Saturday, September 4, 2010

"Poverty"

Well, it was definitely smiles and joy in building that well that day. But I really should share what made it so special.

Just after meeting the family with the well from 2006 and the garden full of vegetables... and before getting to get our hands on some well-building the next day… we had a much more sobering experience of poverty and needs in Cambodia.



We met this family. This lady’s name is Ran, and her mother. She has 3 kids. She had 4 kids… but one of her sons died of typhoid from drinking unclean water last year. Ran was very ill herself, which is why her mother had come back to live with her. Her husband is away most of the time, collecting firewood in the jungle to sell. She and her remaining 3 sons work the little land that they have to grow, and spend the rest of the day in other people’s fields to earn what little income they can to buy rice for the day and survive.

It was a pretty sobering encounter. She is one of many families waiting for a well from HOPE. Nothing has been promised to her yet – HOPE builds somewhere in the range of 50 to 100 wells in Cambodia each year. When they get the funds, they build the wells.  Ran’s family is still on the wait-list.

What is life like for Ran and her family?

Well, Ran herself is sick with some kind of typhoid. She suffers from anemia, from lack of iron. Her son has swelling in his legs, arms and shoulders from some kind of muscle infection that has gone untreated. They have no money for medicines much less vitamins.

She and her family eat twice a day... simple meals. Just rice porridge. We met her around 11am that day. She'd just come back from working in the rice fields since day break, about 5:30 or 6 o'clock in the morning. But she hadn't eaten yet - and her kids were still out in the field. She was about to prepare her family's meal: the rice porridge - ie, rice boiled down with water – more water when there’s less rice. She didn't talk about eating - just about 'filling stomachs'. She showed us her drinking water – an almost-empty jar of collected rain water. She lives too far from any river or open water source to even be able to get water from there. When she runs out, her family drinks the water from the rice field – the kind of mud, really, that we were wading around in and Adam did his bellyflop into. At least – that’s when they are lucky enough to be in the wet season. In the dry season, even the rice field water has long dried up.

There are some people, some distance away, Ran and her mother said, that have access to some water. So, when they need it, they ask if they can have some little bit. Ask might be too nice though. Beg might be more fitting. Where water is scarce, even neighbours are reluctant to share. Ran's mother just looks at the ground: We make ourselves lower than dogs and cats to ask for water.

They had no smiles for us. Not for themselves. They didn’t even look us in the eye when we were there –  they were squatted down as we stood around them, eyes down at the ground as Ly talked with them about what if  HOPE was able to support them. Ly translated for us, but we caught most of it in their voices. Their voices were lifeless. They had nothing to say when we asked what they dreamed of for the future.

It was hard to stay. And hard to walk away. We gave Ran’s family some loaves of bread that we had brought, and then left, very much sad, and had a quiet motorbike ride home. It was a hard day for the team. We had a team chat that night, and talked about poverty and development, as we’d seen over the last few days.

* * *

‘Poverty’ doesn’t just ‘exist’. ‘Poverty’ can be so vague it hardly has any tangible meaning anymore when we use the word. It isn’t captured by indicators of daily income, child mortality rates, poverty 'lines' and who's over or under it.

It is captured in the life of a young mother whose every day existence is a struggle to survive, whose health is failing, who’s lost a child, who works and toils to no end, only to fill her family’s stomachs with food that will not nourish them. It is captured in eyes that can't smile, and voices without life, two beautiful lives so desperately surviving today, that there is simply no hope, no dreams of what if? for a different tomorrow. It is captured in a family who makes themselves lower than dogs and cats, for water.

It is captured in real lives and real people… and it is very much real.

Food for thought.

xo
Rainbow

Water wells!

Well the the next day indeed, here we were... gettin' to be a part of a real well in another village!


We met one of the families that would be getting their water from this well... very exciting! The mom has always had to walk wayyyyyy far away to get their water - and here is this almost-going-to-be-ready well, right in their back yard! It’s already dug and cement-walled down into the ground – we just got to help make the foundation around it.

Shoveling rocks… by now, we know all about moving rocks around.. !


(But I love that the kids always without fail, get right in there and start helping!)


Dumping rocks

Workin’ the rebar…


I now not only know what rebar is, I know how to tie ‘em together in straight grids with wire & twist it with a nail! :)

Preparing the cement... just doin' what we do best at this point! :)

Pouring water to make cement...  Scottie is now cement connoiseur directing this process :)

Mid-work coconut break, fresh off a tree! (Really, they sent a kid shimmying up the tree to get it!)


Which was a gift from that village's Village Chief, who came to thank us for coming to visit the village and to help with the well. (Though really - thanks for letting us be a part of it!)


Ok- back to work. Pouring cement by the bucket (if we weren't ripped at the beginning of this trip, we sure are now! ;) )

Pouring & smoothing out the cement

Inscribing the well with HOPE!  They do this with all the wells, with the year it was constructed, etc - though I'm sure no one will be forgetting any time soon! 



Laying bricks around the edges for a bit of a brim around the foundation (that way they can draw buckets of water and wash stuff right in the big foundation area, or pour water over the foundation to wash it and have all the water drain out to an opening we left... we've already tried it with washing off our mud-covered feet. Works wonders! :) )



Cover it up with more cement... 

Smooth it out... (and beautifully slice off the excess along the rim as the cement hardens a bit, which I missed getting a pic of!)

And... we're done!

HOPE well... full of water, and many life stories to come, I'm sure! :)

:)

xo
Rainbow

Friday, September 3, 2010

O-jaa!!

We had many awesome field trip days... but this was one of the best. Definitely one of the most impacting... off on a motorcycle adventure we go!

... to have a real, face-to-face introduction to the life-changing-ness of access to clean water!


HOPE met this family just a few short years ago... when just mere survival was a struggle. They live in the "higher lands" of Cambodia, where they can't really grow rice (which needs to be on lower land, where at least a couple inches of water can sit in the field), even in the wet season. There was no 'life'... just survival.

But then, in 2006, HOPE was able to build a well for this family!


Life has been incredibly, incredibly different for this family since they got their well. As the family shared with us with big, vibrant smiles of how life has changed... there was a moment where our whole team just stopped… and kind of took in the magnitude of it all.

A video of us, wide-eyed at the scene, would have caught the moment so perfectly well:

Kat: So… in four years, this family has gone from having absolutely nothing, having only enough rice to fill their stomachs for four months of the year… to having clean water, health, water to irrigate their crops, now a garden full of vegetables, and is making US$9 - $20 every other day selling their crops to the market? That’s pretty…


Adam: O-jaa!! ... which is one of the few Khmer words we’ve all learned, which means awesome!!

And awesomely o-jaa it is! This family has now been able to grow beans, cucumbers, watermelon, fruit trees, all kinds of veggies! And, fun for us - we got to join them for some planting that morning…

which will yield a harvest full of long green beans in just 2 months! :)


Hopefully anyways, if we did it right! We were joking about how the beans, when they are ripe, would get a better price at the market because they were barang-planted. Ly (HOPE Cambodia's director): "Yah, they could market them as miracle beans - it'd be a miracle that they grew!!" Haha.. well thanks to the family for trusting us with their bean field... fingers crossed we did them more help than harm! :)

As one of my UNION team said that day, “It’s amazing how one well transforms lives .. And we get to be a part of it tomorrow. Cambodians are filling my heart with love .. One smile at a time!” (I stole this off his Facebook, because this, among the other status's that they’ve been putting up, made ME smile so much, every time I took a peek on my news feed when we get a chance to catch some internet time… I hope he won’t mind). :)

O-jaa!