This summer I had the privilege of being a part of a team of filmmakers at the 48 Hour Film festival in Baltimore. Working with the soon-to-be-legendary Tress brothers, I was the second cameraman. Suffice it to say I was happy to hear recently that the film tied for best cinematography and production design. If you have a fast connection, and seven minutes to spare, I would like to share it with you.

1.
Growing up in Sipacapa, a small village in Guatemala at 9000 feet above sea level with no electricity or running water, our family did our fair share of visiting fellow villagers. We’d hit the trails and wander up and down hills, past houses with barking and angry dogs, stepping over cow paddies, and eventually arriving at our destination where we would try to get the attention of the owners of the house before their dogs ate us alive.

We’d sit on miscellaneous pieces of furniture in front of the house, and my parents would engage in conversation in Sipakapense, a language I did not speak or understand. I would sit there, along with my brother and sister, having no idea what was being said, drinking super-sweet coffee that had been offered and could not be refused for any reason. These house visits were not particularly exciting and fun experiences for me, and I’d look forward to leaving. Invariably before leaving however, the woman of the house would pinch me on the cheek and say to my parents that she wanted to keep me because I was cute or white or whatever. Same went for my brother and sister.

Now I am in Cambodia and my job here involves visiting villages and sometimes homes, and in some ways, it takes me back to those days in Sipacapa. But now the villagers don’t ask to keep me. They ask me to take their daughter and marry her.

2.
Engchy and I got a ride with Sivan in her SUV out to Ponhea Kraek on Thursday afternoon, which was very pleasant. The a/c kept us comfortable. I ate bread and drank a can of Coke. And then I discovered that the highways of Cambodia are straight enough for me to read in the car and not get car sick. Air conditioning, bread, Coke and reading make for an enjoyable ride. But Sivan stayed in Kraek which meant that Engchy and I had to catch the bus back to Phnom Penh.

Busses in Cambodia have a/c as well, but not as strong as you’d like. It gets stuffy in there, so you slide the window open, and then get reprimanded severely by the temperamental driver for letting in the hot air. Cambodians, it should be said, also like their rest stops. On the ride yesterday, we stopped inexplicably several times every five or ten minutes it seemed, and sometimes for fifteen minutes or more. And while this means we always have access to snacks and toilets, it is not the most efficient way to get to one’s destination, if you want to know what I think about the matter.

We had just hit the road again after one such stop when we pulled over once more. No explanation was offered nor was one asked for. The driver got up and began rummaging through the overhead compartments. He found a rolled up mat and some tools. He took off his blue bus company shirt and hung it up. Flat tire, it seemed. Slowly, people started getting off the bus and began milling around in the roadside mud. We then learned that it was not a flat tire after all, but the bus had broken down and the driver-turned-mechanic was now underneath the thing, banging around with his tools. Reassuring this was not. We had been there for nearly 45 minutes when another bus from the same company, and empty bus no less, pulled up behind us. Loading us onto this bus to continue our jouney might have seemed the sensible solution, but instead the driver of the empty bus got to work on the repairs as well. Fortunately, within another 15 minutes or so, we were back in business and after two or three more hours of Khmer karaoke music videos and stand-up comedy on the TV screen, we arrived at long last in Phnom Penh.

This afternoon I head back towards Vietnam, to the town of Kraek, where I will be visiting the child survival projects in the area tomorrow before coming back to PP. I hope to get some interviews and some good photos.

I have been planning on moving in with a Cambodian family next week for the remaining two months of my time here, but just learned this morning that it has fallen through. There is another place across town where some young foreigners live and I will be checking it out on Saturday.

If you think of it, please pray for a productive time in Kraek and that housing will work out one way or another.

And now, here is a random photo of a fish in a hotel lobby in Vietnam.

DAY ONE: Phnom Penh to Chau Doc

Boat at dock

Cruising down the Mekong

Chau Doc at night

Internet café, Chau Doc

DAY TWO: Chau Doc to Cantho

Breakfast at hotel in Chau Doc

Exploring floating villages by rowboat

Farming some sort of plant

Little feller with a pixie stick

Front of mosque

Carpet in mosque

Wee little cat

Old feller having a smoke

Back to dock in rowboat

Overlooking the Cambodia-Vietnam border

Lady Chua Xu Temple

Hungry critter at croc farm

A whole slew of juvenile crocs

Soup that tasted like spicy fruity pebbles

Hotel in Cantho

First time bowling in a communist country

The dragon fruit given to Buddha, then given to me

The monk who gave us the fruit off the altar

Cantho at night

DAY THREE: Contho to Ho Chi Minh City

Floating market

No minimum age to operate a boat apparently

Making rice paper

Cruising through the delta

Tour guide Hip with a water snake

Sautéed frog with curry

DAY FOUR: HCMC walking tour

Intersection in HCMC

Fish in Ben Than Market

Beans in Ben Than Market

Jesus among other gods, Ben Than Market

Uncle Ho and City Hall

Reunification Palace

View from top of Reunification Palace

War Remnants Museum

US Army tanks, War Remnants Museum

Protest poster, War Remnants Museum

Barbed wire, War Remnants Museum

Notre Dame cathedral

Inside Notre Dame

DAY FIVE: Cu Chi Tunnels

Unbiased documentary on the war

One entrance to the tunnels

Jon inside the tunnels

Listening to one of many semi-historic spiels from Tour Guide Bean

Ride on a moto across town

Front of our hostel

In the lobby at the hostel

HCMC at night

Photos from Vietnam will be coming in the morning, but first things first.

The trip back to Phnom Penh had all the makings of an uneventful six hours, but such was not in the cards today, my friends. The ride itself wasn’t bad. The A/C actually worked really well, but the condensation from it started dripping on the German in front of me while the Russian guy behind me talked on and on about the going rates for girls in Asia and about opium and “happy pizza.” Otherwise the bus was fine.

The border crossing was what I didn’t account for. Since I am not just passing through Cambodia like most of those on the bus, I needed to get a business visa instead of a tourist one, which meant I needed to fend for myself while the bus company people took the rest of the passports inside in order to cut through all the red tape. I waited in extra lines and filled out extra forms. I was asked if I had a copy of my immunization record and as I did not, I had to pay a dollar, knowing full well that this was just an easy way for government officials to line their pockets. I looked the guard in the face and laughed as I handed him the dollar bill, shaking my head, trying to shame him a little bit. I went through an x-ray machine where the attendant was talking to a young lady and didn’t bother to glance up at me or my bag even once. But by the time I got through all of this and emerged outside, the bus was nowhere to be found.

Being stranded at the border with half your luggage, very little money, and no one who speaks English is a potentially very stressful place in which to find oneself. I stood there figuratively scratching my head, trying to conjure up a solution. A guard with no idea about much of anything motioned for me to walk down the road, and seemed to indicate that my bus was around the corner, but it was not. Finally, the bus company guy, the one we unknowingly paid off to get us through the border, came running up and instructed me to get on a moto, so I did and about a mile down the road the bus was pulled over, waiting.

We’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are even supposed to love our enemies. I know this, or at least I nod my head when people say things like that. Nodding your head is easy. Actually loving people is hard. Especially when you come face to face with corrupt border officials who can have their way with you and will do what they want, and the bus leaves you behind, or you hear a guy talking about getting “ripped off” when they charged him $40 for two hours with a girl. In these moments you wish you could just throw those verses of Scripture out the window and strangle some people or at least punch them in the face. I believe there is such a thing as righteous anger, but I guess I am just trying to figure out how to love like God loves and hate what he hates. And this is no easy task.

This morning we hopped on a bus headed for Cu Chi tunnels with some new found friends from France and Mexico who we met during breakfast at the hostel. The bus trip was about an hour and a half each way. The tunnels were interesting; an extremely complex system of underground passageways allowing for the Victor Charlie to maneuver here and there right under the noses of the South Vietnamese or the American troops, undetected. Clever little rascals. But I won’t write much about the tunnels because our tour guide will be more interesting for you. The guy’s name is Bean (at least phonetically), and he talked just about incessantly, editorializing freely and repeating himself quite a bit. At one point he said not to ask us about his experience fighting in the war because it is too painful to remember and he wants to forget, but then he proceded to tell us (without our prompting) more than we could have ever wanted to know. He told us the story in pieces, so I’ll do my best here for you. The story goes that he fought for the South alongside American troops as a member of the Navy. He was an officer on a ship and American troops saluted him, he said. Later the story had him in the Coast Guard, where he flew the helicopter and then somehow also managed to be the guy at the door yelling “Go! Go! Go!” as troops parachuted out. He was not on the ground, he told us, so he never went near the tunnels. Later in the tour, however, he told us of leading reconnaisance missions deep into the jungle to find dead American soldiers so their bodies could be sent home. He would have a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, and he showed us how he would yell, “Billy, go that way!” and “John, over here!” At one point he claims to have worked for John Kerry while he lived in New York, though he moved back to Vietnam because he couldn’t stand American food. He was sure to let us know that his dad was an ambassador to the United Nations. Tour Guide Bean loves his country, but he hates his job. He will retire next year, at which point he plans to sit in his hammock and finish the book he is writing. He told us the title and encouraged us to be on the lookout for it in Australia and Europe and America, and wherever we were from.

Upon returning from the bus trip Jon and I went looking for one of the things in HCMC that we missed from the walking tour yesterday: the Jade Emperor Pagoda. We wandered for an hour or more in pursuit of the place but in the end, the search proved futile. At one point I told Jon I found it, but what I saw turned out to be the Prudential Insurance building.

Our trusty Lonely Planet guide assured us that the walking tour of downtown HCMC would be well worth it, so we set out this morning to explore, loosely following the suggested route. First stop was the Ben Thanh market. I have been told that this is the most expensive real estate anywhere in the world, per square meter or whatever. I cannot verify this factoid, but I can tell you that the salespeople there are particularly pushy. They not only try to lure you in with their verbal appeals, but they grab your arms and follow you. The t-shirt people are the worst, and so we had some fun by asking how much the shirts were and did our best to act alarmed and offended that they had the audacity to suggest a price as high as two dollars. The next stop was the fine art museum, housed in an old yellow colonial building with a tennis court in the courtyard. The lady at the desk told me the house used to belong to a wealthy Chinese businessman who lived there with his and two other families, for a total of 30 people. I got some pistachios at a street market and I sprinkled the shells throughout the city. It was a hot and humid day so we ducked inside a frigidly air-conditioned mall and sat beside a fake waterfall for a while, discussing how it would be great to have a moto back home in the States. We looked around at a few other old buildings of local significance and we took photos of posters and statues of Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as the communists affectionately say. After lunch we visited the Reunification Palace, where tanks rolled up and a soldier ran inside and up to the top to change the flags in 1975 when the North Vietnamese took over the country. The War Remnants museum was next, documenting the American War, as they call it, in a way that makes you feel like they’re talking about the holocaust. Jon and I then discussed what it means to pledge allegiance when kingdoms collide, and how these things are all a lot more complex than American or Vietnamese big wigs would have you believe. The last stop we squeezed in was to visit the Notre Dame cathedral, a big brick church that lost its stained glass windows in the second world war. It felt more like Italy than Vietnam, except for the altar. At the altar of the church, below the crucifix, was a statue of Mary, with a neon Ave Maria sign. I’m telling you, Asians love their neon in places of worship, but seeing it in an ancient cathedral was a first for me. Mass was starting so we stuck around. I made faces at the little guy sitting ahead of me but I must say his facial contortions proved far greater creativity on his part than on my end. We ate dinner at a Vietnamese-Italian-Mexican place down an alley and then walked back to our street, stopping at a place called Propaganda, which sells posters with communist slogans and pictures of doves and machine guns and other things that go well together, using a lot of yellows and reds. We chatted with the guy at the store about the governments of our country and his. It was cordial, we thanked him, and then headed back toward the hostel, kindly declining offers from people on the street with stacks of travel guides for sale, who whisper in your ear offers of substances that might be smoked in order to obtain sensations not experienced by law-abiding citizens.

After a breakfast of bread and strong coffee, we hopped on a bus and headed across town and then got in a motorboat in order to navigate the floating market out on the Mekong river. As advertising for what was for sale on each boat, fruits and vegetables were stuck on poles like shishkabobs (pardon the spelling). We went up and down some side tributaries and water ways, under low bridges, through a lot of green. We stopped at one point and got out to admire the flora and then again later on for the fauna. One place had water snakes, turtles and monkeys. I sat in a hammock there for quite a while, eating a plate full of longas, which are mucus-like fruits that taste just wonderful. From there we took the boat back to the bus. For lunch I had sauteed frog with curry. On the road once again, we picked up 21 other tourists, mostly Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh City. I chatted with the guy next to me, a 23-year-old named Dien (minus a few jots and tittles). He recently graduated with a degree in information technology. He asked what I was doing and I told him about World Relief and the things I am doing and when I told him part of it had to do with a website, his face lit up and he repeated the word and tacked an exclamation point at the end. At a rest stop he bought me ice cream. Good guy, Dien. He said if I come back he will show me around. We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at about 6.30pm. Hustle and bustle are descriptive of the city, and particularly the backpackers area. I have definitely detected a little something in the locals I will call the Saigon Swagger. I ignored a woman offering us accomodation and she shoved me from behind. Disheartening at first, but no hard feelings. An employee at a hotel we had found on the internet showed us a room with a double bed and told us that there were no rooms with two twin beds available, so we said we would look elsewhere, at which point a room with two twin beds suddenly became a lot less scarce. We will be staying here for three nights. Dinner at Kim Cafe was satisfactory. A map on the wall showed Vietnam in the middle and the USA small and off to the side. Fanmail lined the walls: letters of appreciation from people all around the world, some offering for Kim to come stay with them in Ohio or Japan or wherever they were from. We checked out some shops with $1 CDs and $2 t-shirts. I am now in an internet cafe with a subpar keyboard that won’t let me capitalize the letter t, and doesn’t recognize the question mark.

I was just going to wait to put anything up here until I returned from Vietnam, but then I thought to myself that it would just be too much all at once, like eating a ten pound bag of candy in one sitting. Therefore I’ll serve it up to you in bite-sized doses. The photos, however, will have to wait.

 DAY ONE. Rode in a minivan from the tour office in PP to some dock in the middle of nowhere. Dock actually consisted on a board propped up at a gradual angle against our long, yellow, rusty vessel. Passengers included, in addition to a couple other Americans and the Khmer guide, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Irish, German, Israeli, British, and South African. Had some nice talks with a few of these, namely an American guy named Peter and the two Irish guys. The Irish guys are taking the better part of a year to travel the world, and in India, met up with the Israeli and invited him along. Took most of the day to get to our destination just across the border, Chau Doc. It began pouring the minute we docked. We’re talking monsoon. After dinner Jon and I walked up and down the semi-lit streets in the rain, soaked and getting wetter, and just having a good chat.

DAY TWO. Met up with the rest of our group, though they were doing the tour in reverse and therefore were on their way to Cambodia today. We got in these little canoes and were paddled through a floating village by women with cone shaped hats. People live in these floating houses their entire lives, although they sometimes pick up and head downstream. They harvest fish in cages between the houses. Kids learn to swim at young ages. Stopped for a visit in a Cham village, one of many small pockets of this Muslim minority people group, scattered throughout Vietnam and Cambodia. “Friendly Muslim,” our tour guide told us. “Not suicide bomber.” The rest of the group headed off in the opposite direction and Jon and I, along with two guides, got in a minivan and went to visit Sam Mountain, which allows for a great view of the Cambodia border. At the base of this mountain is a statue of Lady Xua something. I don’t know the correct spelling off hand. The guide says he prays to her for a Mercedes. “Who else do you pray to?” Jon asked. Tour guide said, “I believe in myself. I believe in hard work.” He paused, then added, “My god is tourism.” Money, and the insatiable desire for more, is the driving force behind everything in Vietnam, I had been told earlier. Later, on the road, we went over a bridge where everyone was standing around. Suicide. Sobering. We stopped at a crocodile farm where I enjoyed throwing cashews at full grown crocs. Hit a couple of them on the head. Body tingled as we walked away, imagining my arm in a crocodile’s mouth. Ate lunch at a roadside stand next door to croc farm. Fish soup that tastes like spicy fruity pebbles. Checked in at hotel in Cantho. Explored. Bought ice cream in a mall. Bowled a game. Started off with three gutter balls but then pulled myself together and finished with a 105. Free massages in leather chairs in the department store. Saw no other foreigners in this city of half a million for two hours. Then saw some tall people with white skin and cameras. I correctly guessed they were Dutch. Followed them into a temple. A friendly monk missing teeth showed Jon and I the ashes of good Buddhists. He asked if we were Buddhist. “No, Christian,” we said. He took us around to the front and took two dragon fruits off the altar and gave them to us. “Gift,” he said. We then tried to think to the book of Acts to remember if we are allowed to eat food sacrificed to idols after all. My recollection was yes. Jon ate his. Mine sits in front of me in the internet cafe, for later consumption.

Time to go.

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.