Thoughts from Week 1 in Phnom Penh

As usual, I’ll be writing about my summer in Phnom Penh.  Thanks for reading my thoughts and I hope they inspire you to express yours as well.

June 18, 2009
7:02am

There’s one moment I savor more than any other when coming to Cambodia – or any new place for that matter, and that’s the first sniff when the airplane cabin doors are open and you step down onto the tarmac.   It lasts but a few seconds – your nose flooded with the scent of a place you haven’t been able to relish in a while.  Cambodia smells like sweat, and fish – its pungency strong like the aromatic fissure at the epicenter of the wet market.  It certainly is not the most pleasing of fragrances I know, but there is no other smell that embraces you and welcomes you quite like this one.

2:34pm
I have been studying for 5 hours!  It hurts my head but I am reading history and writing essays IN KHMER!!!

June 21, 2009
3:18pm

This expat lifestyle is glamorous and comfortable but I am thankful that it is temporary.  For the last three years my sole interaction with Phnom Penh has been on the Global Urban Trek, where the goal is to facilitate a trajectory for US college students to come to love and learn from the third world urban poor.  My job was to organize month-long home stays in urban poor communities and lead them in working alongside community organizations that take a holistic approach to development – all under the umbrella of understanding God’s love for justice and the poor.  It was intense, and real, and right.

This is not the Trek.  We live in a nicely furnished flat in Boeng Kang Kong (expat central).  How I know it’s a world of difference from most of the people in Phnom Penh is not the fact there is a 24-hour guard at the gate, or even that there is wifi in our apartment, but that there is drywall in our apartment!  Drywall!  In Cambodia!  Where you sweat taking a shower!  I’ve only lived in wooden (and sometimes tiled) homes in Cambodia.  This drywall is livin’ large indeed.

More so than the living situation, it’s the type of people I’m identifying with.  We get shuttled to the Royal University in a nice Benz van, and shuttled wherever we want to go.  We go out at night dancing on floating pontoons, drinking watered down cocktails that costs a day-laborers average wage.  I’m not living with a poor family and eating what they eat or following their pace of life; I’ve just adapted my American pace for hotter weather.  Because of where we live and what we do, the type of people I interact with are completely different from what I am used to.  The poor are not my neighbors – they are the ones rapping on our car windows, the ones asking for 1000riel between the bars we hop to and from.  They are statistics we read about and discuss in Khmer class, and no longer the faces we see everyday.  They are the peddlers and street vendors I don’t have to frequent because I’m not on a tight budget.  This distance is the starkest contrast in Trek vs. Expat and it is disturbing to think that had I not Trekked for the last three years, I would have come to think that Phnom Penh was all nightclubs with exotic names and orphanages with desperate ones.

Thank you, Luke 4/Isaiah 58 & 61, for teaching me where our hearts should be.