Houch Houan
Wanted: Rangers for Bokor National Park. Workplace: nearly 1,400 square kilometers of Cambodia's thickest jungle. Occupational hazards: wild animals, grueling terrain, giant leeches, malaria, dengue fever, heavily armed criminals and land mines. Pay: about $50 a month. Who would do it?
For starters, 50 Cambodian men—some as young as 21—whose bravery and dedication have earned Bokor its reputation as Cambodia's best-protected national park. Houch Houan, 39, spends 15 to 18 days a month patrolling this pristine wilderness with his team. Nature's challenges are hard enough, but the rangers' worst enemy is man: gun-toting commercial loggers and poachers employed by corrupt government officials or rogue officers of the police or military. In 2001, seven rangers were injured in a grenade attack launched by disgruntled loggers. Undeterred, Houch Houan and his colleagues catch hundreds of loggers and poachers every year—69 in January 2004 alone—and destroy dozens of illegal sawmills, charcoal kilns and chain saws.
"The rangers sleep in jungle hammocks, get soaked to the skin in the rainy season, catch colds and fevers, and their families are threatened by influential people," marvels Tim Redford of WildAid, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that trains and subsidizes Bokor's rangers. "Yet they're not put off for a minute." Married with five children, Houch Houan, an ex-soldier, knows his job is dangerous.
He and his fellow rangers are underpaid, ill-equipped and, by Redford's admission, stretched to the limit. But don't underestimate their skills or resolve, warns Houch Houan. "We're a team," he says. "We look after each other." Loggers and poachers, beware.
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