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Preface
My motodriver (driver of a taxi service using a small motorcycle) leaned over his right shoulder, announcing that the road was about to turn very bumpy. I squinted with one eye in order to gain sight of Cambodia’s landscape through the dusty lens of my video camera. The residual smells of harvested rice lingered in the air. Palm trees stood as barriers, dividing one farmer’s field from the next. Small one-room huts providing shelter for a dozen people were positioned in close proximity to the slender street. Behind homes were the fields where the able-bodied labored during sunlight hours. Barefoot children coaxed cows toward a predetermined target. Women wearing colorful sarongs balanced baskets of treasures on their heads as they made their way to local markets. The aged sat beneath the stilt-supported huts, basking in the shadows provided by the wooden slats.
Cambodia is a land of contrast: astonishing temples and deficient aqueducts, elegant dance and pervasive disease, grandeur and genocide, prosperity and poverty, landmarks and landmines. Every village has a story, every family a trial. Life is fragile and death is commonplace.