Hi, all!
A group from Virginia, a few of the CHAD (Community Health & Agricultural Development) staff, and I just got back to Phnom Penh from a few days’ excursion to Kampong Thom, Siem Reap, Banteay Meanchey, and Battambang (coolest, most confusing names ever – and that’s just the English transliteration). We were a small but mighty group: me, Tola (24-year old, newly married Cambodian translator), Romy (DS, Filipino), Mr. Thy (CHAD staff, Cambodian), and Ken (CHAD staff, Filipino); plus our entirely awesome driver, and four adults who work for the UMC in the US. Fun group!
Ok, so check this out: we started in Phnom Penh, went north to Siem Reap, then to the border in Banteay Meanchey (NW), and went south through Battambang to get back home. Quite a road trip!
Our main goal for this trip was for the VA team to see how they could coordinate volunteer teams most effectively in Cambodia in the future. With Mr. Thy and Ken, we also got to see many of the Methodist churches that the CHAD group partners with for rice banks, savings groups, and micro-finance loans for livestock. Actually, we were so far out in the provinces that we made it almost to the Thailand border (we were 10 minutes away from getting our passports out!). It was really wonderful to see in person the churches and projects that I’d heard about so much on paper. For example, check this out:
Pastor Eang Pros at Teok Thla Methodist Church has been around since 1993 (just one year after Christianity became legal in Cambodia), and they plan to build a preschool for their community and an affordable, 10-room, co-ed dormitory for university students who want to study at one of the three nearby institutions without going into irreversible debt after they graduate.
Bour Methodist Church’s rice bank stores and lends 5,600 kg of rice to the community, and two members became Christians because of the church's witness.
Daun Meay Church in Battambang is led by a young, single, female pastor whose rice bank is doing phenomenally well, and her congregants save 5000 Riel/month ($1.25/month) in their savings group (it’s basically a small community-led and run bank – people contribute a monthly portion of their salary, and they can borrow larger sums of money to be paid back with interest). The nearest hospital to this church is kilometers away and transportation is difficult to find, so many women deliver their babies on the side of the road, in transit.
There’s nothing like attending a district meeting with 15 pastors to find out what the true needs of the people are. In Ban Teay Meanchey, we found out that the main problem here in Cambodia was lack of education. To help flesh this out, here’s a scenario of a typical Cambodian family:
Mom, dad, sister, and baby brother own a bit of land out in the province where they grow rice during the wet season. They are far from any river or irrigation system and the dry season is very, very dry, so for most of the year, dad goes to Thailand along with the rest of the men in the village in a mass exodus to find work as an itinerant farmer or laborer. This leaves mom, sister, and baby brother in Cambodia, struggling to grow whatever crops they can on their parched piece of land until the rains come again. Since mom’s busy with cooking, cleaning, washing, and selling whatever food and trinkets she can at the local market, sister has to stay home from school to do all the actual planting and harvesting. Eventually, dad comes home from Thailand for the season…but it looks like he’s not making enough money to supplement his travel expenses and pay for the land that his family owns in Cambodia. So everyone picks up and moves to Thailand, where sister can work, too. If for some reason dad gets sick and dies or is duped into working for a company that enslaves workers for forced labor, mom and kids have to move back to Cambodia – but now they have nowhere to go, mom has no marketable skills because she’s illiterate, sister hasn’t been in school for years, and baby brother’s future is no brighter.
Seems a bit of a stretch, like I’m being overly dramatic for effect, maybe? Not so much. Apparently, this happens all the time. This is why the pastors here are so desperate for help – in the US, members of congregations support their churches and pastors with offerings and tithes; in Cambodia, pastors support their churches, congregations, and entire communities with what help they can. Needs are devastating and resources are scant, so sometimes, all they can do is pray. For a long while, prayer came with intense persecution because of their faith (remember, a 1.3% Christian nation!). In recent years, however, Christian churches are beginning to gain some respect in their communities because of their engagement in social activism – rice banks, savings groups, loans, and the like – so although times are rough, the pastors’ outlook is bright!
On the way to visiting churches and meeting pastors, our team got to pass through Siem Reap. Nearly everyone who’s been to this part of the world has told me that I had to go to Angkor Watt before I left – and lo and behold, I’ve not been even a month in Cambodia, and we got to see the temple!
Angkor Watt - main temple
Temple of Many Faces
There are monks everywhere! In the city, they walk from door to door with little yellow umbrellas to protect them from the sun, asking for food in exchange for prayers. We usually see them in the mornings only, because they aren't allowed to eat past 11am.
Since seeing the largest and most impressive of the 1,100 temples in Cambodia isn’t quite enough excitement for one day, we also went to a fair-trade silk farm to see how silk’s made. So cool.
Mulberry leaves (worm lunch)
The stars of the whole show themselves
Silk worms make cocoons and eventually turn into moths. One cocoon is just a really, really long thread that can be untangled to make silk!
So now it’s back in the office for a few days with occasional day-trips out of Phnom Penh, mainly to accompany CHAD staff members to their sites so I can help them write up stories for newsletters and inquiring supporters. In the meantime, I’m working on starting several newsletters with GBGM staff, getting ready for Women’s Week at the end of March, and getting to know Phnom Penh more with every day.All my love to y’all, and a huge digital hug!
Hugs and blessings,
Stephanie
(As always…) A dozen ways to know that you’re in the provinces of Cambodia:
(1) Something new is to be used. For example, if you buy a super-sharp knife for slicing beef, it will work excellently for cutting wire or tin cans, as well.
(2) Squatter toilets suck.
(3) With only Americans, it’ll take you just five hours to get from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap; with Filipinos, it’ll take you eight; but with all-locals, budget ten or more. Godda have your snack stops.
(4) Women are expected to ride side-saddle on moto-dops (on the back of motorcycles – the cheapest and most popular mode of travel). Suffice it to say, I haven’t quite got that down.
(5) When a package says “mint,” do not automatically assume that is mouthwash, however similar the package might be to Scope. It may, in fact, be shampoo. (A rather unfortunate blonde moment there!)
(6) Speeding tickets cost a whopping 5,000 Riel ($1.25). But no fear!! Our driver talked it down to 3,000 Riel ($0.75).
(7) Tree branches are handy replacements for construction cones when your tire goes flat in the middle of a busy two-lane highway.
(8) Side-street vendors sell gasoline in 1L glass Fanta bottles right next to the Fanta in 1L glass Fanta bottles. Personally, I think they look a little too similar for that.
(9) Having a little ancestor house perched in your front yard is essential – it’s like a front door. Everyone has one.
(10) It takes four people and two rounds of ice cream to decide if the vanilla is really coconut, why they call coconut something that tastes like peach, what kind of fruit “fruit” ice cream is supposed to be, and how on earth ice cream can be so different here than it is on the other side of the world.
(11) The insatiable desire to pass other cars on the road is even stronger here than it is in Peru!
(12) Palm trees aren’t just for Florida – they’re the national tree of Cambodia!
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