And while we're at it, apologies for this blog never really picking up. I had some professional reasons not to be able to speak my mind while I was in Cambodia (see upcoming post), and if I can't write what I really mean, I'd rather not write. I left Cambodia last month and I can now offer some insight from the outside, though with fewer field observations except for (likely anonymous) sources I know over there.

Thirteen months and a day to my landing in Phnom Penh, I took off for 5 weeks of vacation at home in France. I am returning today, now sitting in the Ho Chi Minh airport, contemplating my return to a country where, let's face it, stuff doesn't work.

My posts typically relate travels and beautiful discoveries in my current home, Cambodia. This is not that kind of post.

There is no way to honestly relate the feeling of returning home, even for just a short time, after a year in a developing country without sounding terribly un-PC. That may be why such a topic is usually reserved for closed-circle expat conversations, but I was never good at keeping secrets. My Cambodian readers will pardon, I hope, the following unleashing of frustrations.

Most apparent among said frustrations are the material conditions that locals have always lived with and that you, privileged Westerner, must learn to no longer see as inconveniences. (And if you do, don't say it because you still have it better than 99% of the country.) Examples? No dairy in the supermarket because of a storm in Bangkok. Shoddy construction standards in all 13 apartments you were made to visit. Thigh-high water downtown during monsoon rains. Daily black-outs. Mounds of garbage at every street corner — hence the comforting purr.

Then there's the really frustrating stuff. The omnipresent misery: the material kind you were expecting — the kids tapping you on the shoulder for money at stoplights — and the intellectual and moral kind that sneaks up on you after a few months. The bad news in the paper every morning, with which bad news back home bears no comparison. The obviously undemocratic and unfair actions of government and others that make you boil inside while locals don't flinch. The violence. The dawning realization you can do next to nothing about any of these things.

While I concede it has issues too and its small share of misery, Europe is a cocoon away from all that. You empty your brain of all those issues, even have a conversation or two about how scr***d up you think [insert host country here] really is, wilfully leaving out stuff that does work to better vent. You put your feet up in a movie theater and (try to) blissfully ignore the horrors of the world.

I know a handful of expats who have been in Cambodia for many years and seem to have made it their true home. Most, however, say a year, two or three, and all matters cited above are no stranger to their decision to leave. And when you stay, a trip home every once in a while is a vital necessity. 13 months was long. The consensus seems to be a trip every 6 months is ideal, when you can afford it. I know one Frenchman who's going on 3 years and traveling home this fall. Enough to go berserk with frustrations IMHO. So I went home and got lulled to sleep by the sweet purr of garbage trucks.

PS: I wish we had a phrase resembling Africa's TIA to allow for shorthand venting of said frustrations between trips home. Something to brainstorm.

It's been several weeks of what — granted I'm a newbie here — seems like completely abnormal weather for the season. And with the lack of rain comes unbearable heat, the kind we normally only suffer through in April-May and that is now dragging on. In June, I should have a raincoat permanently in my bag; I haven't even bought one yet this year.

The rainy season started early actually, with downpours in April that had you wading through thigh-high waters. The meteorology services warned that that could mean an early drought in July and recommended farmers use fast-growing rice varieties. I wonder how they're doing... I got a chance to go to northwestern Cambodia last week (around Battambang and Siem Reap), where there are large plains of rice fields, and fortunately, it's much wetter and greener there. Hopefully, only us city folks are suffering.

Children in rice paddies, early June 2009, somewhere in Kompong Thom province, Cambodia

A reason for all this? I'm no scientist. It could be just a freak year as have existed throughout Earth's history. It could be a consequence of Cambodia's anarchic use of timber ressources: one theory for the demise of Angkor is that it got so big and deforested so much for its economic development that it disturbed its own rain patterns and fizzled from a lack of water. It could be just one more anecdotal evidence of global climate change.

Deforestation looks like this! The Bolaven plateau, in southern Laos, here photographed on a motorcycle trip last March, is famous for its coffee. To make way for Vietnamese-owned, industrial plantations, the little-developed plateau is being slowly stripped of its primary forest.

Slash-and-burn is the traditional method of culture on the Bolaven plateau. As traditional as it may be, it's not very sustainable, and when it's used on an industrial scale like here, it's a vision of environmental apocalypse. Flames were coming right up to the road: an inferno of heat and smoke to drive through. And live in for all the indigenous population there.

If you're not convinced, I recommend watching Home, a film granted a tad formulaic in its visuals (Yann Arthus-Bertrand sticks to his proven formula of graphic earth views from a helicopter... the same shot, albeit beautiful, repeated over and over for 90 minutes) but also a needed wake-up call. Tracing the history of earth, man and climate, it goes from science lesson to scary movie (images reminiscent of The Matrix, only it's real Earth. Enough to bring tears to my eyes.) to inspiring conclusion. "It's too late to be pessimistic." So go plant a tree and give us rain.

(Where was I? Let's just say under a bit of a gag order for professional reasons. I am now in a new job, happily learning documentary film-making, and fully back to blogging. More coming soon from Cambodia...)

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Frankly, I have a hard time believing it myself. Cambodia is ranked on par with Sudan, whose president was just indicted by the International Criminal Court (something our prime minister doesn't like either), where aid workers get murdered by the dozen and Darfuris by the hundreds of thousands. In these rankings, Cambodia, which has been at peace for more than a decade, is only topped by Zimbabwe (its dictator, its inflation, its cholera), Chad (its border wars, its coups) and DR Congo (no list necessary). But are considered more stable than the Khmer kingdom: Iraq, which we're told could fall back into violence any day now; Afghanistan, which we're told never really got out of it; Pakistan, which we're told is the next hotbed of terrorism; and the Central African Republic, where Cambodia happens to be sending peacekeepers. Moldova, Thailand and the Czech Republic, where governments are indeed wobbling, also rank much better. It's simply hard to swallow.

To understand the outrage of pretty much everyone in Cambodia over what could, after all, only be another list compiled by a reader-hungry magazine, you must know two things.

1) Cambodia systematically makes a terrible showing in any kind of global listing. The country is 166th on corruption perception, 126th in press freedom, second to last in 2009 Asian growth predictions (I should rather say recession predictions), in the bottom 10 for digital access... It's like getting picked last in gym over and over again. Every week a new one comes out. Phnom Penh has even been dubbed worst city in the world to hail a taxi. Of course, Cambodia deserves a lot of those: it's not an easy place to live. But even when the spanking is deserved, after a while, egos get bruised.

2) This particular ranking simply can't be accepted because Cambodia prides itself on its stability. After 3 years and 10 months of an incomprehensible genocide, after a foreign invasion and 10 years of occupation, after another decade of civil war, after a coup and tanks in the streets of Phnom Penh, after riots as recently as 6 years ago, now things are calm. There's inane poverty, land grabbings, increasing maternal mortality, garment factories closing, democracy decreasing, child rapes rampant, health care inexistant, pollution skyrocketing... but darn, "at least there's peace," Cambodian people will tell you. True or not, it's even the ruling party's top electoral argument: "without us, there would be civil war." (Cynics would read between the lines, "we'd rather start a war than give up power.") So telling Cambodians their country is less stable than all those places they see on the TV news where people are getting blown up, is not only factually doubtful; it's simply insulting.

The trial officially opened in February but the first hearings only addressed procedural matters. Then the substantive hearing officially opened today, but then again, we didn't get much. Trial started at 10, Duch spoke briefly to state his identity, then we got a 3-hour reading (interrupted by lunch) of Duch's 45-page indictment. Turns out that document is not any more fun the second time around. There were people ostensibly dozing off, but at the same time there were people for whom this wasn't mere administrative language: it was detailed explanation of what happened to themselves and their relatives. One woman cried out, a few more had tears in their eyes. 

Duch back in 1999 before he was arrested. He was then a teacher and NGO worker in Samlaut, Battambang province. He was living under an assumed name and was discovered by journalist Nic Dunlop. ©2000 Stuart Isett/Corbis Sygma via Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program

I sat by chance next to a man with an impressive story. His father was a pilot and colonel in the army of the Khmer Republic, the regime the Khmer Rouge ousted. The family didn't leave Cambodia when many of their friends did because the father didn't believe the Khmer Rouge would be so bad. When he realized what was going on, he tried to explain to his kid, 11 then, what was going on the best he could. Then he disappeared. The father and mother never returned from reeducation camps; three siblings starved to death. Only a younger brother and he survived. At the end of the regime, he found himself in a refugee camp in Thailand and was eventually adopted by a French couple. He became a pilot "like Papa". "I never knew my dad very well, but now I know him through his profession," he told me. Stories like this one are unfortunately a time a dozen in Cambodia, and that's what these trials are about.

Everyone was visibly disappointed when the court decided to adjourn for the day at 3 pm without getting to the opening statements, which were tentatively scheduled for today.

Heard in the crowd: "Woohoo, day 1 and we're already a half day behind schedule!"

That's very telling of the skepticism for the court around Phnom Penh. Not that it's not doing great work, but it's been 30 years coming, and now the main guys are old. Even the prosecutor has a hard time sounding convinced they'll ever see trial.

Tuesday: Opening statement of the prosecution, after which the defense gets to respond if it chooses to (we expect it will). And maybe — maybe — Duch will choose to address the court himself. He's been accepting some responsibility so far but arguing he was mostly following orders and there's bigger fish than him. Many victims expect to get more historical information from him and even an apology. Whatever he's got to say, we're curious to hear.

Here's one paragraph that made me tick.

It's every aspiring foreign correspodent's dream when the foreign editor calls you in to his glass box and asks: 'Where in the world would you like to go?' In the late 1980s no other newspaper had as many overseas bureaux as the FT and on the foreign editor's wall there was a huge map of the world dotted with coloured pins to represent them all. Red for staff, blue for super-stringers, and yellow for stringers. I was being promoted from yellow to blue, which meant I would get a fixed salary and my own office and secretary.

*sigh* I was born 20 years too late.

And here's one of my favorites, an unofficial translation from François Truffaut's Jules et Jim.

So what should I become? A curious one. It's not a profession, it's not yet a profession. Travel, write, translate. Learn to live everywhere. Start right now. The future belongs to professional curious ones. The French have too long stayed locked in behind their borders. You'll always find some newspaper to pay for your escapades.

Of course, that was all before the News, the Chronicle and the Express-News. *sigh* I was born 50 years too late.

That said, I'm heading out of Cambodia and to southern Laos. Be back in two weeks to write all about it. There's a newspaper to pay for my escapades.

But then I end up in an isolated village in Cambodia’s Pursat province, and I report on this: two cousins, 11 and 14, are raped, badly beaten up and left dead, hanging from a tree in the forest. After a limited police investigation, the bodies were cremated less than 24 hours after they were found. That was in early January; with each day the hope wanes that justice might be found for them. Nai Vinn, 11, and Phal Sophoeun, 14. 

Child rape is a plague in Cambodia. It is a monster born out of misery and impunity. There are no national statistics but consider this: In its 2008 report, local human rights group Adhoc found that two-third of rape cases reported to it are of minors. Adhoc also said rapes were down, but increasingly violent and increasingly affecting children. And, anecdotally, nobody I’ve interviewed about this had encouraging things to say.

I’ve assembled with my own statistics yesterday, looking through our newspaper’s archives, only for the start of 2009. Here are the figures: 14 victims, two of them dead. Victims between 20 months and 14 years old. Ten are girls, four boys. Often victims of a same rapist are related, and victims of another relative or neighbor. Suspects between 20 and 75 years old: a teenage babysitter, an elderly tourist, a mentally ill man, a recidivist just out of prison, a drunk, a police officer. These are only reported cases; those that make it out of the mouths of children, to NGOs, to police and eventually to the newspaper, only in provinces where we have a stringer to alert us to them. Those are cases that happened in 2009; I did not count follow-up stories and cases where we find out just now about crimes that occurred in years past.

Fourteen victims in less than two months in a country of 14 million is a bare minimum. I also haven't closely studied the statistics of other countries and don’t know how that compares. But I’ve never worked in a newsroom where we have to report on a new child rape victim every four days.