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.