Context.

Since I don't have any real exciting updates to write about this time, I thought I'd just write a little bit about some observations I've tried to piece together during these past few weeks.

One of the things people working for World Relief, or anybody doing this kind of work anywhere in the world, need to evaluate and make sense of is the context within which they work. In order to figure out how to help people strategically you need to figure out where they are coming from, where they are now, and where they might be headed, and then to evaluate what could or should be done in light of all this.

World Relief, though the name might suggest otherwise, does not focus primarily on short-term relief so much as sustainable development. It is the whole idea of teaching people to fish so they can provide for themselves long-term, instead of giving them a fish today, tomorrow, and until you come down with a case of donor fatigue and decide to let them try to figure it out on their own and watch them starve to death because they can't provide for themselves after growing accustomed to hand-outs.

Here in Cambodia, as I'm sure is the case in just about every developing country, sustainable development is an unbelievably steep uphill battle. This is not to say that it is impossible, but just that it takes work, it takes resources, and it takes time. I say this because one of the things that has struck me about the Cambodian people, despite the myriad wonderful things that could be said about them, is a subtle yet pervasive underlying sense of immediate pragmatism: there is little to no room for thinking ahead and investing in the future.

Millions of people here are stuck in a seemingly inescapable cycle of poverty. This has a lot to do with the many years of political unrest that peaked during the Khmer Rouge years and have lasted with varying degrees of intensity to today. The nation's infrastructure is not yet up to speed, and while the country should be able to export considerable amounts of rice as a way to boost its economy, as it is there's a deficit. Poverty, of course, brings with it all kinds of challenges, and these challenges, if they don't kill a person, only serve to make the poverty worse and worse.

So here you have a country full of people living on just enough to scrape by, and whenever there is a flood or a failed crop season or someone in the family gets sick or there is some political unrest - things that would make life uncomfortable and frustrating for you and I - suddenly these people are in crisis mode, and they literally have no way to meet even their most basic needs. Add to this the tumultuous history of the nation, which has taught them clearly and repeatedly that tomorrow is no guarantee at all, and you begin to understand why these people are forced to become immediate pragmatists.

And when you have a country made up of immediate pragmatists, the effects are manifested in a multitude of ways, ranging from the small business owners who have no concept of planning ahead, and therefore cannot expand and improve their quality of living, to the blatant corruption among the elite of society who abuse their power and oppress their own people, scared that if they don't take all they can, they will lose it all.

There are a great many things I have come to love about Cambodia and this culture, but there are many serious needs as well. Please pray for those committed to the long, hard task of serving the poor in this country, and especially for those who are doing so because of the love of Jesus. What they are seeking to do is, humanly speaking, impossible.

Temple.

I went to a church yesterday morning in a big pink hotel with guards who smile at you and open the big glass double doors for you. Across the street from said hotel is the American embassy. It is big and grey and jail-like and I didn't walk over there, but I doubt there are guards at the door with smiles on their faces. Both the pink hotel and the grey embassy are located beside a roundabout, and in the middle of this roundabout is the only hill in the entire city. It is twenty-seven meters high and on top of it sits Wat Phnom, a Buddhist temple.

They say this is where the city was founded hundreds of years ago when a woman built this temple to house some statues of Buddha that had floated down the Mekong River. How large stone statues float and how a woman singlehandedly builds a big temple is beyond me, but at a certain point you don't ask questions. You just smile and nod. Phnom means hill or mountain and this woman was named Penh, and the city was thus named.

This was my first time in a real functioning Buddhist temple, and it was quite the contrast, to be in the church one minute, singing "Our Great God" and to be in this temple fifteen minutes later, where folks were kneeling before hundreds of statues of Buddha and whoever else, burning incense, holding candles, praying, leaving rice and fruit as offerings.

I'm not really sure what else to say about it, so I'll let the photos do the talking.

Roadtrip!

The past few days were spent mostly on the road, or so it seems. I took a three hour bus ride with Engchy to the town of Kampong Thom, due north of PP, where we met up with Geof, WR’s health advisor who oversees the AIDS ministry and also works with the child survival program. He was on vacation at the beach a week or two ago and there he met a guy my age from Florida named Sam who just graduated from college and decided he’ll live in Cambodia until his money runs out, so naturally Geof invited him along to see his work. The four of us had a blast, if you ask me, driving all around the country listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Simon & Garfunkel for hours on end. Geof informed us that he has already decided that Freebird will be played at his funeral. It is a great song, he said. And we subsequently listened to it a few times with the volume cranked. His is very likely the only World Relief vehicle with a subwoofer, he told us.

The purpose of the trip for Geof was to visit the projects he oversees, Engchy was serving as translator, and Sam the Beach Bum, as I already mentioned, was along for the ride. My reason for being on this trip was mainly to establish contact with the program leaders and to get a feel for where I need to go when I return to get stories and take photos. I was able to get some photos, and I interviewed two women, whose stories I trust will move you once they’re written. One in particular is quite inspiring.

This was a whirlwind tour, really, driving north to the middle of the country and then back down to the southeast corner, an area of Cambodia jutting out into Vietnam dubbed “the parrot’s beak� by the locals. This area is where the US, during the war, believed that Vietnam had their version of the Pentagon, but nothing like this has ever been found.

A written account of a trip around Cambodia wouldn’t hardly be complete without at least a paragraph about food. In January I ate frog legs, which seemed pretty exotic to me at the time, but Sam tells me they eat them all the time in Florida, so I guess they are just exotic to Pennsylvanians. This week’s trip afforded me the opportunity to sample fried tarantula, which tastes like a strange barbeque potato chip. I also discovered that soursop juice, another January discovery, is prevalent just about everywhere, which is good news indeed. The other night we had traditional Khmer soup, which turned out to be quite the exotic experience. They sat us down in this hut with a roof and a radio with Khmer pop music and a fluorescent light and no walls, and the staff brought out each ingredient one by one, and then they brought out a grill thing and a pot with some chunky broth containing many an unidentified floating ingredient. When it was all said and done, the soup had some more or less regular looking beef, egg, some sort of edible grass, and then the good stuff: cow intestines, stomach lining, tendons, ligaments, and liver. However, even the Cambodians among us skipped the bone marrow, lumped on the plate resembling a human brain and making the rest of us nauseous just thinking about it. I skipped the tendons, ligaments and intestines myself, but did chow down on several pieces of stomach lining (before asking what it was, as is the best way to eat food around here) and I sipped the broth, flavored by all of the aforementioned delicacies. It is good to do these things once, you know. But once is probably enough.

Time now for 19 photos from this week’s adventure.

A Buddha factory.

This is Geof, the guy who wants them to play “Freebird� at his funeral.

This is one of Geof’s adopted daughters, who has since returned to live with extended family. When Geof first took her in as an orphan, she was less than a week from death. Now, happily, she is doing better than ever, Geof says.

A wat that is estimated to be from the 11th or 12th century or so, one of the best preserved ones, apart from Angkor Wat.

The temple grounds are quite well-kept, thanks to...

...one of the nicest temple keepers you could ever hope to meet.

Fried tarantulas, hooray!

In addition to some fried tarantulas, Engchy bought himself a live one. Later, much to Geof’s chagrin, he left it in the SUV when we went to eat dinner. Afterwards, the little critter was unaccounted for, which was a little unnerving as we drove in the dark, not knowing when any of us would keel over and die. After a brief search, the spider was found and we breathed easy. Sam then left him in his hotel room at check out, leaving the housekeeper with quite a nice surprise.

Engchy showing us how one goes about eating, and enjoying, fried tarantula.

As the writer Don Miller says, “We were made to jump off bridges into rivers.�

I am doing my best to indoctrinate Engchy with a lesson in computer superiority.

This is Sam. Please also notice the gi-normous gecko on the wall.

Here is a group of pastors and church leaders gathered for training in order to mobilize their churches to reach out to those in their communities living with HIV/AIDS.

Some sort of a war memorial I reckon.