Here's a guest post from my mom, Jan Cooper, about her recent visit. My love of writing is from her... enjoy this glimpse of Cambodia through her eyes!
I visited Chelsea this month, my second time to Cambodia. A fun and adventuresome travel companion from Davisville Church came with me, Holly Ferguson. We spent time both in Phnom Penh and up north with Chelsea's amazing, lovely fellow World Teamers. There we helped lead a two day children's ministries training with children's volunteers who work in the local villages. Then Chelsea and I traveled down south to the shore for a mini vacation. My trip gave me only 8 days in country, but it was a rich and varied time, memorable on many levels.
A typical response when I tell someone that my daughter has moved to Cambodia is, "She must really love it there." After spending seven of the last 9 years in country, she likely would agree that she does truly love this small country on the other side of our planet. But as in any relationship, love doesn't come easy. Love implodes if it's not selfless and sacrificial. Love must patiently learn to accept flaws. Cambodia is not an easy place to live, an intuitive place to love. And for this American, at least, it's not always easy to be lovable when living there.
Because, for all my "I used to live in Europe," and "I speak German," I'm still very much an American. I want to fix things, tackle problems. Going through the streets, I want to organize a Cambodian version of "Don't be a litterbug", the campaign that cleaned up the US in my childhood. I want to tell everyone to stop wearing hooded sweatshirts and jeans in the sweltering heat, that it's okay if the sun turns their skin a shade darker, it's really okay. I want to tell them how beautiful they are, such lovely, amazing children they have, so ready to wave and call out, "helloIloveyouwhat's your name" when we pass. I want to round up the parade of stray dogs off the city streets and their trash diet and give them a happy life on a farm. I'd like to make everyone wear a life jacket on the rickety ferry boat. I'd like to pull aside the clever and intelligent but underemployed tuk-tuk driver who taught himself English. I'd like to reach out to the young woman at the market stall with a life work of selling scarves. I'd like to hand them a pathway to a skilled trade that challenges their minds, an education. I'd like to provide running water for the villages. I'd like to stop the rolling truckloads with thousands of garment workers, all young women, and provide the hope of a different life for them. And, less nobly, I'd like to provide each bathroom a clean working toilet with a real seat and a roll of toilet paper. Oh, yes, and I'd like to send the lizards and toads and snails and super-sized insects to a safe place anywhere outside my four walls.
But I can't. I can't even find my own way through the ever-expanding city. Without a translator by my side, I can communicate exactly nothing. And even if I could say these things in fluent Khmer, it would have only a negative effect to focus on the unchangeable. I'd like to think I'm more able to flex culturally, and am disappointed to find the small luxuries built into my daily routines have clouded my lens. Being there showed me how short it is to the end of my rope, how the smells and heat and poverty around me overcome my appreciation for the world's peoples.
But yet there was so much to love:
The endless varieties of flowers and fruits. Tasting and enjoying passion fruit and dragonfruit and jackfruit and the variety of mangoes. Even bananas tasted richer, creamier.
The beautiful shoreline rising into green mountainsides. The flat landscape of so much of the countryside like a child's drawing dotted with palm trees and triangle mountains.
The crazy patchwork of traffic patterns, where people weave in and out in an unrushed manner and no one seems bothered by road rage.
The soups and stews and heaps of steaming rice and fruit smoothies with the richest of flavors.
The easy way people sit on the floor together.
Hearing my daughter speak Khmer, seeing her joy and warmth in the interactions with the neighborhood shopkeeper, the tuk tuk drivers and market sellers, the worker at the butterfly garden. Feeling her love for this place cracking open my heart, too. Loving what she loves.
The welcome that we got from the bevy of high school girls at the Plas Prai dorm in Preah Vihear. Chelsea bonded with them throughout last summer as she was finishing language training. These are all girls from subsistence rice farming families who would not have been able to finish high school in their village, and could not afford to move to a city to do so. They were the cream of the crop of a group of applicants, and knew they were privileged to stay in the dorm, six to a room on thin mattresses, so they could finish high school.
The families from Davisville Church who followed the call to Cambodia 15 years ago. Spending time in the Gabriels’ home, enjoying home-cooked meals and hearing about SAM, the school of applied mission, which is training the rural pastors and leaders in that area. Meeting up with the Hartsfields, whose focus is shifting to the growing task of leading World Team staff for all of Asia.
The children's ministries training in the open air facility, with all the distractions of chickens and children and loud speakers on trucks and water deliveries, yet culminating after months of preparation by the staff in Preah Vihear and me. Seeing it come to pass, resonate, spark change.
Watching the lessons we taught, now put to work in the villages. A new creativity, fresh ideas to try out, which seemed to be enjoyed by the leaders and participants.
But as I watched, it struck me: would our American kids come and sit on pig feed bags in the dirt and the heat, sing songs at the top of their lungs, and play and take part and listen together? We require so much more in comfort and climate control and technology and glitz. I'm not sure how much our kids stateside could focus on the basic truths without the bells and whistles.
What would a Cambodian think of how we do church, how we live our lives? What would they find hard to love here in America? What would they want to change, but find us intractable?
God love us, God love us all.
