Kampot Connections
by Rach
Kampot, Cambodia
It’s a run-down ramshackle dilapidated town. It looks like it’s falling apart. That could be because it IS falling apart. Apparently, it *was* worse, but now people are flocking trickling back, doing up property, setting up business here. But to the casual observer, who just wanders round town for a couple of days, it looks tired, shabby, old-but-not-gloriously-ancient, dirty, littered.
However, it’s not about attractions or architecture. It’s the people who make a place.
Mrs H had commented that she was feeling like a tourist (not surprising when we were running round attractions and only superficially rubbing shoulders with market sellers), rather than making any connections with PEOPLE.
The very next morning I met my first Pol Pot Survivor. Only a baby when his mother was murdered in front of him, he somehow managed to survive. But nine of his eleven siblings did not, and neither did his father. In 1983, against government orders, he started to talk to himself in the mirror – in English. It wasn’t the mirror that was the problem with the authorities, it was the English and he became very competent at it. Twenty-five years later he would squat on the street with me, sharing his life story, allowing me to connect with a Real Live Person, who lived through the Khmer Rouge regime. He looked just like any normal man of his age on the street – do they all have a similar story to tell?
Then that night, last night at the restaurant that didn’t have the food we wanted, we met two couples. And we connected. Firstly with an American man and his Japanese wife, who met in the Philippines and are now living in Kampot with their two-year-old daughter. For their privacy, that’s all we’ll tell you, but I can say it was *inspirational* to consider their four-years-so-far cost, the sacrifice they are making as they live out their faith in the here-and-now with an eternal perspective.
Then we met the restaurant owners. They don’t just run a restaurant. They also run an orphanage. And when their “children” are old enough, they learn to work in the restaurant to give them a skill that will enable them to support themselves instead of ending up on the streets. The orphanage is small – just twenty-two children, so it will remain family-like. Doesn’t sound like a small family to me! Most of the children have been orphaned through HIV, all the backgrounds we were told were tragic. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine one and two year old babies eating dirt to stay alive until someone finds them, isn’t it? And why did this couple take them in? It seemed their lives were orchestrated to make this the obvious way for them to live! The Chinese-but-living-in-Cambodia-for-many-generations husband was orphaned as a child and grew up in an orphanage. The Vietnamese wife had had an equally sad story. Her mother had run off to Cambodia with another man when she was a baby, leaving her with a father, who remarried and had six more children. He didn’t want her and so sent her to be brought up by her grandmother. When she turned 12, someone promised to take her to Cambodia, to her mother, whom she still loved dearly and was eager to meet. But there was not to be the happy ending she was anticipating. With five other girls bundled in a tuktuk, they were destined to be sold in Thailand. Unfortunately (fortunately?) this girl fell off the tuktuk, gashing her leg seriously. Now useless, she was left at the side of the road. After a harrowing hospital stay (where she was not cared for properly, because she was Vietnamese – she was evicted from the hospital each evening so that locals could sleep inside, but then readmitted in the morning when UN personnel came to check up on her progress), she was discharged to an orphanage. Today she still walks with a limp, and sometimes suffers pain, but sometimes doesn’t. So when these two stories met, they figured it would make sense to get married! And they did. Now they are wooing a new generation of children to the love of Jesus that has changed their own lives.
We connected with them too (and two days later we would bump into her again at the Russian Market in Phnom Penh and be able to visit another of their small restaurants and meet the girls she grew up with in the orphanage – amazing!)
The very next day we would cross the old bridge (and I mean OLD, look at one of the supports….the bridge is to the left of that post!!!)
Just 50 metres up a little dirt road, while some of our lads watched a furniture maker at work (and even got to “help” him cut the scallops on a bed frame), the H’s found themselves in the midst of a gaggle of question-asking people – fortunately there was a young schoolgirl willing to try out her English to augment the sign language! More connections for everyone.
We had expected to connect with so many more people, volunteering here for a few weeks, but with our personal medical dramas preventing us from getting our visas before we came here, we have to return to Phnom Penh without so much as even seeing any of the projects we were hoping to be involved with. So it was a blessing to hear some life-story-snippets from a handful of people, especially when our stay has turned out to be so brief.
Kampot is still a rundown, ramshackle town, but there are people here working at building and restoring lives.
Tags: God, postcard: Cambodia
rayres
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