We took a train from Thailand to the border of Cambodia. We walked carrying our packs across it, which was thankfully much shorter than any of us had believed it would be. We even crossed paths with another Race squad coming across from Cambodia into Thailand.
My team was placed in a small village an hour outside of the capital, Phnom Penh. We lived with a man named Umong, his wife and two small children; and Umong’s younger brother, Utry, and his wife and baby. Our house was a wooden structure raised on supports to keep it out of the flood plain during rainy season, with a set of steep, ladder-like steps leading twenty feet up to the top. All seven of the team plus our squad leader slept in a line of beds in their living room. Privacy was nonexistent this month. Each morning the family woke and came into the living room and had a perfect view of the eight of us sleeping under the massive mosquito net that covered our half of the room. Often a young boy from down the road would come in the mornings and stand and watch us sleep until we woke up.
The first part of the month we spent shoveling and hauling dirt from the front yard to the back, to level out the ground in preparation for the new part of the house they would build. It was hard; the dirt was often heavy with rain that came many evenings and it was oppressively hot and uncomfortably humid. By the end of a day of shoveling we would be absolutely drenched in sweat and exhausted. I’ve never sweat so much in my life. I enjoyed the work though. We also went each week day throughout the month to two different locations, one in our village and one in another village, to teach children English.
The second part of the month we spent constructing a house for an elderly lady who attended our church and our Bible study. Her previous one had collapsed a few months before in an earthquake. It was a simple wooden frame wrapped in metal. In the US, it would have nearly passed for a garden shed, but in Cambodia this was someone’s home.
A group from Malaysia came towards the end of the month and helped us with the house for a day. It was nice to come together with other believers from another culture and country to help our sister in Cambodia.
Cambodia was a quiet and peaceful place. Where we lived was quite rural; most people were farmers. The people were mostly very kind and humble. They didn’t say much but they served much. Our host family took good care of us, and the people in the village were very welcoming and kind toward us. They were clearly happy to have us there; when we left they told us how much they would miss seeing us.
There was a certain heaviness there, though. When we spent a few days in Phnom Penh, we went to the killing fields and the genocide museum in one of the former prisons. It was a heartbreaking and sobering experience. The wounds left in Cambodia by the atrocities committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are still apparent, considering it’s barely been four decades since they occurred. It is apparent in Cambodia’s mostly agricultural economy, which is still recovering. It is apparent in the young population, where most people are under 40 because so many people didn’t survive the genocide of the late 70’s. It is apparent in the elderly people in the provinces who can’t read or write, or even speak their language properly, because they were taken out of school to serve the Khmer Rouge in the fields, while their educated peers in the city were murdered. Or how even today, it is uncommon for people to know English, or other Western languages, because Pol Pot wanted to scourge the country from Western influence. The most chilling thing I saw was a tree at the killing fields that had been discovered with bone and brain matter on it, next to a grave of the bones of infants and small children and women. What they discovered was that soldiers of the Khmer Rouge would take babies from their mother’s arms, hold them by the ankle, swing them and dash their heads against the tree and toss their bodies into the open pit dug beside the tree, then shoot the mothers and toss them in as well.
Yet this darkness wasn’t what I saw when I looked at Cambodia. On my birthday, I had been sick much of the day, but we were about to leave for South America and there was a dirt road that led into a field of tall, green green grass behind our house. I had been looking at it all month and I wanted to walk there. So I got up and went into that green world. The fields stretched on and on. The grass rose up taller than me on either side of the path, obscuring its turns, until it opened up beyond a small rise. A very old woman, wearing a woven straw hat, knelt in the earth, pulling some plant from the ground, not seeing me. Her red bike rested against a sapling behind her. Beyond the grass, there were corn fields and rice fields and pastures. I passed a small shelter someone had made with palm fronds and had hung a hammock, to rest from their work and the heat of the day. Beside the path there was a lone tree, ancient and solitary and inviting. It was quiet, except for the sounds of the birds calling, the bells around the necks of the cows grazing, the warm wind stirring the grass. There was a young couple by a small pavilion in a field, their motorbikes parked nearby. They sat in the grass against a stone wall and the wind carried their voices and their laughter to me. A family in a far lane was herding their cows down the road, the children laughing and playing as they went. The very blue sky, filled with great, shifting clouds, stretched vast above the flat plains. It was so peaceful. It seemed time had stopped and I was standing in ages past. Or like I had stepped into a story.
As I stood there, I thought about how much I loved this country and the people I had met. As I stood there, everything felt right. Though I knew there was poverty and there was struggle, I was struck by the beautiful simplicity of life here. It seemed like it was how things were intended to be. My soul was quiet and still, and God was with me.
I found Cambodia to be resilient. The people want to heal and move on, and they are. They’ve found no solace in Buddhism or in the stark secularism of the past. They are finding their peace in the arms of their Father.
