Sweeping: the national pastime in Cambodia.

     If sweeping were an OIympic sport, the Cambodians would regularly come home with the gold medal. Possibly also silver and bronze. (I guess that means they would sweep the competition.)

      Everywhere you go, you see people sweeping. They sweep their front steps, their shopfronts, and they sweep the highway and the dirt lanes. Along the road to Angkor Wat, they sweep the forest along the edge of the road. One might think that task is better suited to a rake, but I've never seen one here. There's probably a very good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.

Sweep, sweep, sweep...

     I never really understood the obsessive/compulsive sweeping habits here, but I’m starting to get a clue. First of all, when we wake up in the morning, the balcony is carpeted with a layer of tiny bugs who gathered around the lights for some kind of nightly mass suicide. Throughout the day, dust and bits of leaves and other debris blow onto the balcony, requiring more sweeping - and when rainy season is over, I'm sure that the dust will be even more plentiful. 

     When we arrive from the outside world, we take off our shoes as is custom (and practical) and that means that a collection of dirt and dried mud accumulates on the balcony, and this must be swept away as well. Inside, where the floor tiles are all white and glossy, any little bit of dirt shows quite obviously, and despite the habit of taking off our shoes, we manage to track in some dirt and some other debris blows in through the open doors. Finally, the lovely handmade brooms themselves leave a trail of straw tufts and twigs that they shed as you go, so sometimes you have to go back and sweep up the pieces that the broom left behind. This also explains why you see so many broom sellers all over town - the brooms slowly cannibalize themselves until you’re left with nothing more than a handle, and then it’s time to buy a new one. I should start a pool to guess how long our brooms will last. At the rate we’re going, I give them 4-5 weeks. Thankfully, they only cost about 60 cents each.

Our balcony broom

Details - this one doesn't self-cannibalize quite as quickly as the other broom.
It's excellent for sweeping ants.
(Did I forget to mention how we have to sweep a lot of ants...?)

I give this one another 3 weeks before it's down to three straw bristles.