invisible lines.

I stepped foot in Cambodia today. In terms of what I actually did there, it wasn't very notable; I ate a hamburger made of some kind of meat that wasn't beef or chicken, and I got a pretty green sticker in my passport that will allow me to stay in Thailand a little longer. But I did something else there: I prayed. Fervently, unceasingly. It was my second time straddling a siamese border (the other time being in Mae Sai, where the tip of Thailand spills over into Burma.) The prayers weren't the happy kind, but rather, they were the kind where I have to look at all the tragedy in the world and go to God and ask him what needs to be done to fix this. Many of the other foreigners there for a routine visa-stamp routine don't see what I see, they see a legal technicality. An oppurtunity, perhaps, for some cheap booze or some other "merchandise". There is a darkness in the air in these places that they don't sense. I do, though. I know what really happens in these places, these imaginary lines in the world that men have carved up.

Explore or loiter long enough, and you'll get the picture. A man will walk up and ask what you might be shopping for. Marlborough cigarettes? Viagra, or Ambien? or is it companionship you're looking for? For the flash of a few baht, no door is left locked for the white man with cash. And it's here, right here, in these lines that we've drawn in the sand, where so many of the evils in the world trickle through like water making their way to Bangkok and Phnom Penh. The human suffering in the air is palatable, knowing what I know about what happens in this place.

And with all these scattered thoughts I'm left to wonder what's supposed to happen? How do we fix this? What am I supposed to do about it? There are so many things that have to happen, but for me it starts with a prayer, mostly for the defenseless made victims in this place, but it's also a prayer for us - we, the lucky, who eat our questionable hamburgers and need not worry about much of anything - that we might care.