Column: Khmer hotline
I am a daily witness to the river happenings in Bangkok, because our apartment is built right next to Khlong Bangkok Noi, and we have a view over the comings and goings and the trade and walking on these typical Bangkokian canals.
“Khlong”, which means 'canal', is actually a misnomer, since “Klong Bangkok Noi” is a tributary of the Chao Phraya River, which meanders royally through the city with its café au lait tan. Because of the cement walls on the banks, it looks like a khlong, but it is not a khlong, it remains a tributary.
This morning there was a sampan moored across the street, a lush stretch of Bangkok with jacarandas (that's trees), mango trees, sugar palms and other greenery sprinkled with Thai wooden houses. A sampan is an Asian barge that transports anything and everything: sand, rice, crates of Cola, in short, anything that can be transported.
I sat with my book down on the bank in my pendekkie watching the scene. The sampan was filled to the brim with sand and the sand was brought ashore in oval woven wicker baskets that I first saw in the movie “The Killing Fields”. There were five wiry boys working. A wobbly plank no more than a foot wide formed the bridge between the barge and the much higher bank and the boys, who were undoubtedly Khmer (Cambodian), given the krama they had wrapped around their heads. The krama is an often red-white or blue-white checkered multi-functional cloth, comparable to the Thai pha khao maa, a multicolored cloth that serves as a hammock, headscarf, scarf (it sometimes gets cold in the tropics) or loincloth .
Girl with crama. Wilders goes crazy when he sees this…As I sat watching these guys toil, I realized how incredibly physically degenerate I am. I thought so because I saw this:
With his hands and a deeply arched back, a boy, barefoot, dressed in ragged shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, krama around his head, fills the basket with loose sand with his hands until the basket must weigh at least 20 kilos. With a smooth swing, the basket is brought to the right shoulder and with the balance of a tightrope walker, the lad enters the well-bent rough wooden plank and walks up whistling, as if he is taking a walk in the park. Meanwhile, jokes are being made under the crackling sun, the basket of sand is emptied onto the bank, the boy turns and walks with his empty basket over the still sagging plank for a new load of sand, while his colleague, as soon as the plank is free, perform the same ritual.
This goes on for three hours at a temperature of 36 degrees in the shade. I shudder at the thought of the temperature in the full sun, where the sampan was docked.
Afterwards, the sampan is washed with buckets of khlong water and bathed in the khlong. Ten minutes later, these guys are smoking in the benevolent shade of a huge mango tree – workers who do heavy work all smoke, they have other things on their mind than something as trivial as lung cancer or vascular disease – and the client comes over with some food . There is incessant chatter.
Khmer people in Thailand usually work as unskilled workers. They are cheap, don't complain - because of the illegality in which they often work - they are the ideal disposable workers, just like the Poles in the Netherlands. There are more similarities between the Netherlands and Thailand than we dare to think. But we don't have a Khmer hotline yet. Maybe that will come…