Cambodia Update May 2010

“They claim it might be cholera that killed him.” The project manager broke the news that the younger brother of a child in our feeding program had died from severe diarrhoea.

It’s ROASTING hot but I was making the most of the early morning cool when I looked up at the razor wire around the compound and wondered when I stopped noticing things like that. It made me realise how certain things now appear normal and I became aware of how at home I feel. Growing up in Asia means that a lot in Cambodia is ‘normal'; other things have become ‘normal’; yet there are still some which will stay ‘abnormal’ – like passengers on motorbikes who have an arm in the air holding an IV drip or seeing people with missing limbs - a reminder of the Khmer Rouge horrors.

New Role at Work

A lot has changed since January. I left the provinces and my job as M&E coordinator in agriculture and water and moved to Phnom Penh to take up a new position as Programme Manager of four projects. Three are church relations projects, one of which teaches churches about HIV/AIDS and mobilising them to reach communities through home-based care and education through sports and youth programmes. In a country where the majority of churches are three years old or younger it is good to see them start to look outwards to help surrounding communities. The fourth project provides supplementary feeding to acutely malnourished children in urban resettlement communities. The team also provides training in Parenting, Nutrition and Hygiene to complement the feeding. In all of this I’m learning and growing in the running of the programmes - from implementation to reports, proposals to budgets, monitoring to building the team.

The staff teams are great. We’ve spent time doing team building exercises like sharing our stories. This has helped me learn lots more about Cambodians and the impact history has had on the present. It’s sad that the realities of oppression, poverty, social and family breakdown start to become less shocking after hearing stories about it too often. One after the other, stories set in Khmer Rouge times: a guy whose grandma shared her food with him when he was growing up when no one else would, to the point that she starved and died in his place; another whose father left and he would wander the streets abused by others; the woman whose parents died and who made her way to the refugee camps in Thailand hopping between camps escaping the abuse of the soldiers. They go on and on, but, the team gives me hope for the nation. They are a group who want to give others a better chance than they had. I don’t want to become numb but I also don’t want to become paralysed by the desperation. God, will you use us to bring healing to this place?

In saying this, we have our fun and, with the number of NGOs in this city, it sure isn’t a tough place to live! I have been in my apartment above a Khmer family for 2 months now and have joined a house church which is fantastic. I’ve started to schedule in Khmer lessons as I realised that I would never have the time unless I put it in the diary.

Posted by: Paul McKnight on Tuesday May 25th, 2010

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