My wife Eunice and I
recently spent two weeks in
Cambodia and Thailand with a group from American Jewish World
Service, a charitable group headquartered in New York. We
were amazed by the breadth of its activities; this is one of
several reports on the trip.
Including several New York
and Southeast Asia staff
members of American Jewish World Service, the group had grown
to about two dozen people. AJWS prides itself on not going into a
local community with “here is what you should do”, but
seeking local organizations with their own ideas and providing
modest amounts of support, money or volunteers, to
organizations that are often too small to be ready yet to
compete for significant “foreign aid” organization grants.
They feel that the Jewish mission of
“tikkun olam”, repairing the world, applies wherever in the world there
is
extreme need. This trip was, in part, a way of showing the
travel group a sampler of some of those needs, and motivating
us to tell others about them.
Many members of the group arrived in
Cambodia about
February 11, for two days of sightseeing at Angkor Wat before
the group got down to work. Angkor Archaeological Park , a
United Nations World Heritage Site, includes about 150 square
miles of forest which include the magnificent remains of
capital cities and temples of the Khmer Empire, from the 9th
to the 15th century. The constructions have suffered from
both ancient wars and very recent ones, having been used as
quarries and robbed for antiques by invaders from Thailand
hundreds of years ago and damaged further by fighting in the
1970's through the 1990's.
Foxholes are still visible, as are bullet
holes in the
stonework, and it is easy to pick up spent bullets on the
ground. It was hard for a group of Jews, hearing the war
stories, and seeing the ruins and the restoration work in
process, not to be reminded of Jewish history, Israel’s
wars of recent decades, and of archaeological work in
Israel.
The wars of the last thirty years
severely damaged
Cambodia’s economic infrastructure. Many areas that used to
have irrigation systems allowing two rice crops per year now
depend on the natural rain cycle and get only one. The
systematic murdering of educated Cambodians during the Pol Pot
regime of the late 1970s has made it very hard to rebuild.
While the restoration of peace in
recent years has
allowed tourism to resume at Angkor Wat, this has produced
less income for the locals than one might like. Large luxury
hotels now dot Siem Reap, the town of 350,000 people adjacent
to Angkor, but eighty percent are foreign owned (many by
Vietnamese and Japanese investors).
Locals told us that admission fees to
the park itself
go to a Vietnamese company, under a franchise granted by the
government during the Vietnamese occupation in the 1980's.
Local residents feel that not enough of the money goes into
either park improvement or the local economy. At the same
time, in the large area included within the park limits, there
are strict limits on increasing cultivated areas or on
industrial development, which limit economic opportunities for
those living there.
We spent a day visiting projects
of the Angkor
Participatory Development Organization, a Cambodian nonprofit
organization started in the mid 1990's devoted to helping
20,000 people living in the twenty or so small villages
located within the Angkor park. It operates on an annual
budget of about $75,000, of which about $27,000 comes from
AJWS.
Its activities include village
leadership training
courses and the provision of small community libraries;
economic development through small grants (it also receives
funding from Trickle Up) and micro-credit (small loan
cooperatives) , and projects oriented toward income
production. These include increasing crop production through
better agricultural methods, mini irrigation programs,
acquiring tools for woodworking, training in handicraft
production and traditional music.
Another day was spent visiting Banteay Srei,
an
organization devoted to helping women. Banteay Srei has
been
active since 1989, and is better established; AJWS now
provides only about 12 percent of its budget. It engages in
educational projects devoted to reproductive health issues and
to the prevention of domestic violence. It trains volunteers
from those living in rural villages, and we were able to meet
and talk individually with some of these volunteers and see
some of the villages in which they work.
One project has been the production and
broadcast of a
thirty episode radio entertainment drama and a fifteen episode
radio talk show addressing domestic violence and women’s
issues. In the poorest communities, this has meant issuing a
radio to a local volunteer so that people could gather to
listen to the program and discuss it. The project has had to
overcome a number of problems, including radio station owners
who would not broadcast it if speakers on the program belonged
to a political party not in power.
After two days in Siem Reap, we
moved on to Phnom
Penh, which will be another report.
This sort of travel is far more
difficult, in many
ways, than the usual tourist program. It has a demanding
schedule, and as interesting as discussions may be when you
eat with the local people, it is harder on the American
digestion than eating in tourist hotels. But it allows one to
see how the locals live, to make friendships, and to learn
things about the world, that are invisible from the usual air
conditioned tourist bus. Being able to see how a major Jewish
humanitarian organization actually interacts with the recipients, and
letting
the locals see what some of the people in America who care for
them are actually like, makes it worth the extra effort for
many of us.
Return to Asia trip page
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(edward@ordman.net)]
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