This week I have been skewering, debating, agonizing, defending, and turning over the bloody and tender guts of the issues I work with every day. I wish sometimes that there was an off button for the images that blare every time I close my eyes, like the shiny white SUV I saw on Tuesday morning splash putrid gutter water all over twelve-year-old John Maren and his one set of clothes as he walked a ways in front of me on his way to Mith Samlanh. When the SUV continued towards me, it swerved away to avoid giving me the shame it threw all over John Maren. The intricacies of those ten seconds and so many others bring my head to my hands. Why is the child John Maren on the street? Does he have parents? Does he hurt? Where did the money come from to pay for that SUV? What has happened in this place where white skin is both a badge of honor and a suit of armor? Am I actually helping John Maren grow into an intact young adult by putting self expression in his hands by way of a camera? Does it all just revert back under and around in a sick cycle?
On some nights when I’m falling asleep guilt and reality overwhelm me and I cry until I can forget for awhile. I think about the girls who are my age and hook their arms in mine, giving their friendship, and imagine the heat and stench and ache of pushing a garbage cart around and around the gravel of the city that has been their life. I think about their mothers selling them to brothels, them escaping but their bodies still owing a debt. I watch like a little film one of the kindergartners proudly showing me a loose tooth and the slow motion of my mind’s eye- camera roving over the deep scars on his cheeks and temples and the chunk of hair missing from his head. I wonder how the pain feels, how indignity stings, if I could bow down like they do and take the licks dealt. I crumple the sheet in my hands and look at the solid walls around me as I kick against the knowledge that some growing, fragile head is fearful and cold on the dark sidewalk next to a father with a knife—and that I know that fragile head but don’t know how to do anything that will help.
There lies the hardest issue. How do I help? How does any one of us else? To quote Paul Farmer, “I wonder fleetingly what even a government of saints and scholars could do in the face of such odds.” I look at the perpetuated cycle of aid right here in Cambodia, the army of NGOs that set up camp right after the Khmer Rouge and have never left. There are so many they are ignominious, they assume responsibility from the government and society, and in many cases fail to effect any change but short-term and potentially harmful transformations when that awful aforementioned cycle turns again. An example of just one facet is how the stereotypical aid comes from the hand of a benevolent white person and their country, which has perpetuated the God-like ascent of white skin here and created situations like that of John Maren and communities evicted to make rooms for spacious tourist pleasure spots. Do we plead and reason with the government? Is it time to wield the big stick for the under trodden at last? But who would be dually self-sacrificing and influential enough to wield it? Has the inherent selfishness of Darwin’s humanity damned some to hell on earth? Can that lovely and convenient statement of “global understanding and community” actually lift some from the depths if ever put in action?
I know I won’t walk away from the life I have been given and built. Deep down in my blackest soul I am glad to be one of the lucky few, to not be retching and indentured, terrified and desperate. I’m glad that goodness and mercy are there waiting for me to grasp if I only stoop my nose to the grindstone. But then here how do I find a pigment of truth beneath my skin? Would I, could I withstand the frustration and anxiety and bitterness of giving voice to the voiceless? I am finding that for all the love I feel and tears I shed, I still shut the door; it is so unbearably difficult to search endlessly for answers and action.
Maybe this new mass soccer teams idea is the answer. Maybe soon this next generation will rise more educated and aware than the last and mobilize a campaign for grassroots moral decency. Maybe clean water could solve it all. I wish I knew. Not only that, I wish I knew how many other minds are on a self-inflicted hot plate chewing on these easily forgotten problems as well—and then I wish the answer would fall as if out of a fortune cookie and a worldwide sigh of “Ahh, so that’s it,” would go ‘round. “Helping people” has become a business, and a flourishingly popular one at that-- from citizens setting up and assigning themselves the NGO label so they can receive government money to the vast marines of proposals, meetings, deals, and signatures masterminded by geniuses in snappy suits.
But I still walk through wailing squatter settlements every day, and I still touch grubby hands with bare-breasted mothers, and bounce mere bones of a child on my hip. I see them fall to their knees and I sidestep heroin needles and yamma straws and wonder if the next passerby will be too young to know and play with them. I work with them and watch carefully designed performances with folk music featuring a little boy who has figured out he is extraordinarily flexible. I teach them cartwheels and aerials and sing long songs when legs get tired and heads droop. I play one-legged tag amidst broken glass and worry about their scrapes and bacterial infections, and tiny arms and intestinal worms. I write long reports and emails and call painful meetings of arm-twisting and brainstorming in my diminutive push for something better.
What cuts me in two and what has brought me to stir the tumultuous cauldron my brain has become is the loss of “the poor” or “the people of the third world” as a nameless, faceless entity, however pitiful or inspiring. They are each and every one a separate, beautiful personality with eyes, sometimes twinkling and sometimes dulled, cheeks, chins, elbows, shins. I can name a seven-year-old goofball who can’t stop giggling or coining silly faces, and a regal old woman with her head wrapped in a korma turban who proudly sells her few dried fish every day while teaching young women traditional songs, and a mentally disabled girl who loves badminton and rap music, and a round-faced boy missing his two front teeth who closes his eyes while he practices hula-hooping and disco dancing at the same time.
As the Haitian proverb goes, “The rocks in the water don’t know how the rocks in the sun feel.”
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