Penny spent January 2016 in Cambodia and Thailand with a group of Calvin students and two faculty colleagues. Looking back, we can see signs that she had cancer already during our time in New Zealand in 2015. But the first acute symptoms, not yet diagnosed, occurred while she was in Cambodia in 2016.
Our students hardly believe us when we tell them that January is the best month to visit Cambodia. As we dig trenches, teach children how to count to ten in English, or try to listen to the director of a local NGO pointing out the innovative irrigation system in a watermelon field, the sweat gathers along our hairline and drips down the middle of our backs. We pass around water bottles, preferring to share countless germs than have someone faint from dehydration.
If you can’t find any shade or the hint of a breeze, you start to wilt—literally! You can watch the eyes glaze over, the shoulders begin to droop, folks start leaning on each other and against any reasonable tree, hut pole, or wall; and if at some point we can find a tile floor not exposed to direct sunlight, the entire pack of sorry bipeds does the big flop. Everyone sprawls on the tiles in hopes that something they heard in high school chemistry about heat transfer is true and the flooring might suck the excess heat out of their bodies and leave them a normal temperature again. Even the professors can lose focus and not quite remember all the details of what innovative mixture you feed those crickets for eventual sale to the local market or how you get the nutrient-rich water from the small fish pond to the garden behind the thatch-walled house.
About ten days into our month-long study trip, we finalized our visit to Mondulkiri Province. “It’s north, more mountainous, more remote, and cooler.” A cheer went up from the crowd.
After at least 10 hours in a bus bumping along dusty roads with stops to practice using the squatty potties and to give our mentees the requisite opportunity to buy fried grasshoppers and sugar coated tarantulas, we arrived in a small town far away from any other signs of “civilization.” That evening my table ordered a peacock pizza. By then most of us had either converted or resigned ourselves to being adventurous eaters. When the pizza arrived, we all leaned in trying to figure out which curious topping might be the peacock. Finally, Kayla or maybe it was Seth said, “Oh, no, look! It’s a peacock!” The bits of fruit, vegetable, and unidentifiable meat bits lay fanned out like the tail when a cock is strutting his stuff. I noticed small slices of some sort of hot dog thing carefully placed where aqua-marine circles might have been, if you used your imagination and had very poor eyesight.
What happened next cannot be blamed on that pizza because I was the only peacock-pizza-eater who got sick. Strangely though all three professors came under what we refer to in whispers as “the Mondulkiri curse.” We three spent the same couple miserable days mostly in our hotel rooms, staying very close to western toilets. We entrusted our students to our on-site guide and sent them off to visit local villagers and enjoy a hiking tour of the surrounding rain forest—a hike which included analysis of a plot of land for its potential as a coffee or pepper farm and a missionary retreat center, as well as perfect selfie ops near one of the province’s beautiful water falls. They returned with stories and smiles, smelling unmistakably of mosquito repellent and, of course, sweat.
As was the case in our previous trips to Cambodia, the professors and students who happen to get sick do get better. It’s a messy business (the what-in-the-world-did-i-eat-that-is-doing-this-to-me ills), but with some rest, 7-up, crackers, and Cipro (antibiotics) we all get well enough to learn more about this country and its peoples: why clean water remains an issue; how the sea flooding during monsoon season leaves rice fields salty and almost unplantable; why the youth are migrating from the rural villages to the cities and the sweat shops; how during the Vietnam war clandestine bombings destroyed vast swaths of the Cambodia countryside; how well-meaning western NGOs contributed to arsenic poisoning in rural villages; how much of the anguish of the Cambodian Holocaust under the Khmer Rouge remains repressed, relegated to a couple memorial sites for tourists.
Like countries and people all around the world, Cambodia has a rich history and a fascinating culture – examples of notable ingenuity and stories of amazing resilience. With each opportunity I have to visit Southeast Asia and listen to the people there, often while sharing peacock pizza, Pad Prik, or chicken feet, I learn more about both the depravity and the nobleness in my fellow human beings, about myself and my cultural biases, about how much I don’t know and what I can learn from others.
I’m still mourning this loss: that I might never again be well enough for long enough to visit my friends in Cambodia, to escort young co-eds well beyond the boundaries of their safe boxes and to introduce them first-hand to the struggles and triumphs of a beautiful people and their country on the other side of our world.
Interestingly when you begin to mourn such losses, your assumptions about the future come into focus. Dreams and hopes and bucket lists get mixed and pushed through a sieve woven of CT scans, blood work, and the things your doctors say and don’t say.
But none of this was on my mind during the long transit home from Phnom Penh via Seoul and Chicago to Grand Rapids. I was enjoying the relief of another successful study trip: no serious injuries, no lost passports, no more than the usual stresses and unpublicized fees needed to cross the borders. Should I lead a student group to Germany next year? Or maybe I can propose a trip to New Zealand to explore how the country has worked to integrate new immigrants and the native Maori peoples into the fabric of society. Last January I still had the freedom to dream such things because I was clueless; I thought my Mondulkiri curse was a basic case of parasites. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out Mondulkiri was sort of my entry point into Cancerland.