Thinking about Cambodia

These next thoughts will be split up into several postings--indulge me as I work through the answer to the question that so many of you and others asked me:  Why Cambodia?

I am sitting in a hotel right now, in Phnom Penh, waiting out an afternoon Monsoon.  I was thinking about what brought me to this fellowship year in Cambodia (jet lag has a way of keeping your mind whirling about while your body tries, and fails, at every attempt to really rest).  What I kept on coming back to was how I never really imagined that this would be the country I would end up in.  When I applied for this program I imagined South or Central America first.  Perhaps Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, or Peru.  Places I could finally achieve a real level of fluency in Spanish, places where my wife, Laura, could imagine herself living.  Tango in Argentina?  Why not?  Or maybe Turkey, which I enjoyed so much during a Fulbright -Hays program for teachers 5 years ago.  Or Morocco, Algeria.  Places to study Arabic language and music.  Lots of places, but not Cambodia.   

Why not Cambodia?  When I was matched to this project I initially turned it down.  Maybe it's my generation, but all I could think of was Nixon's illegal bombing and invasion of that country, which was followed by civil war, and then the ghastly genocide of the Khmer Rouge.  And the painful rebuilding of a country devastated by this weight of history.  No way I would want to live there.   Plus the heat of the jungle...  could I even survive it?  But I spent a weekend reevaluating this hasty decision.  Why was I applying for this fellowship?  Certainly there was the desire to travel, to live in a different culture for a year and really experience it.  Then there was the desire to simply mix things up.  I was turning 60.  My wife already turned 60.  It would be easy to continue things as they were, continue to teach drama and ESL in the public middle school I have called home for 25 years.  So maybe I needed to move out of my comfort zone a little to really mix it up. But Cambodia?  It was my 26-year-old daughter who changed my thinking.  She said something along the lines of "Perhaps you got placed in Cambodia because that's where you need to be.  You probably will travel to all the other places you want to go at some time, but you will never go to Cambodia.  I'd go there if I were you.  It's only a year."  And that made me think differently about this possibility and rather than resist it, accept it and learn from it, perhaps learning something I didn't expect. What that will be I am not entirely sure of, but for my next posting I want to write a short anecdote about something that happened in Oakland, California soon after accepting the fellowship in Kampong Cham, that I think captures the essence of this quest. I leave you today with two photos I took at the central market here in Phnom Penh, where we met a Cambodian woman from California, who left here at the age of 8 after she survived the Pol Pot regime, and who shared with us her bag of silkworms (to eat-- not bad, crunchy and clean) and left us with hugs and tears and promises to meet again.  We've had a lot of that (hugs and tears) in only two days.  And maybe that's why Cambodia.