Holland, Amsterdam,
09 Jan. 2011.
In my mind's eye I return nearly one year and to the other side of the world, back to Phnom Pehn with its open sewers, its chaotic traffic, its lack of public parks, maybe back to the tourist distrct of Boeng Kak where most of the guesthouses were built on wooden platforms over the polluted water of the Boeng Kak lake but where the carbon monoxide in the air wasn't as bad as in Bangkok or maybe New Dehli, Jakarta or Mumbai...
Back to Phnom Pehn where the numerous motorbike taxi-boys would be more interested in selling their little sister - or maybe brother if that is your preference - as in scoring a ride to, say, the Tuol Sleng torture museum...neatless to say that Mariuana, crack or coke, horse - local slang for heroine you know - or whatever else your Batang mind might conjure up, was high on their money making list too...
Back to Phnom Pehn and its hordes of street kids dressed in dirty rags and armed with even dirtier garbage bags slung nochalantly across their shoulders...the kids I drew in my sketchbooks and on local newspaper by the sheer lack of better moleskine paper - I must have done at least a hundert of them during my three weeks of constantly being on the move in this Asian dirt heap, short breaks in old colonial french coffee houses where that black brew was so strong it kept me going despite my heavy night owling the evening before...
Giving my underaged models a couple of American bucks each, telling them my conditions, buy some good food instead of glue, give some of it to your Mum...
Always receiving feigned indignation, angry young eyes that would bore into mine, asking me in a sort of pissed-off way why I would think they would buy glue, more often than not with a half smoked sigarette butt dangling from smeary young lips...
More often than not these underaged streetwise kids would ask me shrewd and lewd questions like "you like Bam Bam, mister, maybe Yam Yam?", as so often before making me realise how sick this world really is...
More often than not I would let them have the sketch wondering what they would do with it, adoration for the wooden shed they live in, maybe something to look at late at night, their nasal passage ways blocked by heavy glue sniffing while focussing on that quickly done pen drawing, a fast drawing in exchange for a couple of precious American bucks, paid for food but turned into nighttime glue-sniffing sessions instead...
The next day they would be there again, waiting at my favorite bench at Wat Phnom, a couple of friends in their wake, my wad of one dollar notes getting lighter by the day...
