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.