Boeung Tumpun Community Development Program

In the southwest outskirts of Phnom Penh a gravelly road gives way to a path of dirt and cement chips. On either side houses stand on stilts in the dry season. In the wet season you can only reach these houses by boat. When the water drains the road appears with new muddy holes. The villagers fill the holes in with broken slabs of cement and rock, a solution that creates a navigable but painfully sharp road. The families live here temporarily. At any time they may have to move. For this reason they try to build their houses of steel, to carry easily to their next home. The poorer families have to use wood. Outside the houses are fields of a cheap vegetable - a staple of Cambodian diet, whose name I can't recall.

Sister Regina's Community Health and Education Project comes with a tarp and a deck of cardboard signs. Children come with babies on their hips. Mothers arrive with children to drop off. Children and teacher spread the tarp out on the cement yard under a house.

Class begins. The children, ages 0 to 10, are attentive. They love the attention from the teacher. They love when she calls them up to answer questions. They sing a song about dengue fever. The dengue fever mosquitos come in the day, they sing, so when you rest in the day make sure to be covered.

Regina let us watch this class and take pictures. The children in the back were distracted, catching my eyes to steal a smile. The teacher was animated though. I couldn't understand the words, but it was clear that Regina was right when she said this was a natural born teacher.

Anyone is welcome to the class, but the parents usually don't attend, and the kids don't travel more than a couple hundred meters from their homes. For this reason, the classes move from one small neighborhood to another. They find a nice patch of concrete under a house and ask the owner if they can hold weekly classes. None of the owners have never objected.
Above, the children demonstrate covering your mouth when you cough so you don't spread tuberculosis.

Even though the adults don't come, the health messages taught reach the adults as the kids share their new knowledge with their families. Watching the kids, I saw the benefit went well beyond the health education. Children in poor families hear much fewer words than their richer counterparts. The children we saw who didn't attend class wandered about the road unsupervised. I'm not sure what the kids would do all day, but it was clear that this time with the teacher was a time they cherished. The fact that the teachers come shows the kids that someone cares for them, someone takes time for them, and someone wants to hear their voices.

A few houses down another program was set up. Regina had watched the kids playing and noticed that even the older children didn't play with each other, so much as both play with the same thing. She noticed that the kids had trouble with simple puzzles, even the older kids. So they brought toys to play with - puzzles, interactive games and blocks to help the children develop normally socially and intellectually. This playroom was set up inside one of the one room houses, rented from the owners for $50 per month.


The kids were playing a game they had invented using cards with pictures of fruits and vegetables, many of which I couldn't recognize myself, but they all knew the names in Khmer. Unlike the children we'd seen at the orphanage, these kids were too engaged with each other to pay much attention to us. Plus, why would they want to play with grown-ups who can't recognize a sau- mau when they see one?

Some thoughts on the Khmer Rouge

Cambodia's history from the 15th century on seems to get worse and worse until the last two decades. I'm not a historian or a politician so I won't attempt to explain the history here. However, to understand the current state of the country, I found it helped understand the short rein of the Cambodian Communist Regime that was astonishing both in the extent of its cruelty and in its short-sightedness.

The leaders of the Communist revolution originally learned of communism through their Paris education. Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Khieu Thirith and Khieu Ponnary represented a young educated class that wanted a better situation for their country. Following these friends through their adulthood, we see a slow transformation that I find difficult to explain. A wish became a goal, a driving force, and then an obsession. The Khmer Rouge leaders, then named the Kampuchea People's Revolutionary Party, fought their way into power from the Cambodian jungle. They picked up party members from the peasantry and created compounds of workers and soldiers. In part because of the folly of Cambodia's leaders - first Prince Sihanouk and then his usurper, Lon Nol - the Khmer Rouge finally took over Phnom Penh in 1975.

The Khmer Rouge immediately evacuated the city, advising the residents that the US would be bombing there and that they should leave behind all belongings. The fortunate displaced people were divided and sent to compounds in different regions of the country to join their comrades who had already become accostomed to long days of work, insufficient food, and no leisure. The less fortunate people were asked for their biographies. Most of these people were promptly executed. The first round of executions targeted officials of the previous regime and those considered too educated to be useful.

Those who survived and moved to the compounds suffered from hunger, over-exertion, but the physical hardship was not the worst. The Khmer Rouge separated children from adults, sent family members to different regions, and casually executed people who showed too much attachment to their family. The Khmer Rouge was insecure in its power, and ruled by terror. One group after another became the scapegoat for the failure of the nation to move forward according to plan. The real reason for the failure is that the people with the education to plan irrigation, dams, agriculture, etc. had all been murdered. Furthermore, the citizens were not working to their full potential because of miserable conditions. Fear of harsh punishment brought about deception, which in turn bred more deception.

In Phnom Penh, a secondary school was converted into the infamous S-21 prison, called Tuol Sleng. Prisoners at Tuol Sleng were chained to their beds and questioned at regular intervals. The questioning involved various torture methods. Once the victim had written in his or her own hand a full confession of completely fictional crimes, he or she was taken to a field and bludgeoned or shot to death. The few survivors give horrendous accounts of what happened there. The prison has been converted to a museum, which I visited while in Phnom Penh. Just hearing the stories is dehumanizing. Hearing about all the crimes and victims, I found that I feel not just sympathy for the victims, but also guilt for the perpetrators. Something of the evil seemed to seep into me and make me feel melancholy and cruel. It took several hours for my bleak mood to wear off. This photo was the only I took of Tuol Sleng. It is so strange to think such a bright sunny place could be the site of so much misery.

I can't blame the poverty and lack of education in today's Cambodia on only the Khmer Rouge. However, that particular history - one of torture, against family, education, and love between people - gives a unique perspective in understanding Cambodia's culture. I visited Tuol Sleng the day the trial of Duch, the prison's head, began. I never heard a Cambodian mention this while I was there.

The gains the country has made since the Khmer Rouge lost power to Vietnam in 1979 are impressive, but there is still much, much more to be done.

Dinner with the Sisters

Possibly the best night of the trip was when my Aunt Lulie and Sister Regina invited us to share a meal at their charming Phnom Penh home. As Harry put it, "I never knew a dinner with nuns could be so much fun."

I could see how you can live your whole life without marrying when you have a family of sisters like this. Relaxing on the breezy terrace, each of them shared what had gone on during the day in their respective projects. Sister Mary shared her frustrations at the impenetrable database that had been created for her Little Folks program for children affected by HIV. Sister Len talked about an intense session training active listening that brought up painful stories from the participants. There is a lot of pain in this country's history.

Lulie had prepared a tasty cabbage salad, ratatouille and cake, quite a change from our new Cambodian diet of amok, curry and fresh fruit shakes. Over the meal we talked seriously about world issues, and fell inevitably into laughter. When we discussed family planning and gay marriage and I found these Catholic women supported both I had to ask, "What do you think about what the pope says?" Neither Harry and I expected the response: a collective snort of laughter. Finally, Sister Len said, "With a grain of salt!" As they explained, out here in Cambodia, the pope doesn't much notice what's happening and they prefer it that way.

Sister Helene and Sister Regina let us laugh at their expense with their city slickers tale. Coming from New York and Chicago, they were astonished to see the livestock that creeps, prances and hops through Cambodia's roads. They were surprised to find cows come up higher than your hips. After all, you can't see how big they are in those picture books. Crates of chicks and bulls pulling ploughs seemed right out of a storybook. The greatest shock came from the dairy cows. Regina and Helene couldn't understand why the visiting dairy farmers were so preoccupied with caring for calves. You don't need calves, right, just adult cows? Both believed up until that day, just two years ago, that cows graciously produced milk expressly for humans. What a shock to find they were taking the milk from a needy calf! They had a good laugh about their innocence.

When the night guard arrived at 8, Lulie had to shoe us out for bedtime. As I was graciously kicked out of their happy home, I noticed I'd never felt so welcome. Thank you, to all of the sisters who made us feel at home.

Sr. Luise at the Royal University of Phnom Penh

Our tour began when we arrived by tuk-tuk at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP). The place was a university before 1975, when the Khmer Rouge devastated the educational system, relocating everyone to provinces and killing almost all of the teachers and students. When the university started back up in 1979, there were 3 professors and 36 students. Having suffered through years of war and a recent regime of terror and anti-bourgeoisie, this was worse than starting over from scratch. The Cambodians were building on a shaky foundation and a haunting past. Teachers taught what they knew, even if that meant teaching from a high-school education. Because the US had imposed an embargo against Cambodia that lasted until 1992, most of the aid to Cambodia came from the Soviet block. Nevertheless, the university made progress, a testament to the resiliency of the university staff and their faith in the value of education.

When the small Maryknoll team arrived in 1991, the university had one classroom serving as a library, which was locked. Knowing the trauma the country had suffered so recently, I was impressed to see how the university leaders, faculty, students, and visitors like Sr. Luise had transformed this skeleton of a school into a serious place of study.

"It looks like it's a serious university," I said, as Aunt Luise whipped us through the bustling campus.
"I know, isn't that funny!" she quipped, "The website looks like a real university website too! People e-mail me wanting to study here. I have to e-mail back and say, 'you don't want to study here!'" She chuckled, but she's modest. While the school has a long way to go, everywhere were signs of the work she and the other leaders put into it. There was an English department whose staff got its masters abroad. Funding from the World Bank, the University administration, the Ministry of Education, RUPP filled a real library full of books in French, English and Khmer, along with a fleet of used computers. In crevices were biological tables and journals that no one in the university knew how to use...yet.

Uniform students swarmed the library entrance, where they had to check bags so they couldn't steal the books. The door woman is illiterate, but keeps count of the library's patrons by having the boys put a marble in one basket and the girls put a marble in the other upon entry.

"You see, the students use the books. They love the books. The professors don't use the books, but this will change as the students become professors," she explained. But the books weren't the only draw to the library. The internet had a parental blocker, but the students found sites that leaked through. How did she know? "We find pornographic sites bookmarked at the end of the day," Luise said.
"They bookmark them?" I said.
"I know, aren't they stupid? They're kids!"

On the second floor of the library we saw the offices, with stacks of books yet to be shelved. Asia Foundation--Books for Asia Program has a deal with the customs agents that allows them to bring in boxes of books untaxed. Without this, the library would never be possible because the books would be taxed thousands of dollars at the border, or simply stolen. The library workers are paid so little that Luise has to supplement the salary so they can afford to stay a full day. Otherwise the library would only be open half the day. In fact, this same arrangement works for the entire administrative staff and professors. Teachers are not paid a living wage in Cambodia.

I was proud to be introduced as Luise's niece. Every person we met glowed with their respect for her, which she had gained even though she wasn't the person in power, she was a newcomer, and a woman. She knew what to do, and she brought an attitude that no one could stop, or that no one wanted to stop. I saw that she had gained their full trust and I could see why. She has a clear vision of what needs money and attention - books, world-class education abroad for future professors - and what can wait: - restoring the campus pool. She understands that even what looks hopeless now can change direction in just a generation or two, and she has the decisive attitude needed to push it forward. Above all, she has tremendous respect for the people who work their, their struggle to move forward in the wake of hardship.

"Can you imagine what it must have been like for them. Imagine if you and I were the only two people left in the family," said Luise. And I had tried to imagine, but it's odd how you cannot. You can read the horrors, see the pictures, look into the eyes of a person who has lived through torture, through the death of his or her entire family, and yet you still won't understand. Just me and Luise left out of our lively family of over 70 people? Impossible. To see these professors teaching as they can, pushing for what resources they can grab for their students, is to see at once the damage that so many external and internal forces have inflicted, and to see the power of hope and creating a better future.

I asked why Luise was no longer teaching. She explained that consistent attendance was a problem in the university. Because she had many responsibilities, she could not always make it to class. Even though the students still would have benefited from her instruction, she judged that this was not worth setting a bad example of poor attendance, so she devoted herself more to administrative and advisory role.

On our way back to the offices we popped into the back of a computer class. A student hid a photo on his computer of a half-naked woman a second too late. Don't let a nun catch you at that. The professor strolled over to meet us. "This one was looking at naked ladies," Luise reported. I had a feeling the professor would give much less retribution than Luise would have.

At coffee time we met the university's resident ex-pat professors. A psychologist, a chemist, and a handful of other PhD's had come from their respective countries to teach here. Ken, the chemist and biologist, explained how Khmer children were taught never to ask why. The first talk he gave in his class was on learning ask why. "Your experiments won't work sometimes. You have to ask why and try to figure it out." He said they learn that lesson quick. These are smart kids. They test into the university through one of the few honest testing systems, and come from all over Cambodia.

The latest high-tech innovation in the school was a basic database that had been set up by an outside organization so that the university's only IT worker could alter the structure. He showed us how they could now track students' grades and demographics in the database. This was a great time-saver over recent times when each grade was logged by hand in a notebook, and certainly leaps ahead of the library's marble system. My boyfriend reflected a few days after that at that moment he may have been the most advanced programmer in the entire country. It was strange to realize this was almost certainly true. RUPP hosts Cambodia's most educated and we'd met the best IT staff of the school. I say this by no means to devalue the professors at RUPP who have been pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I'm simply highlighting that anyone educated here could put his/her skills to excellent use bringing Cambodia up to speed. If you ever wonder if you can make a difference in the world, go to Cambodia and you'll see you can.