Last weekend I took a trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia to see the Angkor Wat ruins. Angkor Wat is now a UNESCO park where you can tour and explore lots of ancient temples, some with trees growing out of them! Siem Reap is the town near the Angkor park and it is a relaxing place filled with all the things that tourists love including great food, a lovely range of hotels and guest houses, lots of shopping markets, and tuk tuks (taxish motor bike things) everywhere waiting to take you where you’d like to go. While prostitution, especially of children, is a great problem in Cambodia, I did not observe any sex industry activity doing my entire trip to Cambodia, which was a refreshing break from Bangkok.

Cambodia’s fairly recent tragic history of the genocide that occurred during the Khmer Rouge era still is evident in this nation. Under the Khmer Rouge millions of people were forced out of the cities to the fields in an attempt to return the nation to an agrarian society and regain the splendor of the classic Khmer rice producing society. In this process many of the educated or seemingly educated people, including artists were wiped out in what is today known as the Killing Fields. This message from the past, that Cambodians are not intelligent, but only useful for harvesting rice still is evident in the people today. We met a Cambodian man on our taxi ride to Siem Reap who was working in Bangkok. He has a good job and speaks English fluently, but as my flat mate and I told him we were from America and Singapore he went on to tell us how Americans and Singaporeans are so smart (unlike Cambodians). We tried to convince him otherwise, but years of propaganda are hard to undo.

One of the elements of greatest hope I saw on my trip to Siem Reap was in a visit to an artisans group called the Artisans of Angkor. This group is training artisans in traditional Cambodian fine arts and crafts. From woodcarving, metalworking, and stone carving to painting and silk production, we were able to tour one of the sites where the crafts are created. After six months of training the artisans are put to work in one of the 15 fair trade workshops. Today over 1000 people are employed and the craftsmen have formed their own association, which holds 20 percent of the shares of the company.

My favorite part of the tour was going to the silk farm where we saw the whole process from little silk worms, to cocoons, to spinning the silk onto spindle and dying, to weaving beautiful, intricate pieces of silk it was an amazing process to observe. The man who was our tour guide told us the work with the worms and silk was done mostly by women because it requires a lot of patience and he at least would not have the patience for it. So, while Cambodia has seem much destruction in its recent history the Artisans of Angkor is one of numerous organizations that is using the arts to restore dignity to the people and bring new life.

Check out www.artisansdangkor.com for more information

NightLight

I have yet to write about my internship here in Thailand. As I mentioned in my earlier post the issue of prostitution is great in Bangkok. In response to this problem many organizations have formed. The organization I am working with is called NightLight and is committed to addressing the complex issues surrounding trafficking and prostitution by catalyzing individual and community transformation. (Nightlight Website) NightLight is a jewelry business that gives jobs to women who have chosen to leave the sex industry. Not only are the women hired for a job that gives them dignity they also are provided with life skills training, physical care by an on campus nurse, and emotional and spiritual development. Amidst the darkness of the red light district in Nana, NightLight is an organization offering hope and transformation to the forgotten members of Thai society.

During my time at NightLight I have been impressed by the life I see in the women. Twice a week NightLight volunteers do outreach in the bars. We go and attempt to form relationships with the women who are trapped in the sex industry. After my first night of outreach I came home and felt so sad about what I had seen and experienced. It is easy to just see the darkness of this industry here in Bangkok, but as I went into work the next morning the life and light of the women, with transforming lives seemed even brighter and more hopeful to me.

It has so far been a joy and honor to work with these dear women and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to teach them weekly art classes. One woman, whenever she sees me says “hello teacher!, pa jaw why pawn (God bless you)” and I reply back to her “you too are my teacher” as I am learning much from her and the other women. While there are still a sea of women trapped in the prostitution it gives me hope to the transformation in the lives of the 70 who are well on their way down a path of new life!