Seaside handicrafts

A small pile of seashells, in an old plastic bag with the sand gathering in the corners of the plastic, is decreasing as the woman nimbly picks up another tiny sea shell and snips off the end with nail clippers. The second woman threads the shell onto the line. Occasionally she looks at her work critically to assess how it’s coming along. It’s a necklace of shells, with some colour added into the natural brown and beige tiny shells that make up most of the necklace. The colour is added every 6^th or so spot between the tiny ones and she makes sure the pattern is even. The first woman never glances up, focused on removing the end of the spiral seashells not much larger than grains of rice, creating a seaside bead, with the tiny clipped ends of the shells falling around her.

We are all sitting on the pavement beside Kep beach. These women sell to tourists their handicrafts from flat baskets carried to their side, one part of basket resting on their hip or more often from squatting on the pavement with the basket of items in front of them. Most of the trinkets are gaudy by western standards, bright red dyed shells made into 3 inch high towers of I know not what and cowie shells glued to together with twigs into another shape not so aesthetically pleasing to my eye.

They sell mostly to Khmer tourists they say. They tell me if they sell to westerners, we only ever buy the necklaces like she is making now.

I ask how does she make the bright coloured shells, the pieces that are bright pink or green that she is using to create the pattern. She tells me she not know how they are made but wants to know, to learn. She buys these pieces from someone in the district that borders the Vietnam coastline. She knows they come from the ocean, the flat pieces of coloured shell, but when she buys them they already have the hole made in the shell, ready for her to thread onto the necklace. Same for the palm size cowie shells that have little pictures engraved onto the side, they too come from the ocean she tells me, but not made here in Kep. No not here she tells me. She enjoys collecting the small shells used for the jewellery she says but goes to a different beach near the crab market behind us, where there are more shells, not where we are now by this beach of sand.

Sometimes Khmer ‘big men’ get angry with her if they suspect the jewellery and trinkets come from Vietnam. She is referring to the powerful, rich Phnom Penh based men who have brought their family to the beach for a visit and she waves vaguely at the enormous black Hummer vehicle that is just pulling up to the nearby picnic areas. The other women run with their baskets of goodies over to the car touting for a sale, while this woman continues to thread her shells onto her necklace. The women who had all sat together joking and talking with me become competitors for a moment as an impossible number of women and children pile out of the Hummer, in their expensive clothes and each child with high heels and makeup that matches their mothers and older sisters. I am unable to see from my spot on the cement pavement what is bought but plenty is being sold to this wealthy Khmer family.