I remember not wanting to go to school as a child. I recall praying for a snowstorm to hit northeastern Iowa and force the doors of the institution to close for the day. Here, in Cambodia, children go to school six days a week (Monday through Saturday). Smiling faces and books in hand, they walk together along the dirt road in their white tailored shirts and navy blue pants/skirts. These kids are thirsty to learn. They know it's their tictket toward opportunity. Most, if not all, of the parents were denied the right of an education by the Khmer Rouge regime. They know very little and are afraid of what they don't understand - a truth I've discovered exists for all people, everywhere. These children are not only showing strength and courage to do something that their parents are unfamiliar with, but they are running toward the doors. It's insatiable, this kind of fervour to learn. The mentality for living is so different.
There is a program that's starting up now through the Angkor Hospital for Children that will buy one person (street children or struggling mothers/women) literacy education for one year all for $35. I have spent $35 on a pair of jeans...on sale. To think of the things I've spent money on, and then to see what that kind of money could do here for people...to get them off the streets, to get the children to stop begging, the young girls to stop selling their bodies in the local bars, the mothers educated enough to work a job and not be cheated because she doesn't know how to calculate correctly...at the risk of sounding like Sally Struthers, $35 can change a life in Cambodia. But in the states, $35 can't fill a tank with gas. The idea of it is astounding, unbelievable, mind-boggling.
The average working person in Cambodia (by working, I mean twelve hours a day, seven days a week) makes around $25/month. These are people with children to feed, rent to pay, and all the other everyday expenses of living...what happens when you can't afford to help educate someone in your life?....someone you desperately want to have a better life than the one you have known?...you stand knee deep in a rice paddy, if you're lucky enough to be part of a family that owns land. You stand in snake infested waters and hand plant single, green blades into the mud below. You stand under the burning sun of Southeast Asia and you move as quickly as possible....you are 5 years old. It doesn't matter. You want to do it. You have to do it. It's what you know. It's life. Work. Eat, if you get fed. Go to the city center and beg if your parents ask you to do so, because they know you have better luck at a U.S. dollar than they do.
It costs 12 cents to buy one egg in this country. The farmers who farm the eggs can't even afford to eat them. This is not a plea for charity. This is not a PSA for poor, Cambodian farmers or uneducated children. Some things in life are hard to face. The things we want to make easy for ourselves to ignore are the things that we cannot, without guilt, look in the eye. But if we only would, if we only would just be aware, just pay attention, the world may have a better chance at unification rather than division. What are we all so afraid of? Is it that greed has taken over our hearts so intensely that we cannot possibly believe our money or time would really make a difference? How sad it is that we have all become so cynical in such a safe part of the world. We have nothing to be afraid of....except maybe ourselves and what we are becoming as a whole. People in countries that are struggling...people who are waiting outside the doors of a school to be let in...they have every opportunity to know fear and succumb and yet they are unafraid...or they are the bravest souls you'd ever want to meet.
