Giorgio Trombatore and Barbara Contini in a meeting held in Catania for the Darfur Crisis


A Khmer Rouge with a Mosquito Net

Now , here I am, again in my ship. The river Congo , today is more friendly. I am heading toward east, the south east. They asked me to reach Cambodia. I never visited that country, I know that the Khmer rouge are living today, still fighting a lost battle. More than a million killed in a crazy purge, and me , I will be there to distribute mosquito bed-nets so as to protect the people from the malaria .
We are here to save Cambodians from dying from Malaria, when still in the remote bush, Pol Pot is playing is last cards with Kiew Samphan.
As I approach the beautiful Phon Penh and live my river Congo, I am astonished by the beauties of the Temples, by the colors of the monk’s rap.
I move along the busy roads, where people sell everything, where the shops never close, where the shop keaper sleeps on a canvas in front of his items.
The Humanitarian World asks me to go in the jungle, along Kampot region and keep west, where the lates Khmer rouge were still fighing.
I took a flat in street 63, central Phon Penh . I guess, I managed a good bargain 200 dollars per month. A fridge, a bed, a couple of fan, and a sofa. That was all I needed. To tell the truth I had also a Kitchen , but I never used it. Morning time I took my Takeo, a sort of cappuccino and lunch and dinner at Chinese restaurant open until early hours.
So after arranging my things with the National Malaria Department I took off direction remote jungle of Cambodia. There once arrived I was welcomed by a bunch of Khmer Rouges that were dealing mainly with the illegal trafficking of valuable wood .
My house was a temple, I was a guest from a couple of monks, and during the day I was going around with my assistant from the Department of Health to teach old and young Khmer Rouge on how to use the bed- net with the Deltamethrine, a sort of insecticide.
Lunch time in the jungle I used to receive some rice and pork, for drinking a coconut and that was it. I do not really complain about that period, in fact I did enjoy somehow. In fact, it was a total different atmosphere far away from the war torn bush of Angola or Mozambique.
Here the people seemed to me more accustomed to this sort of life. They kept always a distance with me, like if I could never really understand them, and maybe it is like that.
I felt like they never opened themselves and a sort of mistrust was among them. I knew about all the killings that Khmer Rouge had perpetrated all along the seventies, but I did not feel like making any question.
They were living their life, they accepted my presence only because I was there to fight malaria and Dengue fever, for the rest I was a guest, a white man, to treat him nicely but nothing more.
Better like this, I thought after all those people never really convinced me that much.
When my duty was over and I managed to live behind myself the dangerous forests of the Khmer Rouge I headed back to the capital, where after 2 weeks of forests I felt like living the city, with all his restaurants, disco, sauna parlour, and the drinking.
I kept this life for six months.
I was like a small king in my apartment , street 63. Coffee house, restaurants all was within a minute walk. The Sundays I used to visit the Pagodas, or to make short trip in the old Khmer villages.
The death , the sorrow, the suffering of millions of Cambodians, I knew it where there just around the corner, but maybe I pretended not to see them, I preferred to say that Hun Sen was a good leader, that all Khmer had forgotten the past, and that it was also my duty.
But, maybe my real memories are tied up with the period prior to my living for North Korea, with the Cambodians Customs.
It was a “hell” of place, where a white man was not welcomed. All the UN agencies and the Ngos had selected a Cambodian to enter the crazy world of the Customs.
Before you could take out something from the Harbour or the Airport you were expected to go threw so many offices, and hand out so many tips, that usually you arrived exhausted and broken by the time you were supposed to retrieve your items from the warehouse.
But here I was, after my training at the Rwanda’s Customs in Kigali where for approximately four months I dealt with the most corrupted and cynical state employers, I managed to get through the incredible bureaucracy of Cambodia.
At the end, I was so fast and sharp that all agencies tried to hire my services.
I thought ending my Cambodian experience telling this short stories, because as I mentioned in the beginning since I arrived in this Station I somehow decided to take a distance for a short time from the Horror of this land, from the empty look of some Khmer Commander that I met during my staying in Pursat and Kampot provinces.


River Congo.
Why Marlow is going up river?

Often when I come back from my missions around the world, one of the most familiar question is “ Why are you living? Why don’t you stop from going abroad?

Maybe some people asked the same questions to Marlow? Why did you continue your trip up-river? To look for what? Why proceeding a trip in the Heart of Darkness?.

Is there a plausible answer for this question? I really do not know, probably each one of us has got His Answer.
I know that for what concern myself, as soon as I reach a station during my journey in the river Congo, I am already planning to proceed further deep, to continue my trip.

…….”Yes, it is for the unknown prospects , for the finding of new cultures, for the sake of discovery” I may merely mention the above sentence and the questioners will find themselves satisfied.
But that won’t be the truth.

There is a inner sense of discomfort that drives me out in the river, a sense of non-belonging to anyplace a search for identity that only the solitude and the travelling in remote areas stirs up.

Marlow as a young boy dreamed over “The Globe” travelling in Africa and far east countries, a century later I had got a “Map of the World “ hanging on my wall, and imagined encounters and travels in the remotest corner of the world.

It is this feeling that this place is not enough to contain ourselves and therefore we go out and search for breathing life out of our existence.