Monday, I spent a relaxing day in the province touring the Takeo community development projects with the visiting MCC Resource Generation group. Strolling in the woods, we saw the hard and beautiful work of reforestation alongside the scars of war and the craters from B-52 bombs. We saw rehabilitated canals alleviating hunger - canals originally built on the backs of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. We heard the success stories of setting up a Rice Bank, where people could borrow rice in the hungry, dry times and pay it back during the harvests. We learned about the community credit union, which kept the villagers money in the community and protected them from paying (and defaulting) on high interest loans. I couldn't help but be joyful at seeing and hearing all these stories, at seeing and hearing men and women who had lived through years of uncertainty and tragedy, now standing as witnesses to change, happily showing us their gardens. I bought some eggplant - the good fruit of a land that was devastated just a few decades ago.

Cambodia is a land of tough history and tough realities, so experiencing things like this is extremely important to creating awareness and hope for others who are not on the good side of things yet. Here, 4.6 million people live on less than a dollar a day. Up to now, 50 cents was considered enough to get the basics of food and water - but that is changing as, in recent years, the food crisis has been accentuated by inflation.

Over the past year inflation has spiked at 10.8 percent, compared with 2.8 percent at the end of 2006, driving up the cost of food and other staple goods and pushing the most vulnerable deeper into poverty.

"About 8.5 percentage points of December's inflation rate of 10.8 percent was accounted for by food price inflation," said the International Monetary Fund's Cambodia representative John Nelms.

For as many as 2.6 million people living in extreme poverty, the situation has been worsening over the last several years, which have been marked by poor harvests brought on by natural disasters such as flood or drought.

This inflation has, in some ways, been the price the poor have had to pay for the great success of the rich. Tourism, the garment industry, and a real estate boom have injected a lot of cash into Cambodia, created some very wealthy Cambodians - and a setup a vulnerable economy. The result, in the words of one of Cambodia's poor, is "This year I'm not at all hopeful...."

READ THE ARTICLE HERE.

Meanwhile, threats to the most important natural resource, water, continue. Cambodia has made great strides in water management, but it shares water with neighboring Asian countries, and nothing is simple. Thailand has considered diverting water from the Mekong, and Cambodia remains vulnerable to water shortages across the region.

Despite the challenges, my trip to Takeo gives me hope that solutions exist. The only question is whether we will seek those solutions out before the suffering of Cambodia is increased even more....

One of the lessons that has been most abiding in my reading of Wendell Berry over the years has been his attentiveness to consequences and the importance of knowing a place well enough to understand the consequences of our actions on that place. When he writes against hubris, the whole thing is predicated on the ability of a person to slow down enough and stop long enough to actually see what is happening. Hubris goes unnoticed when we are flying through life at break-neck speeds. But our hubris, like all our actions, also bears consequences. As Berry has put it, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

So here is one of Nature's votes, a memorial to our own hubris:

Swimmers' Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

The summary is this -

... researchers estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching.

Even low levels of sunscreen, at or below the typical amount used by swimmers, could activate the algae viruses and completely bleach coral in just four days, the results showed.

Seawater surrounding coral exposed to sunscreen contained up to 15 times more viruses than unexposed samples.
[However,] Danovaro says banning sunscreen won't be necessary, and points out two simple things swimmers can do to reduce their impact on coral: Use sunscreens with physical filters, which reflect instead of absorb ultraviolet radiation; and use eco-friendly chemical sunscreens.

I'm not encouraging us to feel guilty or become defensive for using sunscreen, I simply think this is a great example of how we impact those around us (including the earth) without even meaning to. I doubt any swimmers lather on the sunscreen with a diabolical laugh, "Die, coral reef! Die!" It was unforeseen, and it was unknown until someone, some scientist, slowed down enough to know a place, to notice the bleached corals, and to trace out the cause.

My own hope lies in knowing a place - its people and its earth - like this. Even though I wander over the earth, I can be mindful, slow, attentive, and ever-careful of how I live and love. The great irony for those of us who move so fast is how joyous moving slow can be. If we let go of compulsion and enjoy the present moment - the way the wind gently lifts the papers on my desk, the sound of voices drifting up the stairs, the hum of traffic, the noise of construction - there is a depth of happiness there I never find at high speeds. I become aware of my own hubris, that I have forgotten my own part in this world. I have lived without wonder, but wonder returns in the mindful moments, returns with joy and pleasure at the simple fact of life and breath and sense.

Hubris is a forgetfulness. We forget the here and now. We forget our interdependence. We forget that, even unknown to us, we may be working against our own joy of living. To quote Berry again,

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

It is our greatest joy and task to cultivate this awareness and wonder, even in the most unnoticed actions, and to have the humility to place our hubris to the test - when we buy our clothes, when we flush our toilets, when we drive our cars, or even when we grab the sunscreen and head for the beach.

"None of these people want to live 20km outside the city. Their livelihoods are here," explained Pred. "The government is systematically removing the poor from Phnom Penh. But the poor are so important to this city’s economy. The government doesn’t realize that." ---- David Pred, Country Director for Bridges Across Borders, an NGO that provides legal assistance to victims of land disputes and forced evictions in Cambodia

I have been meaning to mention Dey Krahorm for sometime, but never seem to find the right time to give to it. That time never seems to present itself, though, so I am just going to highlight a few things and refer you to the summary report by LICADHO.

I began with the quote from David Pred because I think it reveals one of the basic ways in which the privileged/powerful/rich are often unaware of the crucial role the poor play in the world. Because they are often invisible to us, we can take them for granted. But just a quick tour of your closet (where were your clothes made?), your house (where did you buy your furniture?), your daily routines (how many people are you dependent on to make traffic work, to buy gasoline, to fix your car, etc.?) - all of this, if done mindfully, would reveal to us a vast web of unknown connections. If the poor disappeared, the rich would have nothing.

The Dey Krahorm community is a tragic story of forgetfulness. 7NG, a large contractor in Cambodia, is basically trying to take land from a poor community to develop it for the rich (or at least not as poor) without paying adequate compensation. Some members MCC here have been active in being a silent witness to this tragedy, providing awareness/education for other expats, and supporting groups working on the legal end of things. Over time, the community has consistently employed nonviolent resistance to the land-grabbing, even while the government has failed to help them, the community numbers have dwindled, and workers with 7NG have used violence against them.

It is sad to see the exploited pressed even harder, but heartening to see them refuse to be robbed of their dignity.

For a summary of their story, with some photos, CLICK HERE.

And don't forget to spend some time at LICADHO, a great human rights group working in Cambodia.

And, most importantly, try to spend some time seeing how we are all connected, rich and poor, and how we need each other, and how we can grow in mutual respect and compassion.

In my work here, I am surrounded by resources and ideas about addressing conflict. But I keep coming back to a few very basic ideas and books. They keep me grounded as I try on new thoughts and activities, and I am grateful for them.

One of the most basic texts for me is Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. I remember finding it at a thrift store in a little town in rural Missouri. I couldn't believe it was there! I paid my 50 cents and have carried that little book all over the world. It's here with me, too.

The situation of the world is still like this. People completely identify with one side, one ideology. To understand the suffering and the fear [the other], we have to become one with him or her. To do so is dangerous - we will be suspected by both sides. But if we don't do it, if we align ourselves with one side or the other, we will lose our chance to work for peace. Reconciliation is to understand both sides, to go to one side and describe the suffering being endured by the other side, and then to go to the other side and describe the suffering being endured by the first side. Doing only that will be a great help for peace.

One of the things Thay has reminded me of so often is to nourish compassion even for those who are doing actions that are cruel and unjust. He teaches that those who cause suffering in others do so out of their own suffering. I can understand that, because I have seen it in myself. And I see it here, too, in Cambodia. So if I can stop and try to understand the anger or the fear or the sadness that is behind the suffering, if I can see that, then I can help others understand.

But the reaction in me is often not this kind of stopping. The habit energy in me can carry me away. I react to injustice with anger and violence. The man who throws acid on his wife so that after their divorce, no other man will take her - if I am carried away on my anger, I don't want to have compassion on him. But if I stop, I can see he must also be suffering greatly to be capable of such cruelty. Then I have a chance to "be a great help for peace."

Thay knows people like me, and so he has told us -

Can the peace movement talk in loving speech, showing the way for peace? I think that will depend on whether the people in the peace movement can be peace. Because without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.

It is easy, in this line of work, to get caught up in the systemic injustice, to fight against sex trafficking or the like all day and then go home and act rude to your wife. Being peace comes before bringing peace, and I don't think that is a lesson I will ever outgrow.

The excerpts above are available online HERE.

A friend once told me the first six years in Cambodia are the toughest, but after that it gets easier because you stop trying to make sense of it. Cambodia can feel like you are running on quicksand, or just caught in a particularly bad scene of some kind of demented ethnic Days of Our Lives episode. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
-- From Welcome to the Dark Side: Depression in Cambodia by Bronwyn Sloan

I like the picture of running on quicksand - trying so hard to get out but just going deeper. When I was depressed, it was just like that. Everything that happened was just a confirmation of how terrible life was. Bad things were worse, good things were easily discounted or forgotten in the overwhelming torrent of the bad. Stopping really was the only way out for me - I had to relax into the energy of mindfulness. And mindfulness opened up life to me again. As Thay has put it,

Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others. Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The Question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don't have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don't have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy. We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive at the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.
------ From 24 Brand New Hours

When it came to dealing particularly to those circumstances and relationships (both positive and negative) that were most painful, I found Lovingkindness Meditation to be incredibly powerful and healing -

May I be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit.
May I be safe and free from injury.
May I be free from anger, afflictions, fear, and anxiety.
May I learn to look at myself with the eyes of understanding and love.
May I be able to recognise and touch the seeds of joy and happiness in myself.
May I learn to identify and see the sources of anger, craving and delusion in myself.
May I know how to nourish the seeds of joy in myself every day.
May I be able to live fresh, solid and free.
May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not be indifferent.

And it was the best preparation I could have asked for in coming to Cambodia.

The short side of it is that I have felt very happy living here, having my illusions and delusions exposed even while I nourish mindfulness in my daily actions. Everything Bronwyn wrote about in her article is true to life here (you should read it), except that it is often worse. Somehow, though, the openness of it all has come as a relief to me. Coming from the professional religious background, I find it much easier to deal with the honesty of the situation in Cambodia. And, most importantly, I have the wonderful encouragement of being part of something that is making that situation better.

Nevertheless, I see the potential for Cambodia to be a depression trap, a trap I am certainly not immune from. EAS has started a forum for those of us here who need some help in this area, for which I am grateful. Part of the healing comes in realizing we are not as isolated as we feel. It is too easy to degrade ourselves, believing we are silly for having emotional pain and that others will reject us all the more (after all, it does happen!). Having a safe place is a great gift, and I have learned that we can find it in even the most unexpected places.

Like, for instance, here.