I am typing this from my room in Dolphin Bay, Thailand, with the wind blowing and the waves crashing outside my window. Through the fog I can see the silhouettes of mountains and islands in the distance. Jill and I are here at the Juniper Tree, a rest house for missionaries and development workers to come and get away from everything. It is so quiet. The loudest sounds are the wind and the waves, really. After Poipet and then weeks of traveling through Cambodia and staying in noisy cities, this is desperately needed... I am so grateful for the opportunity to reflect for a few days and breathe in the salty air.

My last post ended with our trip to Battambang Province, which feels like aeons ago now. So much has occurred since then.

Our return from Battambang to Poipet was quite a rude reminder that we are strangers in a strange land. After a long, bumpy taxi ride, Jill, Sophy and I headed up to our rooms in the gueshouse. I unlocked the door to find that the dirty blanket I had intentionally put under the bed was balled up and sitting in my suitcase - gross. I was taken aback but at first I thought the guesthouse owners had come into the room to clean or something, which they don't normally do. Then I saw my box of Bang! cards sitting in Jill's suitcase, and a horrible sick feeling washed over me. Our entire room had been rifled through and we had been robbed of many things. I had foolishly left behind my laptop because I wanted to travel to Battambang lightly and not think about schoolwork for two days, but I realized my folly... all of our electronics, some of Jill's clothes, jewelry, and shoes, even our shampoo and cereal had been taken. So, the first thing Jill and I did was sit down and pray. We audaciously prayed for a miraculous return of my laptop and the other electronic items we needed to carry out our research. I tried to hold it together but found myself crying when we opened our eyes... Jill left to tell Sophy, who was in a different room.

Sophy came in and notified the guesthouse owners, who seemed shocked, and then found that the lock had been bored into and popped open. Sophy had a sneaking suspicion that the people across the hall had something to do with this. She had noticed that they would often open their window and watch us talking in the hallway. So, the guesthouse owners looked in the rooms across the hall, and, sure enough, found Jill's plastic bag that had contained her electronics, and her empty box of cereal (!). We went to the police and told them what happened, but only one policeman was on duty, and he said that because it was a holiday all the policemen were partying that night and would not be able to do anything about our case until morning.

By this point, Jill and I were feeling pretty numb. We headed to the casino area, where we could use the internet and contact our families, friends, churches, cohort, to let them know what happened and to pray for us. I had no idea who had my laptop or what information they could access on it so I changed all my passwords. Ugh. We went back into town and booked a room at the safest guesthouse in town I could think of... and hunkered down there for the night.

The following morning, we got a call around 8am saying that the police had caught the two girls that were staying with the two men across the hall. We came in and repeated our story, with Sophy as our interpreter. We wrote a detailed list of everything that had been stolen from us. We had to fill out various forms stating what we had lost and what outcome we wanted: getting our things back. We knew this was a silly thing to ask, being on the border of Thailand, and knowing the thieves had stolen from us about 24 hours before we returned and discovered the theft. Still, we persisted, and it took quite awhile. Jill, Sophy and I grew quite familiar with the police office we were filling our paperwork in. The hard wooden bench, the mattress folded up in the corner, the dress shoes with the heels crumpled down... the policemen were quite thorough, and had us sign and stamp every paper with one or both thumbs.

They let us break for lunch, and the police officer gave us a ride to John Cena (the name of the restaurant near the border :) ). When we returned in the afternoon, the police took us back to the guesthouse to look through the rooms and take pictures. The two girls across the courtyard from us had to come too. I tried to look them in the eye, but every time I did, they did not hold my gaze for long before looking away.

When we arrived at the guesthouse, we went into Jill's and my room first, pointed out all the things that had been disturbed (pretty much all of our stuff - the thieves did a thorough search of our belongings), and we even found two cigarette butts on the bathroom floor. I felt gross being in that room again, violated, knowing strangers had invaded and then taken the time to smoke cigarettes. They must have known how long we were going to be gone in Battambang in order to be so leisurely about their robbery.
When we went across the hall, the first room we went into the police went through every single bag, box, even the trash, asking us to point out everything we recognized. Jill found two of her earrings, and when she pointed them out, the girl staying in that room protested, saying that she had gotten them in Siem Reap. It was strange to see Jill and this girl exchange looks over these stolen items.
Jill also found her sneakers behind the door - the tops of them had been cut off, strangely, so that only their soles were left. Again the girl claimed her husband had gotten them for her in Thailand.

We went into the second room, and in that room was the plastics bags we had found the day before that we had kept our electronic items in. We also pointed out Jill's cereal box, and her dictophone packaging (in English and in French - only to be found on Canadian items). The police had Jill point to the items she claimed as hers, and take photos.
I spotted a small clear plastic tab, the one that had been covering the end of my iPod/USB charger. When I pointed it out, the police took a picture of me. Then, they brought in the girl that had been staying in that room, and made her stand next to this tiny piece of plastic to take her photo. I looked at this girl, trying to hold her gaze again, and saw that she was shaking and her eyes looked like she was about to cry. Partly because I was straining my muscles leaning away from the camera so as not to be in the incriminating photo, I realized that I, too, was trembling.

It was a very strange moment for Jill and I to be in the same room as the people who stole from us, and to look them in the eye. Talking about it later, we both felt more sad for these girls than anything else. They were probably about our age, and even though the first girl was quite brazen in her denial, we had no idea what they had been brought up in, how these men (who had run away and left them here) treated them, what they may or may have been told or taught from a young age. Jill and I realized that the kind of girls we had come here to "help" may very well have been the ones stealing from us. It was a pretty harsh reminder that human frailty manifests itself in very difficult ways.

When we went back to the station, we had to write up more lists of what had been found that we could claim for certain were ours. More translation, more thumb stamping, more waiting. They let us go at dinnertime, and told us to come back in the morning.

So we did... we got another call early Monday morning telling us to return to the station, because the thieves had been caught. When we arrived, we saw two men shackled together across the courtyard, but we were quickly ushered back into the same office we had been in the day before. Another full day of waiting, signing, thumbprinting. We tried to fill the time with reading but it was hard to concentrate. Near lunchtime, the policeman pulled out his cell phone and showed us two pictures: one of a collection of all of our smaller electronic items, the other of a white Mac in a clear plastic case.

Could it be?

Jill started crying, probably from a combination of emotions, but the police officer said he knew that we were good people and that was why they worked so hard to get these things back. Still, we did not see them with our own eyes yet, and they let us break for lunch, which was agonizingly long.

When we returned, we were greeted with a table arrayed with my laptop, iPod, Jill's dictophone, most of our various chargers, thumb drives, power cords. The police chief was there, standing proudly alongside us for pictures. I felt my gratitude went to the policeman who had worked with us these last two days, but he was not even in the picture:



We were ferried in and out of the office a few more times, and the last time we came out the press was there interviewing us and taking pictures of us with our retrieved items. The whole thing was pretty embarrassing, but when we walked out and saw the two thieves standing there we felt horribly ashamed to see that one of them was only in his underwear. I asked Leng several times if I could say something to the thieves but he wasn't sure if we could. I just wanted to tell them that they were made for something better than this. We didn't get the opportunity though.

Suffice it to say that I cannot tell what means the police (and perhaps other parties involved) used to track down and retrieve our items - but we were so grateful that our prayers, and the prayers of many others in our communities, churches, and families back home, had been heard. When I brought my laptop home that night, I opened it up (thank goodness it was password-protected), unlocked it, and found that everything was as it had been before it was stolen. I even found a paper I had pre-written before coming to get Jill, and I emailed it to my professor with what I thought was a very valid excuse for its tardiness.

The end of this episode culminated in a few days' illness - my body collapsed after this battle was fought and won...

Siem Reap

The following week, we traveled to Siem Reap, one of the major cities in Cambodia, about two hours east of Poipet. When we arrived, we were thankful to be out of Poipet and in a different setting for awhile.

Siem Reap is tourist central. The temple ruins outside the city attract many foreigners, and downtown Siem Reap is a smorgasbord of restaurants, pubs, massage parlors, guesthouses, coffeeshops, and gift shops. Food and drink are cheap, delicious, and cater to the Western palate. I probably ate three or four cheeseburgers that week, some pizza, and a few burritos. I like Khmer food but I definitely won't turn away my other favorites... I don't even eat burgers that often at home, but they were pretty good here!

We took a day to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, Bayon, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei. I probably missed a few names there. We hired a tuk-tuk for the day, because each temple is spread out from the others. These were beautiful and amazing sites, and I felt my own smallness and newness walking through such huge and ancient structures.

My favorite part of the day was in the early afternoon, soon after lunchtime. It was raining lightly, so most tourists were gone at this point. We pulled the tuk-tuk up in front of Banteay Kdei. This temple had pools and trees surrounding it, and the rain falling was probably the loudest sound. Everything was still, until I got to the back end of this temple, where two young Khmer boys were swimming and splashing around in the pool, laughing and climbing on top of each other and onto a branch hanging into the water. This is what Cambodian boys have done for thousands of years here, I thought; it felt more like I was walking through a piece of history and less like I was visiting a tourist site.

The rest of our time in Siem Reap, after Peter left, Jill and I researched and read and wrote and researched some more. We met with a guy who with his wife started an organization called White Doves, working with girls who desperately wanted to get out of the brothels but had no options. It was neat to hear the story of how White Doves sort of organically came into being. Jill and I ended our time in Siem Reap by getting pizza... or was it burgers? No, I think it was burritos... ;)

Anyhow, we headed down to Phnom Penh after that, which was a welcome change of scene which I will describe in my next post.