If you’re one of the 10-12 people who have perused this blog, you may have noticed a few things about it. First, there’s roughly a year long gap in between my first set of posts and my last two. If you’re a bit more detail oriented, you’ll also notice that I have not only changed organizations, but countries as well. After returning to the good old U.S. of A, I got a great many questions about how my experience was. If you’re in the know then this will be review and I’m sorry for wasting your time with this story again. However, most of you probably received a pretty generic answer, mostly because a) the story is long and rather complicated and b) I was so perturbed by the situation that I wasn’t sure that I could have given a non emotional answer. Considering that this incident is almost a year old, I figure why not hammer the last nail in the coffin.
While serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kingdom of Cambodia I learned a great deal about how aid-work operates. I also learned that Peace Corps, like most entities nowadays, is a business. They have a brand, it’s called America. They market it overseas by sending some of it’s best and brightest to make it look good…and maybe do some low level snooping on cultural patterns, social norms and socio-political structures and report data back to HQ too, but that’s beside the point. Nevertheless, my site (Peace Corps lingo for the village I would be living and working in) arrangements were pretty spartan to say the least. I lived in a house on stilts and squatted over a hole for a toilet. Jumping spiders and what may have been cobra snakes made occasional appearances but the geckos, mice and mosquitoes were my best friends. I slept on a foam pad under a mosquito net and meal times were generally depressing. When I wasn’t busy killing/eating bugs (crickets are a delicacy there) or getting beat by my host sister at Connect Four, I was at the Akpiwath Health Center. My official title was Community Health Educator, though everyone called me ‘gkru-payt’ (doctor), probably because ‘nek smut jet sok-a-pee-up’ (health volunteer) was too many syllables.
I spent most of my time studying Khmer (official language of Cambodia) and writing to distract myself from my aching stomach, but on many days I did actually give health presentations on water and sanitation hygiene (WASH) and nutrition-I may or may not have administered a vaccine or two, but we’ll leave that to imagination. My first accomplishment of value was negotiating a project with USAID that allowed a few hundred people in a remote village (k’long popork..say it three times fast) to receive some much needed mosquito nets in a flood (and therefore Malaria/Dengue) prone area. I also had a few other skills that I used to my advantages. The first one, was English. Most people in Kampong Chhnang province (sort of like a state, only smaller) wanted to learn our language; not because they cared that much about our culture, but knowledge of a foreign language for many was their only ticket into earning enough money to move away and hopefully have a better life elsewhere. Thus, I tutored my staff and a few village members at my health center for a few days a week. My second and perhaps most admired trait was the fact that I was probably the best soccer player in the entire village. I became a coach for the local team and would also play in games from time to time-that is, until I found out the locals were using said games to gamble; It helps to have someone on your team who’s twice the size of most all the locals. Anyway, be it bravado, ambition or just plain stupidity, I set my sights a bit higher on my next project, taking my service in a direction that I would have never imagined.
I came to find out that a good six NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations for the un-indoctrinated) had completed projects at my site ranging from WASH (remember those acronyms!) to soccer camps. Unfortunately, just about all of these programs fell into misuse and disrepair, mainly because my village had no skilled workers outside of engine mechanics and rice farmers. To put this into perspective, I went around to various youth-based organizations who had done sports camps, eventually visiting one myself only to find that they ended up being hang outs for kids and adults alike-and usually providing opportunities for men to engage in that good old-fashioned pastime of gambling. In terms of WASH projects, you could find around 6-10 abandoned wells out in various rice fields and Oxfam (an international collective of about 17 NGO’s that work in poverty-stricken areas) were just about done with any initiatives they were thinking of implementing there as well. Translation= working within my immediate area would probably result in little, if any, change. So, I broadened my horizons a bit and as always, the universe provided.
While on a trip to Sihanoukville (beach town on the gulf of Thailand) during one of Peace Corps many travel bans, I ran into an enterprising woman who was looking to establish a partnership between health centers in Cambodia (she’s from there) and her alleged connections in Los Angeles. Turns out, she wanted to get medical/school supplies shipped there and my health center sounded like just the place. To top it all off, a fellow expat friend of hers from France was looking to shoot a documentary and wanted to get the inside scoop on what life was really like in the provinces. Should this prove successful, we entertained notions of bringing actual doctors to train our health center staff so they could provide better service to their 20,000+ constituents, which, considering that the center had only 11 staff members and no doctors…you get the point. A week later I also received Peace Corps approval to spend a few months observing the structure of some already established youth-based NGO’s in the capital, where I would venture once a week to get some tips (and possibly resources) that would help me replicate the same model in my village. Needless to say, things were looking up-until I got my next and possibly biggest lessons in bureaucracy and Cambodian culture.
It turns out that in many Eastern cultures, people will simply say ‘yes’ to be polite. Even if they don’t agree or even know what they’re saying ‘yes’ to or even if the really mean ‘no’. In retrospect, my initial ‘yes’ likely fell somewhere in the middle of some (if not all) of those cultural dimensions and apparently my country director was not the biggest fan of my idea-even if it meant improving conditions for many people who otherwise would have continued getting sub-par medical treatment and education. Idealism aside, I quickly learned that the rumors of verbal intimidation and outright threats associated with my country director were based on truth. When a business is built on an image, forces that govern have no issue whatsoever going outside of their own codes of conduct to coerce their own constituents. Long and short: I was told to stop my ‘extras’ immediately and return at once to my site or risk ‘administrative separation’ (i.e. getting kicked out). Deciding it wasn’t worth the effort and absolutely refusing to go back to a fly-ridden, dengue infested monotony (and with a recent job offer at an international school), I field terminated my service…and may or may not have told them where they could shove their threats…which may or may not have affected the subsequent change in HQ’s security policy.
I don’t want to sell my experience short. In the midst of my tenure as a volunteer and as an Expat I had the chance to meet some very talented and influential people. I made what will likely be lifelong friends and I got the chance to experience places and cultures that I would have otherwise never been able to. I wouldn’t change what happened for the world. This does not however change the tone of my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer because quite frankly, it sucked. Perhaps the most shocking realization is that it wasn’t the diarrhea, malnutrition or the loneliness that made my experience so difficult but rather Peace Corps administration and the realization of how vast and ultimately corrupt governments are-Cambodia, the United States or otherwise (a statement like that could have gotten me arrested in Cambodia btw). I am unapologetic in this statement as it is less a criticism than a simple observation…our nation was built upon and is sustained via the systematic oppression of the lesser privileged (and coincidentally, darker-skinned) citizens of the world. Don’t believe me? Check your product labels to see where they are made, then instead of going on that Carnival cruise line or going to a beach and spending two days out sun-tanning, take a day to peruse your nearest overseas garment factory or industrial mine/plantation. Observe the hundreds of trucks stuffed to the brim with young boys, girls and likely, tuberculosis. These are not lesser people. If anything, I’ve seen more dignity and self respect from people who sleep on bamboo slabs and eat dog for dinner than many of the ‘dignitaries’ (both foreign and domestic) that have graced my presence. The men, women, children and ‘yays’ (grandmothers) of Cambodia have taught me more truths than any book, class, documentary or sermon ever did.
Soap box rants aside, I also do not want to disregard the efforts of the volunteers who served with me. Though half of the health program left due to deplorable living conditions, administrative issues and/or sexual assault (which happens much more frequently than staff will ever admit), many are still in Cambodia doing amazing things; all of us have dramatically different experiences and some of them live arguably better in Cambodia than they did in the states. I would never discourage anyone who is considering applying, so long as they are extremely patient and understand that this experience is a gamble-you don’t get much of a say in where you go, and you have just as much of a chance at having the best times of your life as you do the most miserable ones. I would also implore anyone considering it to really have a clear understanding of why it is they are going. Peace Corps may be dressed up as a purely altruistic endeavor…one could argue that most volunteers are anything but; many of them have political aspirations and are no less prone to screw you over than the staff-selfishness is at the center of more good deeds than we realize.
This post was not intended to be a rant, nor was it an attempt to throw any person or group under the proverbial bus. I am one individual out of the 7 billion that inhabit this global community. At best, I hope that this experience gives others a piece to their own puzzles, so that the decisions of another will be made based on a clearer understanding of the world with which they are dealing.
Thoughts of a Leo 