The Market - a metaphor

Americans like to see the world as good and evil, happy and sad, light and dark, comforted by the simplicity of our either/or mentality. In Cambodia all these lines are blurred. Stand on a street corner outside a market and you will feel every emotion swimming in an inseparable swirl, like the humidity which makes it unclear where your body ends and the air begins. Cambodia insists that in order to truly understand the world we must embrace its interconnectedness instead of hiding behind the extremes. The market is a raw metaphor for this complexity. Walking among the stalls it is undeniably beautiful. Baskets filled with vegetables and crab and fruits are displayed like art, the colors so varied and vibrant it is impossible to capture them on film. Then look down to the concrete floor where your flip flops walk through rivers of blood and fish guts. Watch as a woman chops heads of frogs, quick like dealing cards at a casino and flips the frogs into a basket. The smell in one breath is rancid, fish guts in 105 degree heat, trapped by the busy market, but in the next breath it is sweet with the passion fruit and lechee and mango and there is no separating the perfume. The women and girls working the stalls are poor, working all day in a place many in the world would not even enter, and yet you can not separate the despair from the quick smiles and lively banter between the stalls. 

On one day we visited Toul Slang a detention and interrogation center where over 20, 000 Cambodians were killed during the Pol Pot regime from 1975-1978. Their only crime? They were educated or artists. Maybe there was no reason at all. Many of them were children. This one location was once a school. Imagine using a school as a location to destroy the future of a country. As we left, we passed a exact replica of the building, bustling with students in uniform heading home after their school day. All in a block.

Visiting the girls in our program is similarly overwhelming. Each one is lit from within by hope and you can't help but feel good in their presence, and yet they are still so close to the lure of sex trafficking, the call of the garment industry. Many carry with them stories of losing parents to AIDS, fear of having their homes bulldozed by the government, the skeletons and the Pol Pot regime, and yet they keep moving forward with a brave smile and gentle humility. The reality is that even with an education the road will not be easy, but they are driven by their dreams and the knowledge that on the other side of the world, someone believes in them. 

Amara-Hope amidst the darkness

Amara wants to be a doctor. When we film her sharing her dream in front of her house, the trash in the alley dissolves, her humble house constructed of scrap metal on the red dirt is transformed and the injustices of the world fall away. Amara from the end of the road wants to be a doctor and when she says the words, brings her dream into the 100 degree Phnom Penh heat and humidity, the city is already transformed, her electric smile lighting up the dark places in the world. Amara wants to be a doctor and because of generous donations to CASF by people who dare to believe in impossible dreams...I feel sure as I watch her shyly cover a smile and look to her younger sister and mother silhouetted in the doorway that someday she will make her dreams come true!

If not school, then this...

The importance of educating girls was never clearer than yesterday when we visited the street outside a garment factory at lunch time. Walking inside the apartment they rent was like entering a prison, the air was heavy with the stench of hopelessness and the kids and families inside sat in the filthy dark concrete hallway with only the glow of one tv to illuminate the gloom. Many of the girls aren't old enough to work but they pay government workers to make them fake id's. They make only 55 dollars a month and pay $40 or more to rent a room shared by 4-6 people, never seeing an opportunity to change their fortune. The factory is also windowless and they work behind a prison like gate, only coming out for lunch. When they start earning enough to get close to earning the benefits of higher wages they are fired or the entire factory will shut down and move location. Out of all the women living in this building the longest one had been working for the factory down the road was 4 years. This is what misery looks like -a far cry from the fancy malls where the clothes end up in Abercrombie stores and the Gap- here the despair is tangible and as Westerners who buy the clothes, we are a party to the horror unless we do something. I left the apartment in tears, the image of a mother watching her sleeping baby of the filthy floor of the dismal trash strewn street painted in my mind forever.

Visit to Skun to see students

In each village we showed students where America and Cambodia are on the globe. We reminded them that even though the countries are on opposite sides of the world, every time any of us makes a good decision to be kinder or to study hard, we make the whole world better for everyone. In this way the distance shrinks. We are connected by our shared hopes for a better future and it is really children who "have the world in their hands." They learned the song "Got the Whole World in Our Hands" and sang it as they passed the ball around. After, we asked them each their one dream for the future and wrote it in English for them to share with the other side of the world, so that we can all be reminded by their lovely faces of the importance of supporting the dreams of our most impoverished world citizens. We will make a movie of their answers! Lots of them want to return the gift of their education by teaching others...music to our ears!