The Early Years

The Early Years:
By: Thomas Weber Carlsen

Thomas Weber Carlsen is a Danish architect who has been living in Cambodia with his Cambodian wife and their two children for over 10 years now. Apart from designing and building his own house, he has been working with humanitarian projects, worked as a tour leader and made video documentaries about the Khmer Rouge and indigenous people under the influence of globalization.

His first literary work Third World Man (Out of Denmark) is the personal account of his journey from Denmark to Cambodia and the various impacts it has had on his life. It is also a critical comment to the divided and unsustainable world we live in today. Thomas is now looking to have Third World Man (Out of Denmark) published in hard form and/or as an e-book. This article, “The Early Years”, is based on the third chapter of the book and is the second in a series of three articles by Thomas Weber Carlsen, all taken from chapters in the book, to be presented on Latitudes.nu in the near future.

Try to imagine being dumped outside of time in a place where nothing resembles anything you have ever experienced before; where the smells, the sounds, the lights and the feels are all different. To me the first meeting with Cambodia was like that: stepping into an entirely new dimension where everything suddenly switched from black and white into color. It felt like freedom.

When I first came here in the mid nineties the country had just opened up to the outside world after twenty years of war, isolation and ideological madness. Nothing as radical as the Pol Pot regime had ever been attempted in the history of mankind and the country was shattered to pieces. The Khmer Rouge literally wanted to erase history and time. Their new regime began with Year Zero in 1975 and only seemed to be moving backward from there. All the old formal institutions of society were broken down along with most of the known human relations including in many cases the family. Probably one third of the population was starved to death or executed as a result of failed and paranoid communist politics arbitrarily implemented by ignorant peasant revolutionaries in the course of less than four years. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 they put the Khmer Rouge on the run but never fully controlled the country; they were at odds with the majority of the world too and kept the country sealed for another ten years.

Never has it been truer that one man’s hell can be another man’s redemption. For the people who had gone through this ordeal and survived, Cambodia was a living hell; to me it became a paradise.

I remember stepping out of the small plane at the old airport outside Phnom Penh and meeting the physical impact of an intense humid heat for the first time. I hadn’t been sweating for twenty five years and now it came pouring out. Instantly I had to adjust to a much slower pace, with every movement becoming a physical burden. It certainly affected my thinking too; I automatically switched to a “default” mode where most of my conscious thoughts were centered on getting from one place to another with the least possible effort, and finding something to drink. But that was a good thing as my mind had been running wild for a long time.

The first visual impression of Cambodia was one of … not just poverty, but rather dilapidation. The roads and the buildings were in a state of disrepair beyond imagining. Everything was makeshift: the vehicles, the shops and the restaurants – even the people seemed to be improvising their very existence from one minute to the other. But there was a sense of elementary joy too, a celebration of being alive and kicking, although I have never seen so many handicapped persons in various states of physical disarray. Cambodia was like that, total anarchy and very charming, and that was probably why I fell in love with it.

I remember Phnom Penh. There were no streetlights then and only small kerosene lamps in most of the houses at night. The city disappeared after seven pm and I would be navigating a strange and unfamiliar universe where new and exotic businesses sprang to life. It took several years before the first traffic lights were introduced and I thought then that the city had died – in retrospect I am pretty sure that this first impression was correct. Before the traffic lights came, everybody was weaving in and out between each other in the most incredible and elaborate pattern, a unique un-urban and very charming rhythm, a strange and unexpected order in a chaos like nothing else that I know of. It was mostly motos then, the small reliable Honda motorcycles which could go anywhere. The locals trusted them with their lives. There were thousands of them and hardly any cars. Potholes were everywhere, no street still had a smooth unbroken tarmac – many streets had no tarmac at all – and in the rainy season they were a real challenge to navigate. Some areas were notorious for being under half a meter of water for several months of the year and you would need a 4WD to get through. The locals would just wade across.

I remember the girls. There was a brothel on every street corner in Phnom Penh and sometimes next door too, a relic from the UNTAC period (1992-93), when twenty thousand UN soldiers from all over the world had been let loose here with monthly allowances bigger than what most local people could hope to earn in a decade.

I remember the people: smiling, curious, willing to reach out. Different, not better, but different from anyone I had ever seen. Not all of them were equally friendly. Some of them would stare at me sullenly, even hostile, as from a strange world I had no access to. Khmer Rouges? I never knew, by then many former KR had been reintegrated into the new society. Everybody had been uprooted and moved around for decades, many had changed their identity completely, nobody knew for certain who their new neighbor really was. But as a precaution everybody was very polite and soft spoken, always willing to compromise.

The best thing was the people. Nobody knew me there, nobody judged me, everybody was just curious and trying to understand the basics of this unpredictable life and taking whatever advantage of it they could in the process. I looked into their eyes and I saw souls, souls who had escaped a nightmare – just like me. We were brothers and sisters.

Of course all of these first impressions have long since faded and been replaced by others of a much more accurate and pragmatic nature. People here are not like that at all. They are selfish, stupid, revengeful and paranoid – just like me and you. But we are talking about first impressions here, and they can be a wonderfully healing thing.

The minefields of Cambodia – stranger and more exotic than anything I ever saw – were the real reason for my coming here. Nothing could be further from my first world existence until then, death lurking in the ground with every step you took. Or were they that different, really? I had grown up to become what is known in modern psychological terms as a “flying boy”, unable to reach the ground firmly below my own feet, afraid of the dangerous reality they might find there. I had long been living in my own dreamlike world out of touch with the surroundings, always fantasizing about somewhere else and someone else to be. A “flying boy” is a boy or young man who for one reason or another feels that the ground beneath him is poisonous, burning, not fit for walking on, and he seeks refuge in his own inner world far above the profane mentality of ordinary people.

I had come to Cambodia to finish my studies as an industrial designer; I wanted to do something different with my life, so I looked for a special challenge, some way of applying my new professional skills at the service of poor and needy people in the third world, and someone I knew had mentioned the landmine problem in Cambodia. That seemed like a fittingly heroic thing to do: develop a new technology for detecting and destroying landmines. I first came to Cambodia in early 1994 equipped with a video camera, a map and a very thin guidebook.

In the safe company of humanitarian mine clearance organizations who willingly let me study their practices in live mine fields, I went all the places where no one else dared to tread. Ancient temples  still booby trapped, no man’s land between the remaining Khmer Rouge fighters and government forces, pristine jungles in their primeval splendor, well protected by the landmines and as yet unharmed by loggers. Quiet places, beautiful places, deadly places. I was in good hands among true professionals who knew the seriousness of their job; this was a man’s world in the best sense of the word and I enjoyed it immensely. The camaraderie between these foreign professionals, militarily trained and gentleman-like, and the local staff was a beautiful thing for me to observe.

There are rare times when everything comes together in an almost perfect way, when the moment and the place and the personal situation intertwine to become something more than the sum of the parts. I have had a few of those experiences along the way. One such occasion arose for me then. I was back in Denmark again, in my hometown Aarhus, and a friend of mine came by to welcome me home. When he learned that I was still working on a design solution to the landmine problem, he told me something interesting. A friend of his sister’s who was a diplomat at the Danish embassy in Bangkok had come home on vacation with his family and was visiting Aarhus. He was among other things in charge of government sponsored projects in Cambodia and my friend suggested that I contacted him. When this man heard about my idea for a low-tech landmine device, things suddenly started moving with a remarkable speed. The widespread use of landmines in many third world conflicts had by then become a very hot humanitarian and political issue, Princess Diana was a prominent advocate for the ban of landmines, and the campaign was gathering momentum by the day. I was encouraged by my friend’s sister’s diplomat friend to apply for a government grant to implement the MineBuster project in Cambodia.

After a few more months in limbo the answer came that I had been granted what amounted to an astronomical sum in my mind, and I set about to organize the project and my departure from Denmark at the earliest possible date.

This was my golden opportunity and I knew it. I had all the contacts in Cambodia in place from my earlier visits. Many different organizations came together on this project to support me in my endeavor; there was a distinct goodwill towards its objective as everybody had something to gain and nothing to lose. I found even the Cambodian government cooperative; they were a lot easier to approach in those days, eager to please their foreign donors and to get connected to the outside world.

I must have made all the mistakes in the book and possibly a few more. But this is how you learn, not from your successes but your failures. In the end the project failed – well, fell apart from lack of funding and external circumstances such as an armed clash between the two political factions in the government. Essentially the MineBuster was not the right answer to the landmine problem, but I spent one and a half year working in earnest to bring something good and useful into this world, and I certainly managed to improve my own personal situation a lot.

We were the good guys then, doing the right thing and being handsomely paid for it. For the first time in my life everything made perfect sense to me. I wrote exhilarated faxes back home, and my father must have sensed my excitement. He wrote me back that I seemed to be like a “fish in the water”. Faxes were in those days the only way of getting in contact with the outside world and a one page fax could take up to a whole day to get through. I didn’t miss the outside world one bit, I was happy to keep it at bay feeling really safe and protected here by the horrid image of Cambodia that kept everybody else out. Cambodia was my playground.

Those were the days of pioneers and marauders; there were more humanitarian aid workers in Cambodia than tourists, most ordinary people still being too afraid to enter this quaint little country with its more recent ominous image of death and destruction firmly attached to it. Some of the newcomers were saints, some just misfits who didn’t know what else to do with their lives. Crimes were being committed daily here on a massive scale by those with power inside the new regime taking outrageous advantages of their positions in order to establish themselves as the elite, ripping the country apart in their frenzy for material gain and personal security. Everywhere there was this rush for golden opportunities, but still there was a sense of innocence not completely lost. The bad guys had not yet won the field; everything was still up in the air.

Over the years, gradually but surely, I moved my life out of Denmark to Cambodia, realizing in the process how little life I had initially had. At a very early stage I made an investment in the plot of land where my house now stands. This piece of solid ground under my feet became a fixed point of reference, the guarantee for my continuing presence here, although I did not know in the beginning what to do with it. I was so desperate to finally break free of my Danish prison that this rectangle of untamed Cambodia became a token I left behind whenever I had to go, urging me on to find some other means to secure my return here. And it worked. I have always found the will and consequently the way to come back, surprising at times even myself at my own ingenuity and resourcefulness.

I had in effect become a freelancer, an entrepreneur, my own boss gathering experiences in a wide variety of fields and moving almost organically from one project to the next, adopting to the challenges along the way and growing in the process, something you would never be able to do if you wanted to have a family and settle down in a first world country. And I wanted to have a family.