My title for this note about my recent visit to Cambodia runs completely counter-intuitive to today's norm. Absolutely everything now is about ourselves. What other explanation can there be for every Apple gizmo beginning with 'i'? iPod; iPad; iPhone.....?
But that was the message--it's about the Cambodians, not us!--which was instilled in our house-building team by the head of the Tabitha Foundation, Janne Ritskes, in the orientation she gave us 10 days ago in Phnom Penh before we headed for the southern province of Kep to put the finishing touches on 18 new starter homes we had raised money for and were building in the poorest of the poor areas of Cambodia.
How utterly refreshing to get out of our own head's, out of our own affluent worlds, and be brought down to earth with a thud by Janne (who also, in her words, scared 'the snot' out of us about workplace safety, accidently putting curses on the houses we built by letting a bloody cut be seen, or inadvertently leading the locals to think we were there to kidnap their children if we so much as played with them!) Talk about pressure! And I had worried about the heat. That was the easiest to take!
But even better, in a world sorely lacking in any context whatsoever, the first thing Janne offered us in our briefing was exactly that: Why is Cambodia the way it is now and why are we there building houses? She offered us a Cambodia 101 seminar before sending us off for mandatory visits first to the Killing Fields Museum (a converted school compound where Pol Pot tortured a figure cited as anywhere from 1.8 million to 3 million of his fellow countrymen during the reign of terror of his Khmer Rouge) and then onto one of the Fields themselves: an old Chinese cemetary desecrated by the instigators of the Cambodian genocide and used to kill those tortured souls who were not already half dead.
An informative but utterly haunting audio guide accompanied us on our walk around the Killing Fields, ending at a memorial filled with anguish. The Cambodian narrator on the guide said words that chilled me almost as much as what I was seeing: "Even now, a genocide is taking place somewhere." History teaches us nothing. I wanted to cry. But I remembered, it wasn't about me and kept my feelings to myself.
My Facebook page (all about me! me! me! I learned nothing, clearly) has been filled with photos documenting this incredible journey so recently completed in Cambodia. But photos can't capture all the raw emotion we all felt.
Imagine being with a team of people you have never met before, ranging in age from 15-71 (!), staying in a jungle eco-resort and feeling like Indiana Jones, hammering away in +30 degree heat, and discovering (this is the most unbelievable) that you can't stop laughing? I'm serious. Maybe I was due for some good hysteria, but our laughter was often as loud as the hammering, or the sounds of the wheels of our van trying to make it up a rutted road to our jungle digs....I even laughed when our prop plane took off from Phnom Penh for Siem Reap when my seatmate and fellow team member Sunny turned to me and 'cracked wise' as they say about what we had just accomplished with our houses. I forgot I used to be afraid of flying.
Flying back to Vancouver earlier this week and entering my empty house, I wanted to cry all over again (a gazillion hour journey will do that to you I suppose). First I passed neighbouring houses all kitted out already with Christmas doodads.....fair enough......this is the Canadian culture, not the Cambodian.....But when I looked at just one room in my wonderful home and realized it was the size of the 'starter homes' we had built, that's when I started to sob.
I'm glad I went to Cambodia, saw the magnificent Angkor Wat in addition to doing 'something good'....creating a community...but I won't kid myself as much as Janne insisted:
It was about me.
Maybe not when I was there hammering nails into a floor or touring around. But when I was lying in my eco-hut listening to jungle sounds that scared the 'snot out of me' calming myself by appreciating my own charmed life: as a privileged Canadian; as a happily married woman for three decades; as the mother of two incredible offspring; and finally, as a woman enjoying the health and affluence that allowed me to make the trip in the first place.
But that was the message--it's about the Cambodians, not us!--which was instilled in our house-building team by the head of the Tabitha Foundation, Janne Ritskes, in the orientation she gave us 10 days ago in Phnom Penh before we headed for the southern province of Kep to put the finishing touches on 18 new starter homes we had raised money for and were building in the poorest of the poor areas of Cambodia.
How utterly refreshing to get out of our own head's, out of our own affluent worlds, and be brought down to earth with a thud by Janne (who also, in her words, scared 'the snot' out of us about workplace safety, accidently putting curses on the houses we built by letting a bloody cut be seen, or inadvertently leading the locals to think we were there to kidnap their children if we so much as played with them!) Talk about pressure! And I had worried about the heat. That was the easiest to take!
But even better, in a world sorely lacking in any context whatsoever, the first thing Janne offered us in our briefing was exactly that: Why is Cambodia the way it is now and why are we there building houses? She offered us a Cambodia 101 seminar before sending us off for mandatory visits first to the Killing Fields Museum (a converted school compound where Pol Pot tortured a figure cited as anywhere from 1.8 million to 3 million of his fellow countrymen during the reign of terror of his Khmer Rouge) and then onto one of the Fields themselves: an old Chinese cemetary desecrated by the instigators of the Cambodian genocide and used to kill those tortured souls who were not already half dead.
An informative but utterly haunting audio guide accompanied us on our walk around the Killing Fields, ending at a memorial filled with anguish. The Cambodian narrator on the guide said words that chilled me almost as much as what I was seeing: "Even now, a genocide is taking place somewhere." History teaches us nothing. I wanted to cry. But I remembered, it wasn't about me and kept my feelings to myself.
My Facebook page (all about me! me! me! I learned nothing, clearly) has been filled with photos documenting this incredible journey so recently completed in Cambodia. But photos can't capture all the raw emotion we all felt.
Imagine being with a team of people you have never met before, ranging in age from 15-71 (!), staying in a jungle eco-resort and feeling like Indiana Jones, hammering away in +30 degree heat, and discovering (this is the most unbelievable) that you can't stop laughing? I'm serious. Maybe I was due for some good hysteria, but our laughter was often as loud as the hammering, or the sounds of the wheels of our van trying to make it up a rutted road to our jungle digs....I even laughed when our prop plane took off from Phnom Penh for Siem Reap when my seatmate and fellow team member Sunny turned to me and 'cracked wise' as they say about what we had just accomplished with our houses. I forgot I used to be afraid of flying.
Flying back to Vancouver earlier this week and entering my empty house, I wanted to cry all over again (a gazillion hour journey will do that to you I suppose). First I passed neighbouring houses all kitted out already with Christmas doodads.....fair enough......this is the Canadian culture, not the Cambodian.....But when I looked at just one room in my wonderful home and realized it was the size of the 'starter homes' we had built, that's when I started to sob.
I'm glad I went to Cambodia, saw the magnificent Angkor Wat in addition to doing 'something good'....creating a community...but I won't kid myself as much as Janne insisted:
It was about me.
Maybe not when I was there hammering nails into a floor or touring around. But when I was lying in my eco-hut listening to jungle sounds that scared the 'snot out of me' calming myself by appreciating my own charmed life: as a privileged Canadian; as a happily married woman for three decades; as the mother of two incredible offspring; and finally, as a woman enjoying the health and affluence that allowed me to make the trip in the first place.
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