Week Without Walls: Cambodia

Every January, our high school students participate in what is called a "Week Without Walls". During this week, each grade group flies off to a South East Asian country where they learn about the needs of the developing nation and participate in service learning. I joined the 10th graders for the trip to Cambodia where we began in Phnom Penh, then traveled north to a very rural and very poor province in the far north. We stayed in a camp built specifically to host visiting student groups and worked hard to help the struggling community with some essential projects: building a home, repairing a collapsed dam, aiding with a tree planting initiative, and volunteering in the local primary school.

It was incredible how our students, who are accustomed to the good things in life, adapted quickly and without complaint to very simple, open air accommodations, limited food options, a lack of showers, and hard, physical labor in near 40 degree Celsius temperatures. A full week went by without incident and only respect, enthusiasm, and compassion shown by our students. In my mind, I couldn't help but compare this experience to the service activities and camping trip with Creative Arts last year. The experiences and the way in which students engaged with the work cannot even be compared. I am grateful to be here.

Personally, despite countless visits to and experiences in rural villages and in struggling and developing communities throughout Asia, I have never had such an authentic travel experience in an impoverished area. Along the way, our guides taught us a great deal about the unimaginably difficult history that this nation has faced in the past forty years, particularly during the Khmer Rouge years when half of Cambodia's population (2.5 million people) were killed by the genocidal regime. We came face to face with this history at the Genocide Prison Museum in Phnom Penh and at the Killing Fields Memorial just outside the city. Moreover, we witnessed the struggles that present day Cambodians face as a result of this genocide during our three days in the village.

At times, I found myself awed by the resilience of these people. At other times, I found myself heartbroken when witnessing the realities of life in Cambodia. When working in the village, we were always joined by the local kids and their visits were the most potent reminder, for me, of poverty faced by these people. First, starvation and malnutrition is a problem faced by most families in rural Cambodia. Fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year old kids, following years of malnutrition, stood half the height of most of our students. When I first learned that these kids, no taller than the waists of our students, were actually the same age as our students, I couldn't believe what I was told. They looked like little children, not youth nearing adulthood. Second, the future for most of the kids here is pre-determined. The class of 51 eager students we worked with at the school will see only a few move to Phnom Penh for higher education. In fact, probably less than 15% will move beyond 8th grade.

Most of the boys will remain in the village, cutting down a rainforest that has been 80% depleted in just the past six years. They will sell the logs simply to survive while several big companies, selling the lumber to Vietnam, will make millions. Meanwhile, villages that a decade ago were in the forest, surviving successfully off the land, hunting and gathering, having enough abundance to dine as a community daily now sit in dry plains with the odd tall tree left standing between stilt homes, the people unable to share, each household now concerned primarily with the survival of their children. While the boys drop out of school to work in the village, the girls are "recruited" to work in factories in the city. Of every 10 girls recruited in this way, 9 end up in Thailand as sex slaves. Other children end up in a huge "orphanage" near Phnom Penh where they are bought by foreigners with good intentions for very large sums of money (who is earning that money?) while the families wait for them to return to the village with some of the money that they were able to earn at the factories.  These kids will never see their families again.

There is hope, of course. Groups like the one running our camp are educated and are working hard to make a difference. Our work will help this community but, it often did seem a little futile. For every tree we planted, we saw ten times as many logs being driven down the road in huge trucks at the end of the day. For every brick and concrete home we built, there were hundreds of other barely standing wooden homes, many of which could likely collapse during the next monsoon. For every 20 children we taught English to in the school, 19 would end up uneducated, despite their best intentions.

There is so much work to be done. Hopefully, our students have left with the same sobering lessons I have and are inspired to do more and that their service to struggling communities throughout the world does not begin and end when they take these trips once per year.