After reading the article about journalist Stefan Ellis in today's PPP, I googled and found a website dedicated to him. It contains some of his pictures, but also writings covering Cambodia in the early 90ies. One, called "Rain in Cambodia", was especially impressive...
"One morning, I woke up, and this had become serious. After the rains had stopped, after I had spent two months buying dish-ware, designing furniture, paying off the Post & Telegraph people, day after day, meter after meter, as they led the phone-wire down to the bureau. I flash-back to when I was sucking diesel out of Jerry-can, just to keep the house lit. I have always been an insomniac. When it rained, I slept like a baby though. I dreamed I still had my innocence, even though I had already lost it. I got it back for a little while, when I showed up at Ponchentong in September of '91.
Did you know that I was the first posted journalist to Cambodia. Did you know I was the first man to be based there since the little men in black came and killed two million of their own countrymen. Did you know that nothing in my life will ever be able to compete with that.
What can you do with the rest of your life. What can you do with the rest of your life after the only thing you ever cared about, the only thing you ever fought for, the only you ever dreamed of doing began and ended when you were only 25. The thing you focused your anger on, when anger was the only thing that kept you on living, turns around and bites you on the throat, a year and a half later, at Moat Peam, and in the Gecko Club after you paid off a chopper to bring you back to the capital to file your pix.
Six months later, what do you do when you go on the war path. One place blurs into another, you see the faces of dead friends on the streets of your home town…what do you do… I guess you pick yourself up, and find something else to dream. But always save the backwards glance, as you travel to places that they can longer go, and remember those dear soft people, those gentle heroes, that you left behind.
Those times with your friends, sitting during a barbecue, Australian rules, when you feel closer than you ever can with people. You don't even have to have anything to say, you don't talk about your fears, your pain, that fact that one of you has the clap, you don't need to say anything, don't need it because you just shared it. For me, that will always be my Cambodia, even though it isn't even there anymore.
Now Cambodia is a badly reported story of economics, written, photographed and filmed by grocery clerks. Yes I am bitter, yes I am angry, but I don't know what to do with my anger. Maybe just tell the story, the fucking, the goddamned burnt hell story of a wasteland. Then I remember the skulls, the amputees, that weird feeling that you cannot walk on the grass. Then I remember coming back from the massacres.
Cambodia, Kampuchea mon Amour, that was where I spent the best years of life, where I spent my youth and didn't know it."
http://www.stefanellis.com/
Stefan Ellis
- sounds_never_seen
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- sounds_never_seen
- I live above an internet cafe
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- Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 12:56 pm
- Lucky Lucan
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Way before my time, but I noticed that blog way back. It's really great where he gives his thoughts about Cambodia (25 years ago). It's also very depressing.
http://www.stefanellis.com/
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/m ... -1965-1996
http://www.stefanellis.com/
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/m ... -1965-1996
Romantic Cambodia is dead and gone. It's with McKinley in the grave.
I remember him fondly. It was a different country. I'm glad for the locals that it's safe enough for the new generation of expats. It can still be a heartbreaker though. It wasn't better then, but reporters were heroes, risking it all in unsafe places where the bad guys just kill you. Now you can make a living doing restaurant reviews.
Not that they (reporters) didn't welcome it, it wasn't about making a living, but about getting off on danger and thrill.exray wrote:I remember him fondly. It was a different country. I'm glad for the locals that it's safe enough for the new generation of expats. It can still be a heartbreaker though. It wasn't better then, but reporters were heroes, risking it all in unsafe places where the bad guys just kill you. Now you can make a living doing restaurant reviews.
He seemed like an interesting character. Photography has moved on since, such a contrast between then and what's possible now.
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