I start my morning journey to the hospital on a busy Battambang street, walking sometimes on sidewalks and sometimes on dirt, passing 2 hotels catering to Europeans, a corner "petrol station", i.e. non-sanctioned gasoline sold in glass liter coke bottles, a moto taxi stand, a hostel for male students and at the corner of the Street of Emaciated Cows 4 outdoor eateries serving rice and various stews. The Street of Emaciated Cows is not only a short cut; it offers me a varied glimpse of non-urban Cambodia in the middle of the city.
Where streets have no names you can name your own.
This name is not an official street name. I don't think many streets in Battambang are named as such. Addresses are given by commune, district, town. But like most barangs I am used to giving directions by street names. Not everyone sees the defining aspect of this street as the emaciated cows. It could just as easily be called the 'Street Where Dogs Rule. Three to four dogs live at every house, creating an unavoidable presence. They are typical Cambodian dogs in that they live in their own world, oblivious to the people, cars, and motos. They act as if sure they are the sole owners of the street. Or it could be called the 'Street Where People Fish in the Sewer'. I find this activity most bizarre and in its singularity think it should be honored with a name. But I've been calling this street in honor of its emaciated cows since I first walked down it three years ago. Most of the time we simply call it the short cut.
The street starts out paved, but the last 50 meters is red dirt. A fresh dumping of dirt was laid a couple of weeks ago, haphazardly graded and has now become a series of dry ruts. In the rainy season it will be an impassable quagmire.
The Cows
Only one house has cows--white, lop-eared, wattled and pathetic. They stand in short sparse grass or at a rubber manger, deliberately chewing as if savoring every mouthful. They are simply bone and wattles, seemingly contented in the same way the starving are listlessly immobile in their starvation. Had Cambodia a humane society, the family keeping the cows would be fined for cruelty and the poor animals impounded. But I like the cows--passive, earthy beasts without the mocking ghetto style of the dog packs.
Most houses have a flock of scrawny, mangy, half-feathered chickens that peck around the road and on the verges. One family has a giant pig that sometimes roams the street and roots in the garbage. Most of the time in wallows in its own yard, a hefty reminder of a future feast.
Fishing in the Sewer
One house on the street is an exquisite and decoratively tiled affair with a manicured garden, a small pool and little noticeable activity. Most of the houses are traditional, stilted wood houses where the open understory serves as the living quarters furnitured with tables, chairs, cupboards and hammocks. Fruit trees, shade trees, a shrine, and a fence make them seem almost to be in the country, not the middle of the city. At the dirt end of the street are 3 ramshackle abodes perched over the black sewer where people fish. This black, garbage-strewn water smells and looks most disgusting. Yet, I have often seen people with long-handled nets scooping through these most inauspicious waters for their dinner.
Every weekday morning teenaged school girls emerge from their hostel near the corner in uniforms of long-sleeved white shirts and long navy sarongs. They ride upright on their high-handle-bar bikes, sometimes with a friend sitting side-saddle behind. Through the opened windows their rooms look uncomfortably hot, bare of decoration, the beds separated by racks of hanging.
The Businesses
Two recently built hotels and a restaurant give commerce to the paved section of the road. A few wooden kiosks selling similar snacks, drinks and sundries but only a few meters apart vie for the street's commerce, somehow attract people to sit and talk and purchase their goods. How they make money I don't know. A recently built wooden platform with half meter high coconut logs serving as stools and a table give young men a place to play chess under the scant shade of a flowering cassia tree in the afternoons.
The old man
I recognize the dogs of the street more readily than the people, except one old man whom I have passed on every walk during my three missions with Emergency in Battambang. He has a long wispy beard from a mole on his cheek. He wears the same baggy black shorts, a red and black jacket and a red baseball cap and walks with an unsteady, slow, wide-based gait of drunkenness. Sometimes in the afternoon he drinks beer through a straw at one of neighborhood kiosks, or sits in his yard, staring. When I pass, I greet him and he gives me the queerest look, as if seeing a barang on the Street of Emaciated Cows is a most unusual event.
