Fire in Cambodia!

I was in the meat isle of the closest thing to an American supermarket in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I asked one of the workers where they kept the bacon. Suddenly, my hand phone rang. It was the leader of our Cambodian orphan ministry. He asked me to go his home/ office quickly, to try to save what records I could. He was some distance away and just got a call from his wife. A fire was raging near the house.

That was the second building fire that I encountered while in Cambodia. The first was an entire market that burned before my eyes. I remembered seeing the families and merchants pushing, pulling, dragging, and stacking on motorbikes whatever goods they could try to save. They were faced with losing their means of scrapping out a living. I learned that fires are not easily extinguished in this land. They do not have the fire departments Americans are accustomed to. After one ignites, nobody knows how far a fire's fury will spread.

I left ground beef in my shopping cart and ran outside. I flagged down a motorbike taxi, hopped on the back, and had the driver take me towards the office. As we rounded the corner onto a one of the main roads, I could see the pillar of dark smoke reach up into the late afternoon sky. I could tell that its origin was not far from where I had been living for the past few months. I began to think about the most important things to grab and rescue from the fire. As we neared the home, the crowd of people in the streets thickened. The people came from two directions, some were trying to see what was happening, and others were trying to flee the destruction. When space on the road was too narrow for the bike, I got off, paid the driver, and hurriedly walked to the home's gate.

Once inside, I ran upstairs and grabbed my passport, plane ticket, and eyeglasses. Then I went back down to pack up what I could. We didn't know whether or not the place would burn. Smoke was coming in the house. I packed up my computer to save the information on it, and put some records in a bag. Without time to worry about the personal items in her home, one of the missionaries was busy packing up legal documents and land deeds. She knew that if the papers burned, they would not be able to prove they had ownership to land throughout Cambodia on which churches and orphan homes were built.

Another missionary arrived shortly, and we loaded all the records and computer equipment we could in the back of a vehicle. His wife grabbed one family picture. A few stayed behind to watch the home and protect it from the crowds and fire damage. Six people and a dog squeezed into the vehicle and made our way through the gate to the street outside. Slowly, we moved through the mass of people. I thought there was a risk of rioting and looting.

I had another, immediate worry as well. Spuds, a family dog without strong bladder control seemed a bit frightened in the excitement. He was sitting on my lap, and I only had access to the clothes on my back.

Finally, we arrived at the hotel in a more secure and less frenzied area. We sat down in the open-air restaurant next to the hotel parking lot, keeping one eye on the vehicle. The contents of the vehicle were invaluable to the ministry. We sat, ordered drinks, and tried to stay calm. We didn't know what the fire would devour.

We hoped that the office wouldn't burn. It was more than just an office. It had become the home of the missionaries who worked there. We didn't know that the office would be protected.

Only later would we find out that only smoke and not fire touched the building. Later, would learn that a nearby squatters' village was likely ignited to displace people for real estate development. We would learn of the six who died in the fire. We would hear about the four children whose parents locked them in their home to protect them from thieves and others who would harm them. They were unable to escape as the fire consumed their home. Later we would see people without homes along the sides of streets looking after all their possessions they could rescue.

With the ground beef abandoned in the cart at the market, we ordered dinner at the restaurant. We thought about the uncertain future and watched the column of smoke rise into the twilight of the evening sky.