Everything a Reporter Could Want

By Dave Bloss
The cambodia daily

Business reporting, environmental writing, legislature coverage.

In much of the world, reporters often dread working on such “boring” stories. My advice to them is to work in Cambodia, where nothing is ever boring.

Business reporting? How about the guy who called a news conference to introduce an investor who would allegedly open the first McDonald’s franchise in Phnom Penh?

He never showed up, but the guy who called the news conference did hand out his own business card—for female nude fencing.
Environmental writing? The Tonle Sap is perhaps the most interesting eco-system on Earth, and nobody really knows which horned animals are still wandering around in the remote northeast.

But you didn’t have to travel that far to find a story. You could go to the parking lot of the Sunway Hotel to watch police bust a ring trying to sell a baby tiger right on the premises.

Legislative coverage? Jody McPhillips got a call one day to hurry over to the National Assembly so she could witness the firing of a committee chairman.

When she arrived, six of the eight legislators who were firing the ninth member walked down the hall to another office and locked themselves in. They wouldn’t let the sacked chairman in, they wouldn’t let Jody in, and they wouldn’t even unlock the door so the two late-arriving committee members could cast their votes.

Democracy at work, but at least Jody and the sacked chairman had the fruit basket all to themselves.

Shortly after I arrived, Saing Soenthrith took me to a demonstration protesting the Phnom Penh authorities’ ongoing destruction of stupas erected on the site of the 1997 grenade attack across from the Assembly.

As soon as we arrived, Saing Soenthrith walked up to the meanest-looking armed policeman on the premises and gently wrestled him to the ground.

“Do not be shooting people today,” Saing Soenthrith told him. “Not while I’m working.”

It turned out the two of them lived in a pagoda together through some very tough years after the Khmer Rouge were driven out, and had remained friends as adults.

But that set the tone for me in Cambodia. You never know who knows who, and you surely never know what may happen next.