We have been in Cambodia for a week and a half now and the things I have seen this week have been absolutely heartbreaking. I have seen more suffering in one week than I have pretty much this whole race.
We are in the bush, living in a village with a Christian pig farmer. All the locals around us are either rice farmers or work in a local “factory”. I say “factory” because after an explanation by Ra, our host, it’s a sweat shop owned by a Chinese man shipping the products to America. These villagers leave the factory after 12 hours of working and make $2-$4 a day, (a cheap meal here is $.50-$1) not enough to support their families.
The kids school day last 3 hours a day and the teachers barely teach during that time. Education is feared; feared because of the genocide that took place 40 years ago. It started because Pol Pot wanted to wipe out the western way of thinking and the only way to do it was to kill, starting with the educated first… the people who had the most western influence. The people of Cambodia are still afraid to be educated in fear that something like the rule of Pol Pot and genocide will happen again.
Ra tutors the local village children every weekday, Monday through Friday. He teaches algebra, English, and Khmer, the local language. Most of the children cannot read and end up helping their family on the farm instead of focusing on school.
It’s a struggle everyday to survive, even for our host.
The family that we are staying with are Buddhist. Only our host and his wife are christian. The whole family moved out so that we could move in. We offered to tent outside so that they didn’t have to but they would not budge. The mother-in-law of our host has cancer in the final stages. She lays under the cabana outside all day in pain, crying, curled up in a ball. Walking by and seeing her suffer everyday has been heartbreaking. All I can do is pray for her and love her… But I want to do more Lord!
Lord? I’m not cut out for this. I can’t see this and do nothing. But what can I do? What is my propose here? Lord, please provide some revelations!!
The suffering I experience gets tougher by the day. I’m sure you can imagine famished children like the ones in the commercials but it is so much worse. Their little bodies don’t have bludgeoning bellies but their hearts cry out every single day. Just by looking in those eyes…I can feel the pain of their 7 years of life, or less.
Most of these children survive on white rice. Rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My team is fortunate enough to have meat or vegetables to put on top of our rice but for the kids and villagers, just rice.
One day Haley and I were washing dinner dishes when I had the most heartbreaking experience this whole race. As we were washing dishes, one of the little girls from the house right beside ours walks around the side of the house and stood in front of the table where we were doing dishes. The only thing that was standing between us was a wimpy barbed wire fence. She look me in the eyes, shivering, fully dressed and drenched by water. I didn’t realize exactly what she wanted at the moment but I found out soon enough.
Our dinner plates had been scraped clean, the rice bowl the same. The rice bowl had been cleaned out by our host so we went to wash dishes like normal. When Haley dumped water into the rice bowl to let it soak, this little girl let out a huge gasp and started to hold back tears. My heart sunk. There was probably only 20ish grains of rice stuck to the side of the bowl but to that little girl, it could have been the dinner she didn’t have, even if it was only 20 grains of rice.
Wasting food is a tragedy when there are starving people all around you. You see the direct effects of it. I think back to how much food I wasted on a daily basis before the race. Americans waste so much.
One thing I would like to challenge my readers back home is to take inventory of how much food they waste on a day to day basis.
~Could you eat it and you just didn’t feel like it because you ate it yesterday?
~Are you too full to take it home and save it for later?
~Did it go bad in the fridge because it got shoved to the back and forgotten about?
I encourage you to find ways to reduce food waste in your own home.
Matthew 25:40
And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.
