Sunday, July 25, 2010

RENEWAL

It was the morning of June 17, 2010. On my nightstand were plane tickets. I had to do a double take. Could this be right? It says, “Ruvane Schwartz, destination: Phnom Penh, Cambodia.” That is my name and that’s today’s date, so this must be right. As a world-weary traveler, this must be a mistake. Cambodia? What am I doing? Why am I traveling nearly 9,000 miles to Cambodia?

Traveling with a volunteer group of teachers and education personnel, I was about to embark on a trip dedicated to changing communities of learners under the “Teachers Across Borders” (TAB) program. The group conducts a two-week long workshop for Cambodian student teachers and professional teachers. TAB feels that education is key to the issues of reducing poverty, gender equality, combating child trafficking and, most importantly, providing children with choices.

Like most average Americans, I only had a limited knowledge of the history and problems that existed in Cambodia. As a remedy to my own personal career crisis, this trip originally served as a means to network. But, once there, I left with a renewed identity of my own culture.

While the Holocaust spawned international laws to protect from further human disaster, the pledge to “never again” allow such atrocities was just an empty promise. The Cambodian genocide, one of the most prominent genocides since the Holocaust, eliminated monks, doctors, lawyers and educators, as well as universities and schools, throughout Cambodia. It was a national disaster that approached the Holocaust in magnitude. Like the Holocaust, the Cambodia genocide not only obliterated the lives of the murdered, but it destroyed their civilization.

Judaism stresses that ‘he who kills one soul kills an entire world.’ And the Khmer Rouge executioners did a superior job. They murdered over 1.2 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population. The Khmer Rouge regime may be long gone, but their bloody fingerprints continue to afflict Cambodia, in its poverty and lawlessness. Outside the hotels, restaurants, museums, and along the Mekong River, maimed panhandlers and children plead for loose change. I was stunned to hear daily stories from locals about the latest victim of Khmer Rouge landmines that still littered the countryside, while those that placed them there were living in stately mansions, having not yet been brought to justice for their crimes.

The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis before them, may have killed the past and blighted the present for millions, but Cambodian survivors, like Jews now prospering again, must be allowed to reclaim the future. Decades later, these student and professional teachers in our workshops were doing just that --- rebuilding their country’s educational system from the ground up. And I, too, was assisting in this renewal of Cambodia, however small I may have deemed my role.

My two-week journey through Cambodian culture left a mark on my soul and created friendships that will last a lifetime. And I hope to one day revisit Cambodia or another impoverished nation. Only fear of the unknown, of abandoning the comfortable feeling of the familiar that one finds in one’s own land, stands in the way of embracing other cultures. Ultimately, by embracing another culture, you may just find your own, your self, as I did.