T AKEO - Cambodia's national animal the Kouprey is not the only species
endangered with extinction. The geckos with their booming call are also
threatened by people who catch and kill them for traditional medicinal
wine.
Southwest Takeo is one area where geckos have been hunted down by
both Khmer and Vietnamese country folk who sell them to traditional healers to
make wine believed to help asthma and coughs.
"Now in my village we
hardly ever hear geckos crying or kids repeating them," said Ngim Rin, a
militiaman in Tramkak district.
There used to be a lot of geckos in Takeo
but people have caught virtually all of them from palm trees and houses during
the last decade, Rin said.
He said during the early 1980s some Vietnamese
men in joint venture business with local Khmer boys and men came to catch geckos
in the province and brought them back to Vietnam.
Local Cambodians, after
being taught by the Vietnamese, later roamed across villages, rice paddies,
bushes and mountains with long bamboo sticks with string traps and cages to hunt
the reptiles.
"Now villages begin to stop them from catching geckos in
their villages," Rin said.
A lady who sells traditional herbs at Ang Ta
Som market in Takeo said she used to hire people to catch geckos for her. She
said she would make a trip to Phnom Penh every three or four days to wholesale
about 200 dried geckoes to traditional healers or retailers in the capital "but
never now."
Sellers of medicinal herbs in Phnom Penh have also told the
Post that there have been very few geckos available on sale during the last few
years. They said people in the country would come frequently to their shops with
about 20 geckoes and sell them for 500 riel each. The shops would then sell them
to customers with a few hundred riel profit.
According to a Khmer
traditional healer interviewed by the Post, the medicinal wine made from geckos
is not very complicated but must be prepared carefully.
Chay Seang Y, a
traditional healer who owns the popular Cadarmom Shop in Phnom Penh, said the
rule is to preserve a gecko in a liter of while wine for six months until it
becomes mature.
The gecko must not lose its tail which is the most
effective part of the animal, but its eyes must be removed otherwise the
eyesight of the person drinking the wine will be affected, Seang Y
said.
Apart from its cure for asthma because the medicine could help ease
the breathing system and give extra strength to the lungs, the gecko wine is
said to help improve muscles and improve concentration in the drinker's spirit,
Seang Y explained.
He said the wine is especially used by soldiers
because it would help them better concentrate on fighting, and not to think
about their families at home. Seang Y, though, failed to confirm whether the six
month old wine made the soldiers too drunk to think about their girl friends,
wives or children.
However, he said gecko wine was just as popular among
the Chinese and Vietnamese, in whose countries the sort of traditional medicine
is believed to have originated.
Chap Narith, a staff member of the Phnom
Penh Post, said the Khmer Rouge's Angkar gave a strict order in late 1977 to the
people in Battambang to catch geckos to be sent to China. It was not known
whether the geckos were a type of bilateral transaction in exchange for tanks,
artillery or any kind of ammunition for the Pol Potists.
Deep in the
heart of legend is the "gecko snake", which slides into the geckos mouth once a
year to eat their swollen livers. The enlarged livers stop the geckos from
crying and once eaten by the snakes the geckos can begin crying again while
their livers regrow.
Post inquiries clearly confirm that the gecko snake is now almost
unprocurable.
Animal experts approached for comment could not confirm the
existence of the gecko liver-eating snake-indeed there was some skepticism
whether the snake exists all-but luckily Seang Y could confirm, saying: "It is
true."
Seang Y said he once saw a gecko snake entering the mouth of a gecko to eat
its liver in a Wat in Kompong Cham in 1946. "And it has since clarified my
doubts," he said.
The traditional healer said there are a lot of
characteristics and mystery about geckos in the Khmer community. He said if a
gecko cries five, seven or eleven times, it would indicate good luck for
family.
"But it would be bad luck if a gecko cries only one, two or three
times," Seang Y stressed. "Such a gecko should be trapped out of the house."
A taxi-driver called Mao had a gecko in his home that only cried three times.
Seang Y told him to get rid of the lizard. After he did so Mao returned and
reported on his much-improved luck. He was able to repay loans and recover his
losses from gambling at cards.
The militiaman Ngim Rin in Takeo also told the Post of a funny game played by
children and some rural adults. The 'Memon- Memai' game is similar to 'He loves
me - He loves me not' played by some American kids while removing the petals of
flowers.
Memom and Memai literally mean spinster and widow. In this game,
people begin to count the number of times a gecko cries to bet whether they will
have a spinster or widow wife.
They can begin either with Memon or Memai,
they will have a widow wife if the gecko cry ends with Memai.
Rin raised
another old belief about a lizard called the Thlen that would rush into a river
after biting a person. If the person who was bitten did not run and best the
lizard into the water, that person would die.
Chap Narith said one of his bothers did so once during the Khmer Rouge regime
even though he did not believe much in the stories.
"Believe it or not,
it is not hard work just to rush into a pond for a minute in case the belief
works," replied Narith when asked why he took this seriously.
Seang Y,
however, said this was not true and that there was a lot of things that the old
people lied about.
Contact PhnomPenh Post for full article
Post Media Co LtdThe Elements Condominium, Level 7
Hun Sen Boulevard
Phum Tuol Roka III
Sangkat Chak Angre Krom, Khan Meanchey
12353 Phnom Penh
Cambodia
Telegram: 092 555 741
Email: [email protected]