Cambodian lessons

Editor's note: This is one in a series of journal entries from Rick Gunn, a South Lake Tahoe photographer, detailing his two-year bicycle journey around the world. Along the way, he is soliciting donations for The Make-A-Wish Foundation. To donate, go to wish.org.



By the time I'd entered Cambodia, I'd passed through a doorway.

Not of the physical type, nor the gateway to another country.

But a doorway of perception, where just beyond its threshold lay a new way of seeing.

I'd moved quickly across the landscape - 50 miles in three hours, nonstop.

A gathering of clouds whispered above the palms, and a light rain began to fall. As it did, I tilted my head back, and welcomed each cooling drop like silvery liquid trinkets from the sky.

That's when they'd made themselves known.

"Sok sa dai! Sok sa dai! (Hello! Hello!)," came the initial shouts from Cambodia's children. It was the first of a flood of many tiny greetings.

As I cycled through a succession of villages, they ran to the road by the hundreds. All of them seemingly waiting to greet the random cyclist. All of them running from simple huts to the edge of the roadway, if just to hold out their hands or shout out welcoming calls of glee.

It was a scene I'd witnessed a thousand times throughout Southeast Asia. A scene, I might add, I never tire of.

These tiny voices brought a kind of settling to my mind, and I welcomed them into my heart, as I did the falling rain.

Despite the rain, it was Cambodia's dry season, a time when the harvested rice fields gave way to a tannish-brown stubble. Near their edges stood simple stilted huts that were surrounded by a patchwork of small garden plots.



I'd cycled 105 miles that first day. And did so with a certain ease. This is how I spent my time. Pedaling through the hours, then days, until the days had turned into months. This for nearly two years. I no longer questioned it. It was simply what I did.

By midday next, I'd cycled upon the traffic-choked fringes of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. Before I would navigate a tangle of intersections in the heart of the city, I would cross the Mekong one last time.

This before it flowed east, and branched like a watery sea fan through the delta lands of Vietnam.

I stopped for a moment on a small bridge to gaze out over its tea-colored waters.

When I did, my vision was hijacked by a riverside slum: a gathering of tin dwellings, and impossibly ill-constructed shacks. Catching a speck of movement from the corner of the scene, my eyes landed upon a young boy crouching above a small dirt drainage. He was evacuating his bowels into an open ditch. When he'd finished, he descended the garbage-filled slopes into the astoundingly polluted waters. There, he took his morning bath.

What I was observing was "extreme poverty," a termed coined by Jeffrey Sachs, (economic advisor to the secretary general of the United Nations).

During a recent interview about Cambodia on PBS, Sachs stated that this "extreme poverty" was "not the poverty of inconvenience, not the poverty of jealousy, not the poverty of wanting to catch up with one's neighbor. But the kind of poverty that threatens to take life. And not just threatens ... takes millions of lives (around the globe) from those too impoverished for an adequate diet, that are too impoverished to see a doctor, that are too impoverished to gain access to clean water that they need for survival."

In short, he was talking about much of the poverty I'd observed for the last seven months.

Only this time I was done observing. This time, I'd come up with a plan.

Obviously I couldn't do everything for everyone, but I could do something, for someone. For me, that something meant spending a week volunteering to teach English to a group of impoverished rural children near Siem Reap.

Shortly thereafter, I stashed my bike, hopped on a bus, and made for the north-central city of Siem Reap, a city made famous by its proximity to the temples at Angkor Wat.

The volunteer program I would take part in was the brain child of Andy Booth.

Booth, a successful businessman who'd retired at age 37, was the founder of SAGE Insights, a full-service travel company whose proceeds are dedicated entirely to growing sustainable business in the region, and helping Cambodia's neediest children through educational and social projects.

Andy believes that "a lasting solution to poverty lies in providing the tools and knowledge to a population to help themselves."

I couldn't have agreed with him more.

A day later, I arrived at the Prey Chrouck School, 40 kilometers outside of Siem Reap.

The school consisted of 637 pupils, four toilets, no running water and no electricity. Most of the students were the impoverished children of subsistence farmers.

As I ducked beneath the 6-foot door frame into the classroom, all eyes widened.

"Goot monning teechaah!" they shouted in unison, after they'd jumped to their feet.

"Sok sa dai!" I bowed, greeting them with palms pressed together. This released a cascade of giggles. Their eyes began to race, setting off mumbles and murmurs around the room. My intuition told me that this was speculation. Speculation of whether the new teacher's-assistant was born of a giraffe, or more likely, about which of them was going to have to cut a hole in the ceiling to accommodate him.

With little time to waste, I went straight to it, driving home the hard work of spelling words like, "cat" and "pig." These were funkified foreign words to the native Khmer child, and they wobbled off their tongues like a row of stumbling ducks.

No sooner had we mastered those words, then we began busting out with a rendition of "Ol' MacDonald Had a Farm."

Although I'm sure they all wondered what an "Ol' MacDonald" was, when it came to the "meow, meow" here, and an "oink, oink" there part, there was instant recognition. And with this, the crowd went wild.

I finished out my short time at the school, assisting students, or performing simple tasks that included sharpening pencils, passing out papers or pinning the letters of the alphabet to the wall.

As dull as it sounds, I took pride in each tiny task.

All of it culminating into a small collection of memories of immeasurable pleasure.

When the students finally gathered to say goodbye, I reached out my hand.

Reluctant at first, they began reaching back. Before long, a small stampede moved in and began grasping, as if only to claim that they'd touched the freakishly tall stranger before he left.



- To read more of Rick Gunn's journal entries and see more photos, go to www.rickgunnphotography.com.



March 7-29, 2007

Mileage log: 14,590-14,750

Elevation: Sea level-75 ft.

Neak Luong, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Angkor Wat

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic

concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.



"We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about (ourselves and) others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world."

-- Dr. Muhammad Yunus, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize



"The longer you live, the higher you fly, the smiles you'll give, and tears you'll cry, all you touch, and all you'll see, is all your life will ever be..."

-- "Breathe," from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon"