Roughing it...and loving it

I’d been looking forward to last week for nearly a year! Shortly after committing to Logos, I saw Facebook albums from last year’s teachers showing the high school Bible camp. I’d heard it was great for building relationships, and I love anything that involves lots of trees. So I was thrilled to be invited along as one of the nine staff members to chaperone last Monday through Friday. I wrote my middle school substitute lesson plans, jumped on a bus, and headed six hours north to Jumbok Hoas (“Flying Tree”) Adventure Camp, near the Thai border.

Not everyone’s enthusiasm matched my own. In fact, the principals had spent weeks on the phone convincing certain parents to let their children attend this “mandatory” event. This province, Preah Vihear, has had a border conflict with Thailand off and on in the past two years. Although we were hours from the conflict, parents claimed their children might be unsafe. Besides, it’s not appropriate for good Khmer girls to leave their families for a week, even for a school-sponsored activity. Four ninth-grade girls were stuck at home, assigned a “ten-page” paper (which turned into three) and forced to pay the camp fee anyways. Other students grumbled about the hardship of leaving behind their Facebook accounts, their house helpers, and their air con. For some, “vacation” always involves fancy hotels and gourmet dinners. I was shocked at how many would never willingly go into the forest, or any nature setting besides the beach.

You have to understand that in Cambodia, leaving Phnom Penh is always inherently an adventure. It was on the bus that several Korean students and I tried our first fried crickets. They were surprisingly good (kind of like potato chips); I even ate a second without persuasion. At the rest stop, we were swarmed by poor children hawking fruit, craving our ice creams, and clinging to our legs. Shortly thereafter, the thick red dust from the dirt roads started entering the bus through the air vents and choking us, forcing us to breathe through our air masks or sleeves for a few hours. Several students screamed as boards cracked on a few of the bridges. Ten minutes from our destination, we tried to go around a broken bridge and the bus got stuck for a hot, sticky thirty minutes as moto drivers stopped and stared, fascinated. We had to walk a half-mile with our things because the camp’s road wasn’t equipped for buses.

The camp was the most rustic I’ve ever been to. We had electricity for a few hours each evening, which just meant lights in the cabins and along the path. Guys’ and girls’ bathing areas were visible to each other (awkward!) and involved the traditional method of dumping buckets of water from two giant tubs. All the new girls were nervous about their sarongs: you’re supposed to bathe wearing a huge tube of colorful fabric with elastic at the top. (I missed the memo on that and wore my swimsuit and shorts. Next year I’ll know better.) Showers were thus slightly nerve-racking as well as jam-packed, although they took top priority for everyone given the heat. People slept on either thin mattresses or traditional hammocks, both shrouded in mosquito nets to ward off malaria. Our cabin featured footlong geckos and biting ants, I shared the squatty potty with a frog and some very large spiders. Thankfully, there were no appearances by the cobra that had bitten a guy at the camp two weeks earlier.

I was intrigued by the number of students afraid of heights. As I reflected further, I realized Cambodia doesn’t have much that’s safe yet daring. People around us take crazy risks all the time out of necessity. For example, the rappelling tree that we climbed using harnesses and ballayers is roughly the same height as the coconut trees by my classroom window that workers scale unaided weekly to collect coconut milk. But risk-taking might not be seen as a fun thing that someone would seek out, even when it’s actually far safer than the moto rides we brave daily. Some students surprised themselves by enjoying the high ropes elements; others bore it as best they could.

Camp was a new adventure for many of us. Then again, Logos had a poisonous krait snake in the girls’ locker room two weeks ago, and dozens of people in my neighborhood shower in sarongs and sleep in hammocks. So in some ways, it was just like the lower/middle-class experience of life in Phnom Penh. All told, most of us enjoyed the adventure, even those who dreaded it. I personally can’t wait to return next year. But it sure made life here in Phnom Penh feel luxurious when we returned!