Efren and Becky Roxas relocated to the slums of Phnom Penh from the slums of Manila in 2006. With their wisdom, maturity and experience they have been a huge blessing to the Servants team in Cambodia. In particular Efren has become a good friend and inspiration to me. Currently he is working with the TASK Teenage Drug User Rehab project (TDUR). The following is a story from Efren illustrating the vulnerability of life for the urban poor…

Vee is perhaps the “most promising” client of TDUR. At 16, he was addicted to amphetamine & started to have heroin shots once in awhile together with his friends from the restaurant he was working. He was 17 when he entered the TDUR program last year. He stopped schooling at grade 8 and had stopped working by the time he joined us.

Last year Vee was very diligent in learning English & basic computer skills, and because he was 18 this year he would be able to go to the vocational training program which TDUR is networking with. We helped him prepare to enter one of these training opportunities and after a year of preparation it pays off. He was the only one accepted out of our four clients who applied. We strongly believed that after two years of full rehabilitation & vocational training, a healthy community integration would be possible for him. During this time he also professed to be a Christian and began attending a local church.

A day before going to the vocational training center to study for two years in Hotel Services something terrible happened. One of Vee’s friends from his old lifestyle committed a crime by killing a man and robbing the victim of all possessions. Vee’s family was dragged into this problem when this friend phoned Vee’s sister on the victim’s cell phone, asking permission to come to their house and change his blood-splattered clothing claiming that he had been involved in a fight. So he came, changed clothes in Vee’s home, then left to hide.

The telephone call was traced later, leading to Vee’s sister & two cousins being picked-up by the police, and imprisoned. By this stage Vee was living at the training center, some 40 kilometers out of the city, but with the perpetrator out of sight, Vee became the prime suspect of the crime.His mother was forced to negotiate for his capture in exchange for the subsequent release of the three relatives in jail. The decision was hard to accept, but it happened.Our “innocent” man has now been languishing in jail for more than two months. He describes the jail conditions as terrible.

Licadho, a Cambodian human rights organization reports that for Cambodian prisons, “Limited access to food and clean water, overcrowding of prison cells, routine denial of quality medical services and violence towards prisoners from prison officials and other inmates is a part of everyday life.” http://www.licadho.org/reports/files/116LICADHOReportPrisonMotherChild07.pdf

Vee and 16 inmates are incarcerated in a cell with barely enough room to lie down. He has scabies and is fed mostly on rice porridge. Although we are allowed to visit him, we need to shell out $2.50 for the main guards and a little bit more for the perimeter guards and if we take any extra food it will not be allowed as it disrupts the guards business. They sell extra food to the prisoners at grossly inflated prices.

In spite of his innocence, it wont be until November, six months after his arrest before his case is heard. The evidence of three witnesses will be required for him to prove his innocence and be set free. In the meantime, however, the murderer has not been found, the trail has gone cold and the police have closed the case.

Animal Planet

One of my most valuable mentors almost always began his letters with a comment on the weather and I feel slightly ashamed to confess that we didn’t follow his example in our last email update. We need to right that wrong especially since recent changes in climate have been so dramatic. Recently we have actually felt cold! We have resorted at times to two blankets on our bed at night and long sleeve shirts in the mornings. With the wind chill factor the temperature has nearly dropped to 20 degrees Celsius at nights. Another dramatic change is the rainy season seems to have finally stopped. The mud has dried up, most of the puddles have dried up and the geometry of our road has been left consistently peculiar for the last week.

As I write this I am on my way back from running in the Angkor Wat half-marathon. I ran in this race last year but I have enjoyed the sense of rhythm that comes from repeating the experience. At one level it symbolizes the fact that we are developing a greater sense of belonging to this life in Cambodia, a greater sense that this is what our life is about and as such we have committed to it, not just for a short period, but for a long haul – whatever that should mean. Obviously I also just enjoy the run itself and sense of achievement and camaraderie that comes from doing it. I also got a kick out of wiping 3 minutes off last year’s time – this year I managed 99 minutes. However, I must admit, it hurt a lot more!

Niam came with me to Siem Reap and we had a lovely time together. We discovered a Horse ranch about 1.5 km from our guesthouse and suddenly Niam doesn’t want to live anywhere else in the world! Another entertaining animal aspect of the weekend was watching the crocodile farm with about 65 crocs immediately below our room window. Animal Planet on the cable TV almost took a back seat to the real thing.

One of the things I enjoy most about language learning is picking up some of the local idioms and proverbs. They can be very culturally specific and therefore give useful and fun information about the culture. For instance, a Khmer proverb goes along the lines of “When the water rises the fish eat the ants. When the water goes down the ants eat the fish.” Basically it is just pointing out that the world turns, life goes on, or not. But it also communicates something about Cambodia, in particular that there is lots of water, lots of fish and lots of ants.

However, there are also lots of idioms that seem to be generic across cultures. Maybe these are hangovers from the colonial era. I don’t know but they are still very interesting. For instance, there is a Cambodian idiom that says, “Clear as day.” But they get a bit confused when I say, “Clear as mud.” An idiom used to describe a lazy person translates, “eat and sleep like a pig”, which seems rather generic across cultures also, at least in my experience. Poor pigs!