has been on my mind since I sliced my right hand open [sutures are out and it's healing well] and spent a week using only my never-the-most-coordinated left.
Last month on the streets of Siem Reap, the Cambodian city launch pad to the temples of Angkor, I bought a guidebook to the archaeology from a man with no hands pushing his wheeled bookstall. With the sensitive skin of his wrists he removed plastic wrappings so I could browse titles and when I paid he whipped out his wallet and counted out my change without a pause.
How'd he end up handless and selling me a guidebook? While in the Cambodian army in the 1980s fighting the Khmer Rouge, his hands were blown off by a mine while he was setting up camp in long grass. Prevented from killing himself with a grenade by a brother-in-arms he spent years languishing on the streets of Phnom Penh as a begger before an NGO fronted him cash and support so he could set up his mobile book stall a decade ago. He's now, he told me, master of his own destiny with a business and a wife and son.
A damn good book too.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Angkor-River-Michael-Freeman/dp/0500974853/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261390078&sr=8-6
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