ancestors day

hm..weirdly the blog clock is on another time to me and most of the world - published last entry as 8 days before it was..if same thing happens this is october 11th, full moon about to rise, puddles drying in kampong sham streets after big storms night before last, me still feeling slightly weird about blog writing but thought id put my message to clement up on here, and the streets of cambodia buzzing with activity.
its one of the biggest holidays of the year in cambodia today - pchum ben, the end of 15 days giving food to the monks at the pagoda every morning to stave off hungry ghosts of ancestors. the streets are full of traffic but almost all the shops are closed (apart from this internet and a big orange mobile phone shop jammed -as it always seems to be- with monks selecting their purchases, orange orange zesty blast to the eye), just families cooking out on the street together and slick young guys cruising by the river, four to a moped. i went to the pagoda this morning and got welcomed warmly with rice, fruit and smiles and comments of 'madame kampuchea' (i was wearing a khmer long skirt as advised). there is a lovely kind of irreverence to people's religiousity here i think - its very serious, and absolutely everyone seems to have been going to temple these last days - but when people are in the middle of ten seconds praying others grab them by the arm or poke them in the side to say hello, and inside, legs crossed to one side, with chanting blessing the food thats being brought, everybody's quite happy to chat quite noisily away.
feels a very social and nourishing religious life, although the temples are definitely the wealthiest buildings you ever see - get money from the community and from local political parties when they want to win votes etc (is one of really only a few cases where money filters to local level from government). they also obviously have a lot of power, and althoguh it allows people like the english speaking monk i spoke to today to be educated (and poor boys can stay at the pagoda while they study, without needing to become a monk, really good if travel to school is too difficult etc), its very gender biased, as the only women or girls who live there are elderly nuns who are usually widows (as theyre not needed at home anymore, and other than the pagoda and family theres no safety net for them) and even they i think do all the work for the monks in terms of cooking and cleaning and clothes washing etc. so the opportunity for girls as well to live in a pagoda in order to access school (something others in my job have investigated) doesnt seem to be possible.
theres also the strange question of cambodian buddhism as distinct from other traditions ive come across through friends and reading etc. theres loads to say about this. one thing is that monks seem to buy stuff, talk to women, accumulate their personal savings during monkhood and eat meat, all of which i found pretty surprising. i met an ex monk who said he'd once tried to meditate for 20 minutes but found it hard....and from speaking to his monk friend who was currently studying at an indian-named university, studying meditation, although he agreed when i said i had understood this was one of the most important practices in buddhist life, i gathered that it was not a teaching common to the monks' lives here. the stories of the buddha ive heard are all of magic naga dragons protecting him, and paintings in pagodas all feature a blue smiley god surrounded by serving women, remarkably like krishna.
like everywhere, religion here is a mix of roots and understandings and practices. noodles again. and my not really understanding how the hungry spirits of ancestors fit into reincarnation doesnt really matter. more important is the fact that in this very family-centred community, every family has relatives who died or were killed in pretty distressing circumstances in living memory. im not sure if thats the reason that my language teacher dara seemed a bit sad today, and in his grammatical examples started using constructions like 'who killed dara's father', 'daras father was killed in 1976 by pol pot'.
part of me wants to say 'dara's father was killed by a khmer person working as a part of the same system as pol pot in 1976', but i think, aside from not knowing how to say ''same system'', its hardly my place to challenge this more succinct and swallowable way of explaining causation.
im out again to face the music-rippling streets on my trusty bicycle, almost perfectly apt now at moving seamlessly with the multishaped vehicles' pressing flow. (and dont bikes feel like gazelle-glidey bodily extensions vs comfy-but-not-as-much-yet motos).
are nights closing in and leaves starting to turn in the sceptered isle yet? maybe too soon. the cool breeze from the fan makes me think rosily of being wrapped up in cold winds walking to cosy pub-insides. oh the romanticism of winter. enjoy seasonality and its condiments.
may our ancestors be pleased with us...
xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxo