yonghui says, i’ve got to insert this at the start:
WARNING: LONG LONG POST AHEAD. (: (:

yeah buddies, it’s finally my turn. (: (: haha actually i’m just copying and pasting my blog post about my previous cambodia trip! was there in june for a short ocip trip with my teachers and fellow ex-ocip jc students. the experience really touched me, which was why i decided to sign up for project baray as well. i think i mentioned this in my first meeting. haha so here’s my share! do hope you guys who’ve been on previous trips to share as well, because i like to read about this kinda stuff! YAY. (:

“CAMBODIA gave me the purpose to serve, to continue to serve, and to encourage many others to serve.

it’s incredible how much i’ve absorbed within this short week, together with the rest of the team, and compared to the first udon thani trip i had, this one meant so much more, and taught me so much more. it’s such a terribly depressing place it left me totally disturbed, and images of the killing fields and tuol sleng and all the beggars on the street and everywhere else are still flashing all over my mind, it’s causing a lot of distress. i guess i can finally understand the reason behind tommy&serena’s work in cambodia, cambodia needs help, desperate help.

the teachers&alumni ocip cambodia team: mrlouisho! jt derrick bryan alvin charis faizah tricia meifang claire huiting jayce evelyn jopoh deb jiayi yuwen lulu leqi and me! (:
plus, tommy&serena anna melissa imm kea tom jeff sarin moen sophiak soraign.

AND if not for this team, i’ll totally be dead right now because i had food poisoning, like all the seven others who were part of the village project. we all had our own share of puking and diarrhoea after we came back from the village, and i puked 8 or 9 times and diarrhoea-ed 4 times in one day, had fever for an entire night and made jiayi jopoh and yuwen sponge me all over with ice towels so many times i was severely violated. HAHA. but i have so much to thank these three awesome kids for, because i recovered the next day, absolutely healthy and jumping around.

and essentially, i think every single person on the team was impacted in one way or another. i don’t know how much it may have hit the rest, but it hit me so hard i couldn’t let go of the fact that although there’s so much i want to do, speak about save the world, i am such a nobody. you know if anyone ever asked me straight in my face why i join ocip (like what mrho challenged all of us to think about), i don’t have an answer, because if i say i want to help people and i want to save the world, you could ask me back why do you want to help people, and i’d be dumbfounded. but cambodia threw me the answer, and there, i know i’m not going to stop here.

you know it struck me very hard when we joined the rest of the team at koh rumdual after we came back from our village, how all the people at koh rumdual never never stop begging. even the little innocent toddlers never fail to cup their hands in front of them. i couldn’t understand why they didn’t feel shame, or humiliation when they begged. i couldn’t understand the reason behind begging, and giving to beggars because i always believed if you had your hands and legs, or even if you didn’t, you’d always have something to do with your life to earn what you deserve, to support yourself. it’s very painful to see the children being brought up in an environment where everyone begs for food, clothes, for survival.

and when we were distributing the donation items at the church on the island, i couldn’t stay positive because all of them started getting very rowdy. you see the children swarming towards you like hungry chickens, fighting for what they wanted, you see the children hiding the clothes we’ve given them somewhere so they could get more, you see the women push their children to go wrestle for more. and it’s so hard to feel their gratitude, it felt so much like they took all these for granted. we had to close our boxes and stopped distributing because of all the chaos, and i wished so much i could tell them, you guys don’t deserve our help.

and then, on the very first morning i came, the carpenter insisted that we needed to get more materials, despite already asking for more before. it was never ending, and sometimes you can’t help questioning if they were exploiting us. like what tommy said, they look at you like you’re a big walking US dollar, and it’s really frustrating getting to terms with them because they’ll never stop asking for more.

and because of all these that we witnessed, so many negative feelings started emerging from myself, and i started to ask why tommy&serena or even mrho chose to come back every year to help these ungrateful people, these people who lacked the very basic moral values that govern everyone’s way of living, that lack of self-respect is so blatant it’s disgusting you know.

but then, we took the trip down to the killing fields and saw for ourselves the 8000 skulls unearthed, and the million other skulls that have yet to be unearthed from the killing fields and it made me sick. then we visited the tuol sleng genocide museum, a former high school converted into a prison during the khmer rouge regime, or essentially, a place where many educated professionals, monks, government officials, teachers and students were tortured to death before they were sent to the killing fields. and i still get shivers down my spine when i think about the blood stains on the floor, and the pathetic cells they were forced to coop up in. to tell you the khmer rouge story briefly, there was this odd man by the name saloth sar, or more commonly known as pol pot, who somehow gained enough power to overthrow the government and decide to make cambodia communist. he believed that everyone ought to start off equal as part of the communist movement, so he gathered all the educated people and killed them and made everyone else farmers so that everyone could be considered equal.

guess when this happened? 1975. it’s only been thirty years since the regime, and imagine the impact of the inhumane acts on the current lifestyle now. at least half of the cambodians we see on the streets at present have been through the horrifying experience, and are haunted by it every single day. it’s hard to pick up from where you’ve left or to start anew after all that’s happened, the brutality of the massacre has left the entire country in distraught, and you can see it on every cambodian’s face.

and i guess it’s because of all that happened that made them the way they are today, that there’s nothing worth toiling for. that if you don’t fight for what you can get, and utilise whatever method to gain more benefits despite how much self-respect you have to throw aside, you won’t survive. that education isn’t going to be substantial, because you never know if another pol pot might come in and decide you should be a farmer instead. and then i understood the scenes i’ve witnessed, and i began to blame myself for all the negative feelings that surfaced.

like, i finally recognized that their greatest need ain’t a shelter to stay in, or food to eat, but a change in the culture that’s been troubled by the regime. that the help we’re offering isn’t just manual labour or dollars, but is reaching out a hand to show it’s possible to move on.

to put that aside, we also visited this institution on koh rumdual, another very depressing place where the government deposit so-called undesirable people picked up from the streets, such as beggars, drug addicts, homeless people, hiv-infected patients, etc. when we went there, there were about twenty people locked up in that large sparse empty building, it was very painful to watch. and let me emphasize that they are locked up perpetually, and never let out except to be given food and a short time to bathe. they had nothing, nothing to do or to while time away. all they could do, was stare into space and wait for time to pass, or essentially, for death. it’s a place where you step into and know you’ll never ever smile thinking about their plight. there were even three children, like what jayce said: imagine the life they’re living, the environment they’re growing up in. it’s so tragic, to be born into this world to just wait for your time to die. tell me, where are those human rights everyone claims to have? you could see the resignation and the sadness in all of their eyes, and i wished there was more we could offer other than give them shirts to wear.

there’s so so much more to do at koh rumdual, so much more to give in the future.

the eight of us who were at the takeo village on the first three days got to witness a slightly different way of life. our main objective of going there was to refurnish the library of rom lok primary school from the village. we cleared the terribly infested library from cobwebs on walls and termites on the ground and weird bugs all over the place and dust and dirt, we whitewashed all the walls, we painted murals proudly designed by meifang the awesome artist onto the walls inside and outside the library, we painted the windows blue, we bought new glass bookshelves, and we brought new books from our fundraising project in sajc during pre-expedition.

i remembered the eagerness in the children at the school, they swarmed us like hell while we were painting the murals, yuwen and i felt so claustrophobic trying to paint barney&bj on the outside wall. and when we finally finished the library on the second day in the late evening, you could see the few kids who stayed back to wait for us to finish crowding around the shelves and reading the books together. it’s very heartwarming to see them appreciating what we’ve done for them, and even though it’s only been just two short days of mad painting, and playing silly games with the children on the fields, you could see how much they enjoy everything from the way they patiently wait for instructions and despite the language barrier, it wasn’t hard to connect with the kids. YOU KNOW WHAT, i stopped hating kids after this trip, i used to hate them because i couldn’t communicate with them and i always feel very frustrated but they’re so adorable now i can’t help wanting to go back to mingle with them and hear them try very hard to ask for your name and your age. and i swear, cambodian kids are all so pretty and handsome, you cannot help loving them.

of course, we had the help of kea, tom, jeff and sarin who were our translators and helped us coordinate everything despite being students themselves, and people who were still learning to speak perfect english. by the way, we engaged our translators from khmer heir association (KHA), which is something like a hostel for cambodian university students to stay and study together, and where they’re also given opportunities to practise english with volunteers like us by volunteering themselves as translators. it’s very moving to know that kea and tom were previously from rom lok and came back to help their own alma mater. kea once told us that he’s very grateful for his teachers, and that’s why he chose to provide his service with us. i had a great time working with them really, and getting to know more about them and the village they come from.

/sidetrack! we had a very freaky night at the village because yuwen and i couldn’t fall asleep and we were just tossing around in the dark. and when i opened my eyes in the middle of the night, i swear i seriously thought i was blind, and it was so scary i almost cried. at that time it was pitch black, and i couldn’t see my fingers even if i put my hand 1cm away from my face. because i have slight night blindness, i always had this fear of becoming totally night blind one day and i sincerely thought that night was it. i started fingering yuwen and making sure she was there just for security, and that was when she held my hands and told me she can’t see a shit too. omg, i thank God for yuwen. and it was also that night when the dogs from the entire village started howling and howling for a few hours, and when we asked why the next morning, kea told us ‘sometimes dogs see strange characters at night’. OKAYY. it was really frightening, it was like being in a horror movie yourself. //

on our last day in phnom penh, we also visited two orphanages under tommy&serena’s care, and were given a tour around the orphanages to witness for ourselves the poor living conditions of the orphans. the leaking roofs and torn ceilings, the lack of proper lights which made the whole dormitory seem very dark, the dust lurking all over in the air, the inadequate and unhygenic kitchen, the almost non-existent toilets, and everything else. but life goes on for all the children and youths housed there, you could feel bliss in them, just pure contentment from having a shelter and basic necessities, and visitors like us bringing in donations to offer them. you’re automatically cheered up there because they’re so welcoming and enthusiastic.

it’s also during the visit to these orphanages when i truly witnessed the manifestation of the phrase ‘a little goes a long way’. because we saw evidence of other schools coming over to help, such as pjc and rjc, and people from all over the world such as australia and japan, and everyone comes over to do a little bit but when you put everything together, it makes a huge difference, a huge improvement in the orphans’ lives. and from then now, i don’t say i’m doing so little anymore, BECAUSE a little goes a long way.

well, i guess i’ve covered most of what we did during the trip, it was truly an eye-opener and so much exposure for me. i’m so glad i joined this trip, because it’s definitely a higher level from udon thani, and made me learn alot more about purposes in doing what you do, and providing the right solution to the right cause. it’s not difficult to say, yo i want to help, but it’s not easy to get down to work and not only help, but give the correct help that is in greatest need. it’s like what derrick said, data collection is only important and effective if you act upon it. being in this team changed my perception of alot of things, and maybe like what huiting said, if we were to come back, we have to come back with a purpose, and not just be a random person to do what’s told.

one day, i’ll reach the commitment stage. (:

I’LL MISS CAMBODIA! (: and the crazy team i’m in, i’ve never gone so mad before i really think it’s because of this team that made my seven days so full of laughter, haven’t laughed so much in such a long time. (:”

take care all you fellas! (: i will blog more next time. (:

MINQI