In the port of Amsterdam…

Amsterdam. City of prostitutes, marijuana and cheese. I’ve lived here for just over 6 weeks and I’ve only had the cheese. But it was good enough to make up for not having the other two. I live on Elandsgracht, a concrete canal filled in in the 19th century and now a thoroughfare for good looking young folk and lost tourists. Across from my house is a bar. It sits on a corner and bears white and red awning and is always full of elderly messers, outside for a smoke or inside for a song. Sunday is karaoke night. For my first two weeks in the house I was out gallavanting but last Sunday I stayed in and, well, just listened. This is what I heard.

It kicks off at 19.54 with what sounds like a Dutch version of Ferry Cross the Mersey. This is unlikely. I’m sure it’s not the same song but my Dutch only extends to asking for beer so I can’t tell what it is. I’m intrigued by the strong voice of the singer and move to the downstairs window to sit on the ledge, smoke fags and generally nose at what’s going on. There’s a lull, but at 20.26 the same man comes back and belts out a rousing rendition of My First, My Last, My Everything. At this point random strangers are stopping outside and gawping at the drama. On a cobbled street like something out of a Disney film, a large drunk man lurching around a bar roaring Barry White songs is a rarity.

A cyclist slows as he approaches the pub. The large man is now attempting a hacking version of That’s Amore as the evening grows cold and sharp after a long day of Spring sunshine. Large man has sung the last three songs. There appears to be some sort of impasse concerning performance variety.

There’s a long gap and no movement in the bar until the large man steps up and begins to croon For The Good Times.

“And make believe you love me one more time, for the good times.”

The footpath floods. The loneliness is too much. You can almost see the broken hearts strewn in the gutter. 50-something-year-old heavy drinkers, a burst of them emerge for a cigarette. Interesting timing that.

Kony 2012 and the curious case of the missing facts…

So it’s taken over the internet with greater fervour than anything has managed to do in quite a while. The dogs on the street spent at least 5 minutes today discussing Kony 2012. Not Joseph Kony mind you, just the relatively well thought out campaign executed by the boys at Invisible Children.

I won’t spend too much time on the basic facts, they have been bantered to death at this late stage in the game, but I have a few observations to throw in. I am not an international aid expert, nor a political expert, but I have my fair share of knowledge on the two. Firstly, and mostly, here’s hoping the next campaign of this sort contains the name of one Robert Mugabe. The pain he has inflicted – and continues to inflict – reaches further than the mind can comprehend and yet he walks in and out of Europe as a free man.

There are many wonderful things about the Kony campaign. It’s always fantastic to see young people, well, any people, getting off their arse to help others and aim to stop injustices. But there are holes in this video that you could drive a tank through. Don’t take everything as a given just because it comes from the same political side that you agree with.

Just from a visual perspective, there is a shot 10.51 minutes into the video of Kony’s head doing a swirly-crazy-eyed-baddie thing. Poor editing move there lads. You can just show normal stills of the enemy. We get it.

But my two massive issues with it concern presentation of information with no back up. Jason Russell’s voiceover tells us that his group thought that “if the government knew, they would do something to stop him [Kony]“. So Russell heads to Washington. Cue snaps of the White House and other governmental-type premises.

He then adds: “Everyone in Washington we talked to said there’s no way the United States will ever get involved in a conflict where our national security or financial interests aren’t at stake.” He follows this with: “Since the government said it was impossible, we didn’t know what else to do…”

This implies that Russell has evidence that a US government representative told him that there was no hope in hell that anything’d be done about this as there weren’t any dollars at stake or it wasn’t likely to cause a repeat of 9/11.  That’d be a pretty big deal. So how much evidence does he present of this?

None.

The only spoken evidence presented or mentioned comes from the lips of John Prendergast from the Enough Project, a partner organisation to Russell’s Invisible Children.

Secondly, when some of Russell’s Ugandan pals come to speak in the US, the voiceover tells us that “Uganda is a relatively safe place…”

Hmmm, a few minutes ago it was warlord hell and swarming with childcatchers. Do you have a consistent opinion you’d like to provide us with or are you hoping we’re all as gullible as you’d like to think we are?

I think the main issue is that the campaign relies on an unrealistic level of simplicity. Black and white. Yes and no. True and false. In countries like Uganda which have suffered war and injustice on this scale, there is no such thing. Life is complicated, justice is even more complicated. Let someone who’s from there give you a clearer picture of how it works…

A muted suffering for Irish women

“Symphysiotomy is a childbirth operation that severs one of the main pelvic joints, sundering the pubic bones and unhinging the pelvis. A related operation, pubiotomy, which splits the pubic bone rather than the symphysis joint and results in a ‘compound fracture of the pelvis’, was also performed. At least 1,500 of these operations were recorded here from 1944-92: most were carried out in ‘voluntary’ or private hospitals under the control of the Catholic dioceses of Dublin, Armagh, and Cork and Ross. Around 180 symphysiotomy mothers are believed to survive in Ireland today.”

Two things stood out to me from this section of Marie O’Connor’s report (found here: http://bit.ly/weMIk0) on the barbaric practices carried out on birthing mothers in Ireland. Firstly the number: 1,500. One thousand, five hundred women physically abused in the name of a catholic doctrine, namely that of not wanting to perform a caesarean section as it may impede future births, thereby going against the catholic hope for a swelling brood.

Secondly, the year it stopped: 1992. Just 20 years ago.

The horrific truth of symphysiotomy was unknown to me up until a few weeks ago and I’ve since spent time reading Ms O’Connor’s report and statements from campaign group Survivors of Symphysiotomy, whose Facebook page you can see here: http://on.fb.me/AkCmOB.

The survivors are now seeking the ”temporary setting aside of the statute of limitations, to enable survivors to seek redress through the courts,” and have been for a while actually, but they haven’t received any satisfaction so far.

Ms O’Connor’s report says that around 180 women living in Ireland today experienced this traumatic and injurious procedure. Is this not a high enough figure to count? I’ve written before about the apparent blind-eyes and deafened ears when it came to abuses carried out in the name of God and which came to light on a global scale in the Ryan and McCarthy reports. Are those responsible for the physical and mental wellness of Irish people going to hide behind technicalities and jargon yet again?

The matter is sure to be mentioned in the broadsheets in the coming weeks following the formation of an all party committee to support survivors. And just last week and interesting series of questions were answered by Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly. (See the full transcript here: http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/2012/02/15/00014.asp)

Dr Reilly claims that  he “reject[s] the Deputy’s contention that this was a barbaric act, although its use in certain circumstances may well transpire to have been utterly inappropriate.”

Not to put too fine a point on it Dr Reilly, but splitting someone’s pelvis in two, arguably unnecessarily, could conceivably be placed in the realms of barbaric behaviour by most people’s definitions.

A report is awaited and Dr Reilly assured questioners in the Dail that “The Government is committed to dealing with it sensitively, so that if at all possible, closure can be brought to those affected by it.”

It needs to happen now, far too much time has passed already.

Ireland, I love you, but you’re bringing me down…

So I have returned to the Motherland for an extended break, arriving last Friday morning to a freezing cold Dublin Airport and a general sense of things just being not quite right. All the time i was working in Phnom Penh, I read the Irish Times and The Independent every day. I read the journal.ie, kept up with friends having difficulty with jobs and mortgages and felt I was prepared to come home and be informed on the whole situation.

People are so, so angry. And sad. And lost. And muted by the abuses of those who have run the country for so many years. My Dad is terrified for the future of his still very small grandchildren. How will they be ok? They won’t have the same wonderful chances my generation has had. Will they see the inside of a lecture theatre? What if they have no choice in how they earn their daily bread? He is worried and afraid and unsettled. But nobody talks about this. People are angry. They are vicious. They have been lied to and robbed from and left in an utterly fucked situation where banks are protected and people are not. But nobody really cares. Not really. The abuse is continuing and it is accepted.

I came home expecting to find a solidarity, a will to change things. I’m a slight idealist, I’ll admit, but for Jesus’ sake, the country has been beaten and pissed on by those we elected as leaders and I don’t think it’s wildly left-wing to expect some mild form of protest or continued open debate about how utterly fucked we might possibly be.

Since I’ve come home, family and friends have told me of the hardships, the injustice, the fear and pressure that has entered their life. And then they go for dinner. Or watch X Factor. Or go to Penneys and buy a top. I’m losing patience. I’m not expecting a storming of the Bastille, but a bit of longevity in your sense of being slighted wouldn’t go astray, fellow countrymen.

We have been ruined. Can somebody stand up and call bullshit on this? Anyone? I love my country, and in a week where we saw a poet, philosopher and all-round wonderful man become our president, how can we be so apathetic about how shit we’ve become?

Fight. Fight with intelligence and informed ideas. Create a new party. Use the Occupy movement to genuinely good effect. Read the paper. Watch the news. Understand what the bailout actually means. Understand what happens if Greece falls out of the Euro. It’s not rocket science and it is your fucking life so make an effort.

From afar, I was saddened by Ireland’s demise. Now I am here, I feel it is partly deserved from an utter lack of anyone giving an actual shit about anything.

Michael D, our new King, said this in his inauguration speech: “The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.”

Fight for the things you have lost. Fight for the loss of people like me who will struggle to call Ireland home for a very long time. Fight for financial equality and the punishment of those who abuse those below them. Fight to maintain the pride of Ireland. For the time being, it is sorely lacking.

Fireworks…

So it’s the King Father’s birthday, and I’m heading back to Ireland for a while in 3 days. It’s been a long weekend of beer and face painting and general halloween shenanigans. This evening, I went out on to the Tonle Sap on a boat cruise, armed with beer and a head full of mixed thoughts about confronting Europe again after 7 months in Cambodia. Long story short, I met a Vietnamese man who was the owner of the boat we were sailing on. Conversation as follows:

Me: How long have you been here?

Him: Ten years. I cannot go back to Vietnam while my friends and family live under communism.

Me: Do you have a family?

Him: I have my wife.

Me: Do you have children?

Him: Perhaps, in the future, we will have children, but everyone belongs to their own circumstance.

While this conversation was happening there were fireworks shooting from a location a few hundred metres from us and we had to strain to hear each other. But in the midst of all the noise, he had the most beautiful way of turning a phrase.

Letters to a trainee tempter…

One of my main interests in Ireland was keeping abreast of the news as reported by Catholic newspapers. My, em, “favourite” was a freesheet called Alive!, which is basically a vehicle for the extreme right-wing views of a select group of people but is widely available all over the country and is sometimes pushed through the letterbox of unsuspecting citizens.

Alive! runs a stellar trade in unfounded reporting, badly researched articles, disguising opinion for fact and generally weak news dissemination. One of the things that always fascinated me was a regular feature called Dumbag Writes.

Dumbag is a trainee demon. He is a little horned, red devil, much like the cuddly toy Manchester United mascot, and he poses with his trident, pulling a letter out of his hellish mailbag. It’s not quite clear what the relationship is to the letter writer. Surely the actual devil wouldn’t have time to write individual instructions on letter headed paper, but who knows. The main gist is that a small devil is getting tips from a big devil on how to screw over the heathens of the world.

In the latest letter from Dumbag, he discusses how easy it is to tempt bad humans into seeking instant gratification through such evil, awful attractions as “bargain-hunting to pilled sex, from sun holidays to victory in sport”.

Pilled sex? Does he mean sexual intercourse taking place following the consumption of ecstasy tablets? Because if he does then he’s a very forward thinking demon. I’m a pretty forward thinking twenty-something year old and I still wouldn’t immediately list that in my top four cheap kicks.

Bargain hunting? Surely that’s alright. It’s better than buying something crazy expensive just to show off to your mates. Also, kind of boring. And sun holidays? The sun is grand, sound, it helps loads of things. It certainly does not drag people to hell as far as I know. I’m pretty certain at no point in the bible does it say you must remain milky white and in a cold climate to remain useful to the Lord.

And victory in sport? What the fuck is wrong with winning an egg and spoon race? Or kicking someone’s ass at darts? Or table tennis? There are immediate issues to be raised with a gom like Wayne Rooney making several hundred thousand pounds a second for being an alright footballer and a world-class idiot, but I don’t think you can just say winning at a sport lets the devil get your soul.

So many flaws, Alive! You missed the seven deadly sins by a long shot. I don’t recall there being anything in there about drugged riding or scoring a goal or getting a tan on your face in Torremolinos.

A la recherche du pain perdu…

The bread in Cambodia is not quite right. Baguettes are everywhere, on the street stalls, in bars, at markets. But when you tear the golden husk, it cracks and blisters. The flesh is dry and bubbly and disappears on your tongue like dead sherbet. I had a hangover a few weeks back and ordered a baguette at a pretty fancy joint, thinking it would break the run of powdery baked goods. It did not, but you could have absolutely skimmed a few slices across the pool and broken somebody’s face.

So today, I ordered some eggs and bread, expecting good to very good eggs, and shit to inedible bread. What followed was a taste experience of Proustian proportions. Solid, thick, white, perfectly toasted bread, half soaked through with salted butter. It’s been a while since I’ve had these feelings for my bread friend.

It makes it all the more magical that the mouth-bread love is occurring in Southeast Asia. It lets my mind run off on imaginings on where all the perfect ingredients could have come from. Flour ground in the foothills of the Cardamoms, oil shipped on a sailboat across the Gulf of Thailand. In all probability, it could just be from a particularly good bread mix packet in the supermarket, but eating it here gives it a certain stamp of quality and adventure. I’ve had really, really good bread in Manchester, but it didn’t quite elicit the same reaction.

A thundering rain shower brings a drop in temperature in Phnom Penh, the really loud English people at the table next to me who’ve spent an hour discussing luxury spa breaks in Thailand finally fuck off and it’s just me, my bread and a drain of coffee.

It’s the little things.

“We always recognise our homeland when we are about to lose it…”

The above quote is from a collection of essays by Albert Camus. So far, so wanky, but my aim in this post is actually to be pragmatic and straightforward about my homeland: Ireland.

I do not live there anymore but I haven’t been away for very long, and the titular quote resonates with me because of an article I read today. I’ve written on this blog about my absolute shame and horror at the 2009 Ryan Report into child abuse in Ireland and Ireland’s handling of the issue, but I’ve always stopped short of venturing into economic territory. I’m not qualified in that area, I don’t have an economic background, it’s not my strong point, and so I’ve always resisted putting down in print what my feelings were on the Irish economic situation. Today, though, I read this article from the Irish Independent.

In a nutshell, Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, has been in existence since 1956 and has 248 beds, all of which are reserved for sick smallies. They contribute hugely to paediatric research, perform specialist surgery and provide oncology and cardiac care for children. The board has now said that they will run out of money before the end of 2011.

Things get talked about a lot in very vague terms in Ireland. Bailout, recession, bondholders…What I fail to see is how a situation where children in Ireland, sick children, are going to have surgery delayed is not a huge, heart-stopping, front-page issue that snaps people into action. Cut the dole, tax cigarettes until they cost 20 euro, impose a limit on governmental pay, do something to make tax money go to making sure that seriously and terminally ill children and their families do not have to get on a plane at the most difficult time of their life to seek treatment elsewhere.

The health system for adults has taken a fair bit of flack in Ireland in the past few years, people waiting in corridors for surgery, sleeping on chairs, my mother being one of them after an accident in her 60s. Is it really going to get to a point where children are unable to get the help they need when TDs are earning almost a 100,000 euro a year? I understand it sounds naive and simplistic, but from the outside looking in, it just looks simple. You do not leave a child without immediate access to healthcare. Not when public service incomes are still high and we are paying politicians to help us out of a ruined economic landscape. You do not delay an operation for a baby. You do not reduce the quality of post-natal care. You give time and money, your last cent, to making sure that is not part of Ireland’s fall.

We always recognise our homeland when we are about to lose it.

A Quart of Tiger’s Piss: A Tribute to my Parents

Skype is the foundation of a healthy, informed, long-distance relationship between an emigrant and their family. You can call home for free and reminisce about childhood activities, enquire as to the health and various brazen outbursts of nieces and nephews and generally keep the home fires burning.

My time so far in a land far away: Part 1

I have been a resident of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for 7 weeks and almost 3 days. I came here to work and see things. That is all. My life in Ireland was good, comfortable and easy. In a sense. As the dogs on the road know, Ireland’s seen better days. The news is sad every day, the politicians are shit. I’m not normally one to be so reductionist about politics but the ones in Ireland are just shit. There’s no mad drama, there’s no threat on your life if you protest. In fact, there aren’t really any protests, none of note anyway. Everything was just slowly getting sadder and a bit more grey and I wanted to celebrate my birthday in 2011 with a sense that something new had happened in my life and that I wasn’t part of the Irish decay.

So I have somehow ended up in Southeast Asia, having never been in any part of Asia before, working and living in a city that, at best, stuns me and, at worst, terrifies the actual soul out of my body. I was mad keen on starting a blog about being here but I’m full sure I’ll fall into the trap of talking about how how wonderful the work of the many NGOs is (it is, but I don’t want to bang on about it), or end up banging on about prostitution or the Khmer Rouge or something I really know nothing about. Instead, I just want to list the little things, the everyday things that make it so interesting to be here. The normal stuff that goes on all the time here that makes me feel like such a newcomer to the world that I might as well be learning to ride a bike for the first time or wee in a potty. These are my thoughts of Cambodia:

1) None of the kids wear pants. None of them. They only wear tshirts and run around like they are on speed and do high fives with you. I imagine that there’s some kind of unspoken rule about letting the kid leg it around the city like a little Porky Pig sans trousers, and then when they hit 8, there’s a ceremony where they get presented with their first pair of pants and they hate it. I’d like if the no pants rule extended to me as it would prevent a lot of unecessary sweating.

2) Things are not like they are in travel ads, sometimes local people think you are a dick and they don’t smile at you and it is fine. When I arrived, I was TERRIFIED of getting on a motorbike, one of the main means of transport in Phnom Penh. You get on a man’s moto, he drives you somewhere and you are at his mercy for the journey. The second time I took a moto, I got off the bike and was so thrilled at having survived/not fallen off/not pissed myself, I started telling the moto driver how afraid I’d been but I was so brave etc…I have never had someone tell me to fuck off using only their eyes as well as that moto driver did. He was brilliant.

3) Other people will think things are amazing and you will not, that is also ok. Before coming here, the entire population of Dublin told me about backpacker stuff and how class it was and how much I’d love it. I was born in a city, I grew up in a city. I’m also not sure if anyone’s noticed but there are no insects in Ireland except the odd ant in July and a few woodlice for posterity. I was not prepared for this. I went to a popular backpacker’s retreat outside of Phnom Penh and lived amongst frogs, lizards the length of my arm and a selection of insects and butterflies. I also woke up in the night as there was a rustling on my pillow. I looked across and saw a thick piece of wood which I picked up to throw off the pillow. It was not wood, it was an insect that looked like it was made of fucking tobacco. I have also seen a bat get  murdered by a fan blade. Me and the nature buzz = not pals, except for the lizards.

4) There is nothing like cycling in a country where rules of the road are entirely subjective. Cycling here is like rubbing vaseline and salt into your eyes and then trying to play a really high level of Tetris. Jeeps, trucks, cars, motos and tuk tuks are flying around and you are a lone blip on the radar. Blipping along trying not to get a smack of something but also seeing the city from the greatest vantage point. The bikes here are amazing. Cheap, sturdy and with bells that would deafen you from half a mile.

5) Oreos here give you the shits. I can’t provide physical evidence of this currently as it would probably contravene some kind of international law if I were to post a photo of my post-Oreo faeces, but just believe me. It’s been a very sad goodbye between me and the heavenly sandwich snack.