To feel a country.

Going out to the village for preschool is always an experience with profoundly elated but troubling emotions. More and more, my affections for the children grow and yet because of that, so do my concerns and frustrations. Everyday, it becomes more personal.

Yesterday, a small girl about three-years old came to the school with something like iodine, in red-coloring, smeared all over her feet. She had a second-degree burn, that happened three days prior, and yet was walking around barefoot, making her open wounds worse. Somehow she had either stepped on fire, maybe some coals fell on her or something. The best we could get from translation was that she was "burned by fire".

We immediately phoned Habib, our resident med student. Since he couldn't arrive until after class, the girl had left but the teacher went to get her back and by the time she came, her foot was bleeding out. She was crying so much. We were able to calm her down, give her a painkiller and Habib went to work cleaning her, doing the best to remove the dead skin and properly bandage her up.

The entire incident was stressful because at first we weren't sure if she needed to go to the hospital. I knew enough Khmer to ask the teacher if the kid needed to go and that I had a friend who could take her. She said that the kid needed to go but the mother had no money. The most important thing was to just get that wound closed and out of dirt.

As we sat around watching this brave girl, knowing how much pain she was in, so many thoughts and frustrations went through my mind. A second-degree burn would not have been acceptable where I come from. Any of us would have been rushed to the hospital. Except, here in Cambodia, in this village, the reality was to simply put some sort of disinfectant on it and tell the kid to tough it up. Almost all the children do not wear shoes and some of them do not even have pants or underwear. So whenever they get hurt, any cut or wound is immediately prone to infection.

Today, we saw even more children with strange open sores on their faces, ears, scalps, arms, legs, etc. Their wounds only become more contaminated because flies and mosquitoes go in them. Since families are so poor, parents are usually off somewhere working while children are left to fend for themselves.

I started to think that maybe devastating conditions of village life, especially since I see how the socio-economic effects have taken their toll on the development of children living there. There are some children who are nearly two-years old yet they are so underdeveloped that that they are so tiny. There is another girl who is also three and she does not know how to speak because no one is around to watch her and interact with her.

Children get breakfast in the morning at school and you just see tons of children, maybe 50, almost all malnourished and starving for food. The malnourished ones have huge bellies and really light colored hair. They are covered in dirt, snot and the smell of urine.

Sometimes I just want to cry out to the parents: Please, stop having children.


(I don't have any pictures from yesterday but this one is from today, another child we were cleaning up who had sores on her feet and the side of her head.)

Here on my GLT, I have experienced so much tension - more than I could have ever imagined. I have seen some of the most beautiful, breath-taking images and also some of the most horrific. It is horrific for any child to be sick or injured and neglected. Anywhere that there is poverty - true third world rural poverty - is horrific because it should not be acceptable. Yesterday, somehow - more than all the days before - it seemed that I finally felt Cambodia. I feel this country. I don't really know how else to put it.

I have always been the type of person to feel deeply for many things in life. It seems like I am constantly (re)learning about the reality and horror of Cambodian poverty, and every time, it's like I get the wind knocked out of me. It is exhausting, consuming, sickening.

At the same time, I may be finally starting to move closer to understanding Cambodia. This; this is why I came. This is why I have chosen Global Studies, or somehow it has chosen me. To learn with my mind, body and spirit about the fabrics of this really complicated system of humanity, the strings that pull on them and the small ways to be part of positive change.

To conclude this heavy post, here is a picture of my feet. I think of them as a daily reminder of the physical challenges I have gone through in my own living here.