Diary entry: From 8th August
2012
Tonight I witnessed a motorbike accident in
which I saw a young man smeared across a road and killed instantly.
My driver and I had to sit right beside
this carnage for five minutes on the back of our moto before the understandable
traffic jam started to move. A gushing feeling of emptiness came over me as I
watched the aftermath process in a state of shock.
The more I watched, the more I noticed that
the people were all too used to this sight – which really got to me. People
were standing, looking, smoking, chatting, as if there were critiques at some
sort of theatrical spectacle. In the meantime policemen were pushing everyone
in sight, and frantically collecting pieces of the victim and soaking up the
blood that had escaped onto the road.
I thought about the victim’s family, and
the hard times to come for them. I thought about where he was heading to on his
moto…and inevitably I thought about if it had have been me. Would I have had
such an audience watching me, dead, in the middle of the road while they puffed
on their cigg’s and tried to catch the best possible glimpse of me? Would I
have been that insignificant too? Would my death just have been another number
on the road, something that happens everyday in this city?
As we unsteadily sieved our way through the
traffic jam and away from scene of the accident on our moto, I patted my driver
on the back to try and evoke some sense of compassion between us for what we
had just witnessed. When finally we
began to drive again, I knew that, in whichever language we spoke or religion
we followed, we were both thinking the same thing…”That could have been
me…Thank God it wasn’t.”
........
 |
| Scenes like this are all too common in Cambodia. |
- The
number of registered vehicles in
- Over the past five years, the number of fatalities caused by crashes has almost doubled.
- With
15.1 deaths per 10,000 vehicles,
- RCVIS (Road Crash Victim
Information System) reports 77% of road traffic casualties in
No comments:
Post a Comment