Jeannie's Blog

For me, as a humanitarian and an anthropology professor, a travel study is a way to bring students into a world full of sounds and textures books cannot provide. It’s a chance to go ‘backstage’ so to speak, and get first hand look, a personal perspective, on world events. This trip to Cambodia certainly fulfilled that role. With Chris Wagner as our guide, and with a fistful of email contacts I’d collected putting the trip together, we traversed the country South to North, East to West – and if you count the history and politics we learned about, through time as well. People are SO nice, coming in on holidays, weekends and nights to share their knowledge with a group of visiting students and teachers form WCSU.

In Phnom Penh we visited historical sites grounding us in the recent tragic events of Cambodia’s genocide: we also visited the offices of World Education and found out about programs to help support the arts, to help kids stay in school, and even how Sesame Street (there called ‘Sabai Sabai’ or, Happy Happy) is helping preschool children get a head start. We saw how Princess Marie, daughter-in-law of the King, is trying to also promote the weaving arts and help empower women in her country (and I had a conversation with the Princess about her lunch with Angelina Jolie – a little surreal, a little bit fun!). We met a young American woman working with the Center for Disease Control whose job is to work with the Cambodian government to formulate policies regarding HIV/AIDS. We visited HOPE International Hospital where people line up in the morning to get a lottery number for a doctor’s visit (unless they have a serious illness in which they will seen right away). We visited Sustainable Cambodia in Pursat on our way to Battambang and then we worked. Our arrival in Battambang coincided with a National Holiday and the US Embassy sponsored the “Trio Chicago” playing Gershwin on a stage by the river (kind of surreal!).

At the Sobbhana day care and school, full of children 2 – 6 years old, the poorest children from the poorest villages, WCSU university students played, laughed, taught, made friendships, painted shutters, walls and doors, (and even sanded latrine doors!). They got dirty, but always with a couple of kids in tow. I heard many a student laugh incredulously, “But I don’t like kids!” while walking the school yard with a child in each arm. Maybe it was just these particular kids, maybe it was just learning a little about something inside of oneself you didn’t know was there. I think the week in Battambang, working alongside Khmers, working alongside the school director Sophal, a survivor of the genocide, was amazing. I kept hearing Sophal’s words of her years under Pol Pot echoing in my mind; especially how, with a smile, she described the fear she felt every night, every long dark night, waiting for sun up when she thought, ‘I’ve lived another day.’

We ate lunch and dinner on mats on the floor at the school, and the school cook, a former restaurant chef, was pretty talented! What she can whip up in an outdoor kitchen over an open fire - morning glories, pumpkin, vegetables with pineapple, all kinds of soups and sauces, yummy! (I gained 3 pounds!).Another memory of Battambang - 12 year-old-girl looking about 8 guiding us through the Killing caves, telling of how Pol Pot would slit the bellies of pregnant women and make a necklace of the fetuses; how people were killed by a blow to the back of their heads and if that didn’t kill them, the snakes in the cave would finish the job. I thought about a course I teach where in one section I ask, “Who gets a childhood?”

We also visited the Maddox Jolie Pitt Foundation and heard about their plans for a Millennium Village – and their program and community development directors came out to our site to as well, very kind.

The last stop, Siem Reap, visits to Angkor Wat – and to Angkor Children’s Hospital where we got a tour and information on volunteering abroad. And to the land mine museum, kind of an ad hoc structure built on the lines of a field camp, where amputees are the guides, kids really, who lost limbs while playing in the rice paddies and the forest. Sobering.

And now, at home at my computer, a few days of reverse culture shock before returning to work.