is your real job?"

There were only questions like, "What can I put in it?"And when I would say, "Whatever on earth you want to put in it," they would still ask permission to pursue their particular idea about zine.