Presentation of House Visits-Day 1:

(Prepared for friends, family, dorm sections, and other small group forums.)

My experience in Cambodia was a truly fulfilling and rich one that I have been dying to describe to anyone who is willing to listen. Often it has been hard to find the right words to express the significance that the two months in Cambodia have had on my thoughts about a wide range of issues. I was warned countless times that I should be prepared for people having a short attention span when I start talking about the plethora of sights, feelings, and emotions that I experienced this summer. Some even said that others cannot understand and are not ready for hearing about the experience, and we should therefore limit what we say or show from our time in a developing country.

However, both Pete and I have felt an obligation to bring this experience home, and that is why I wanted to hold this small presentation. Fortunately, people have been overwhelmingly receptive to seeing and hearing about the very different issues and complex problems that exist in the world, and all of you who came today are a perfect example. After thinking about how I wanted present the amazing experience I just had, I decided that some of the images and stories from Cambodia would influence and move people most in realizing the poverty, complexities, injustices, and realities of the world. I know that these images and stories are most effective because of how they changed me little by little each day of the summer. With that said, let me start the slide show.

This is the Maryknoll Center House where my partner Pete and I spent our eight weeks. Instead of reflecting on how to survive another day living in the jungle and dealing with the frequent diarrhea that goes along with most ISSLP experiences, our site placement in Cambodia was unique because we not only enjoyed luxuries like our own bedroom and bathroom with hot water, internet, television, a guard, an office manager, and two house workers who cooked our dinners, washed our clothes, and greeted us each time we came in, but we also were able to take advantage of observing and working with a non-governmental organization (NGO), which allowed us to reflect on the deep-rooted problems of Cambodia and the work that is being done to solve them.

Even though I was not living with a Cambodian family, I was still able to learn about the culture and hardships faced through listening to the Maryknoll missioners I worked with and my many interactions with the Cambodian people. This was especially true as I went on house visits, which was our main responsibility during the first two weeks. Pete and I would go with one of the Little Sprouts' staff members to talk to the families of children with HIV/AIDS, and then send the stories to donors in the United States. Little Sprouts gives financial assistance to families that have children with HIV/AIDS, and also has been providing life-saving generic anti-retroviral drugs to the children. This project has strengthened children's immune systems, and has prevented the constant barrage of opportunistic infections that AIDS causes. The following are the stories from my first day of house visits, one of the most intense and revealing days I had in Cambodia.

This picture is me on one of the house visits taking a scary canoe trip through a vegetable farm to see the aunt of one of the children in the Little Sprouts AIDS program. The water below us is sewage. If we tipped (the boat was close to tipping a number of times), I would probably still be in a hospital right now.

Even though this experience was fun and exciting which made it easy to forget the hardships this family has had to face (like living over a sewer with no running water, both the girls' parents dying of AIDS, and an uncertain yield of vegetables), it was impossible during the rest of the day to shield myself from the suffering and hopelessness that often goes along with AIDS.

On the next house visit, I met a kind family who invited me to have lunch. In this picture, you see what I ate-yes, it tasted as bad as it looked. However, it was well worth it because during lunch I became very close with Piquoya

Like almost every Cambodian I met, he was extremely open and friendly. He talked about how he wanted me to send him a picture and souvenir so that he could remember me forever. Although we had fun talking through the Little Sprouts Staff member, Many, who was translating for us, he also talked about how sad his daughter who has AIDS is at night: "She needs someone to hold her at night when she cries. She is still very sad about her husband dying, and she knows she will die soon. It is hard for her to take care of her son when he is sick from AIDS." The ironic thing was how he told this to me with so little emotion. Many people have become so used to the suffering they must see and endure that they become detached from it. The time I spent with Piquoya was special and an extremely revealing look at what his family had to face. These very difficult stories became a recurring theme throughout my time on House Visits. It was uplifting to see how these families banded together to survive, and also to see how well the ARV drugs were working. Still, so much more needs to done to solve the suffering and societal problems that go along with HIV/AIDS.

On this house visit, I heard about the discrimination that is so prevalent in Cambodia. Not only did the woman have to deal with having her husband die, she now has to deal with finding a new place to live. She moved from her old home to live with her mother. Although her mother has lived here for a long time, the landlord told her she must leave because her daughter and granddaughter have HIV/AIDS. Until they find a new place to live, the landlord is charging them a higher rent. In addition to this, people in the area are no longer letting the grandmother who is HIV negative wash their clothes for money because they are worried about her infecting them with AIDS. A patient I talked to on another house visit told us in the same day how people will no longer sell to her because they think AIDS can be transmitted on money! As you can see, the problems just go on and on-the mother has AIDS, the Child has AIDS, the father just died, the family moved in with grandma, family including grandmother must find a new place to live, and no one will let the grandma work for them which makes it hard to pay for a new place… Just no easy answers to any of these complex problems.

Not only was the discrimination prevalent within communities but also within families. In this case, the mother is HIV positive and has two children. The first father died of AIDS, leaving the mother and their HIV-negative boy on their own. The mother remarried, and had another child-Mouen Chinda-who is HIV positive. The 2nd husband is an alcoholic. He never hurts the HIV negative child, but often beats his wife and Mouen Chinda because they are HIV positive. The mother will not leave the husband since he supports the family financially and women often accept this abuse in Cambodia. I don't understand this reasoning, but the new father will not get tested for HIV (a requirement to receive financial support from another AIDS project) unless his daughter dies from AIDS. The government has very few laws protecting women and children, and the laws they do have are very rarely enforced. Like every instance of breaking the law, people can have the charge waived by paying a bribe. It's hard for foreigners to do anything because the women usually won't dare to stand up to their husbands and leave. Women in the culture take a subservient role and many people accept violence against women (in one of Pete's class, all but one of his students had seen a woman beaten). The problems are just so deeply rooted within the society and it seems impossible to find solutions. As Sister Len said, "We can start in a corner, someone else can start in another corner and so on in the hope that eventually we will reach the middle."

And finally, one of the most intense and difficult experiences was when I went on the last house visit of the day to the dump. Because it had rained heavily the day before, the ground was still partly flooded which made it extremely difficult to ride a moto to the house. Because of this, not only did I have to deal with questions about how and why I was seeing children working in the dump, I also had to walk through it myself. I was annoyed when I sunk knee deep into the trash muck while dealing with the sweltering heat, awful smell, and swarming flies. I then became angry at myself for complaining after thinking of the people who had to deal with these sorts of conditions everyday just to make less than 3000 Riel/day-seventy-five cents. It was a truly humbling experience, and hearing the family speak made my complaints seem even more superficial. They talked about how their son would not go to school many days because he needed to help support the family by working in the dump. So many children are in the same situation throughout the country. In order to survive, many of the families on farms, the people in the dumps, or beggar families cannot afford to have their children go to school. This intense and horrific poverty that stops children from going to school is also one of the causes of the rampant child trafficking in Cambodia. My time in the dump gave me one of the most revealing looks at the causes and complexities of all the problems in a developing country like Cambodia.

With stories like these that I continued to hear throughout my time in Cambodia, it was impossible to escape the realities of the world. Because we live comfortable lives in America, it is too easy to forget all the people who are affected by this poverty not only in Cambodia but also right here at home in America. I guess one of the most important lessons I took away from this day was how I needed to be more mindful of how different decisions affect the poor in the United States and around the world. Looking at just this one day, a number of problems and decisions in the western world are relevant-large pharmaceutical companies pushing for American AIDS money to only go to projects that do not use generic drugs, the current American policy that says the money for AIDS should only go to organizations that teach abstinence first (try telling that to a brothel where the women and their families can only survive by having sex), the Catholic Church's insistence that support should not be given to programs that give out condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, the discrimination that exists in America against AIDS patients, the 40 million people in America who do not have health coverage, and so many others.

The decisions we make really do matter. Too many times I think people discuss politics without realizing who the policies hurt or help-it's too easy to treat the poor as a statistic and not try to understand the complex problems that they must face. It's also too common that the "experts of the world" make decisions without any first hand experience with the people that the policies will affect. Hearing almost every person I saw on house visits say, "Tell people in America about the problems, and please help us" to me served as a lesson from all those facing poverty around the world. We must be receptive to hearing the plight of the poor, and we must realize that so much more can be done to alleviate the suffering.

I now have a short DVD presentation that Pete and I made, which highlight some of the most important images from Cambodia. (Play DVD and give brief descriptions of the pictures).