08/29/2002
Meerkats and a Cambodian Wedding
In Johannesburg, South Africa this week, the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development focuses on the uplifting of the world''s poor and the protection of the global environment. Very worthy goals but, realistically, any truly meaningful steps towards achieving these goals would require an unprecedented degree of cooperation among all nations. A model of caring and cooperation for the common good already exists in South Africa itself - the meerkat society. Another model might be the caring and cooperative spirit of the Cambodians that I observed last week at a Cambodian wedding.
Unfamiliar with the meerkat? Read the article by Tim Clutton- Brock titled "Meerkats Stand Tall" in the September National Geographic. The meerkat reminds me of a prairie dog and is a small animal, only a foot tall, weighing just two pounds. The little guy inhabits areas such as the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Its diet includes such delicacies as poisonous scorpions, geckos, small rodents and snakes, which it searches out in the light of day on the barren desert. Being such a small critter, the meerkat makes a tasty target for the likes of eagles, cobras and other predators, including even meerkats from other groups.
The meerkat''s vulnerability gave rise to the social behavior that prompted Clutton-Brock and his colleagues from Cambridge and the University of Pretoria to spend five years studying the meerkat''s life in great detail. The meerkat society involves intense group loyalty and an expenditure of time and energy in tasks that insure the group''s survival. These tasks include helping to raise offspring of other meerkats, sharing of baby sitting chores, sharing of food and importantly, sentinel duty. It''s the sentinel standing guard, erect and with eyes pealed for signs of that eagle or cobra, that allows the rest of the group to search for food and train their young. The meerkat on sentinel duty gives a steady peeping sound that tells the group all is well. Spot an eagle, and the alarm signal sends everyone into so-called "bolt holes", part of a series of holes and tunnels constructed by these master excavators.
When forced to make a stand, the meerkats have evolved another interesting cooperative behavior. They come together en masse to form what the predator may take to be a single, large hissing animal - all the meerkats raising their tails and baring their teeth. Although this may scare away some predators, life is still precarious; only one out of four infants survives to maturity.
One aspect of the meerkat behavior is especially interesting to researchers - breeding in a group may be limited to just one mating pair in the group. This flies in the face of the accepted belief that one of the driving forces for an individual in most animal species is propagation of its own genes. In the meerkat society, members of the group appear to willingly give up the chance to procreate and help raise children that are not their own. Researchers feel that their meerkat studies may answer questions relating to other social animal societies, possibly even our own.
Over the years, I have known and worked with individuals from Asian-Pacific countries but had not had contact with anyone from Cambodia until last year, when I attended my Dickinson College reunion. My wife and I had dinner with Andy, our grandnephew, who was living nearby. Andy brought his friend Dana, a young lady whose family escaped from Cambodia, then under the murderous rule of Pol Pot. After dinner, Andy said that we might have a wedding to attend. Dana looked surprised and said, "Oh?" Was that a proposal, we wondered?
The answer is yes. The Cambodian wedding, at the home of the bride''s parents in Philadelphia, paralleled the movie "A Big Fat Greek Wedding" in many respects. The bride''s father insisted on a traditional Cambodian wedding and had spent the past year planning the event in every detail. The Cambodian community came together to help make the father''s plans a reality. One small example - all the downstairs furniture was moved into another house(s) in the neighborhood!
Arriving at the parents'' home at 8 AM, we found the small Cambodian orchestra was already playing, seated on the dining room floor. My wife and I, flexibly challenged, were graciously given folding chairs. Soon, the groom, his friends and family, including our 9-year old grandson, went out into the drizzly weather to collect gifts from the neighborhood. They then paraded down the street back to the house, where they obtained permission from the father to enter. (Our grandson was impressed that, for carrying some sort of unidentified fruit, he received $2 "lucky money".) The gifts included food, beautifully prepared and displayed, ranging from the most impressive large roasted pig to ducks and other items to be consumed later.
The guests sat on the floor around the edges of the living room, the gifts filling most of the room. The ceremonies were mostly in the hands of a gentleman who played the role of advocate for the groom, vouching for his cleanliness and suitability to become one of the family. (I could be wrong - I don''t understand Cambodian.) Repeated loud banging of gongs then summoned the bride, who appeared in a stunning gown. After further ceremony, it seemed as though matters were well in hand and it was time for an intermission to clear the gifts outside where the neighbors got to work preparing them for lunch.
With the living room set up with the elaborate accoutrements of the Pairing Ceremony, the bride and groom reappeared, both in gold outfits - they looked gorgeous! The Pairing Ceremony included tying the wrists of the bride and groom together with strings soaked in holy water and the passing of lighted candles around the circles of guests who waved the sacred smoke towards the bride and groom. The ceremonies ended around noon with the throwing of kernels we stripped from palm flowers at the bride and groom. The pig and duck and other gifts were delicious, served under the canopy set up over the sidewalk.
After a nap, it was off to a Greek church and the banquet, which began at 6:30 PM and was attended by at least 400 or 500 people (some came all the way from France!). The church had two huge halls downstairs to house the banquet and the open bar cocktail "hour" (actually 2-1/2 hours!) The hors d''oeuvres included all manner of cheeses, huge shrimp, fruit and other goodies and even a carvery of roast beef. The decorations included several large and impressive ice sculptures in both halls. I understand that the Cambodian community contributed in no small way to various aspects of the evening''s celebration.
At 9 PM, it was banquet time. At each place setting, there was a little basket filled with candies. I heard that the father ordered the ribbons for the baskets from Cambodia and glued the ribbons on the hundreds of baskets personally. The "Asian specialties" salad consisted mostly of what I assumed was some sort of vegetable. Surprisingly, it tasted to me somewhat like calamari. Examining the morphology of the salad more carefully, I recognized pieces bearing a striking resemblance to chicken feet. The "vegetable" was really the skin of a chicken foot. It seems to me to be an acquired taste. The other courses were all readily identifiable and delicious; sadly, we were already filled with hors d''oeuvres and could not do justice to the 8 or 9 courses.
In a day full of memorable experiences, I would not have expected the dance floor to showcase one of the most memorable. The orchestra played music of a type common to most of today''s wedding banquets, with a loud and heavy beat, amplified to today''s typically high volume levels. However, the female vocalist sang in Cambodian and gave the songs a distinctly different flavor. Some of the numbers involved dances of the sort where you form lines and follow each other around the floor. Normally, these dances are fairly energetic affairs with emphatic motions and some clods like myself totally out of step. However, to the same beat, the Cambodian dancing was a thing of sheer grace and beauty. It was mesmerizing. Those beautiful Cambodian women, in their elegant long, slim gowns, moved around the floor in a manner akin to a combination of the slow motion of Tai chi with the arm and hand motions of the hula in the most delicate and graceful way. The men were almost as graceful. It was, we all agreed, outstandingly beautiful and a highlight of the day.
Throughout the day, we were impressed by the caring and cooperation of these gentle people. Hopefully, some of this gentleness will rub off into our own culture. Yet these people, most having escaped from Pol Pot, must have a great deal of toughness to have survived. I spoke with one of the bride''s cousins who lost two brothers to Pol Pot''s campaign to "purify" Cambodia. He estimated that nearly half the population of Cambodia died or were killed. I had seen figures of a third. It seems clear that between 2 and 3 million of his own people died, putting Pot up there with Stalin and Hitler as the worst murderers of the 20th century. Have the terrible experiences of these Cambodian refugees heightened their innate qualities of caring and cooperation, much like the meerkats'' vulnerability led to similar behavior? Ok, I''m probably stretching the analogy too far.
By the way, Andy and Dana, after all that ceremony and celebration are not yet officially married! A typical Western Pennsylvania Slovak second wedding awaits them this week. It will be quite a contrast! However, having myself married into that culture, I know the caring will be just as great.
Allen F. Bortrum
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