Towards Restoring Village Life
Told by Meas Nee with Joan Healy as listener and scribe
$10 from Overseas Services Bureau, 71 Argyle St, Fitzroy Vic 3065
Reviewed by Peter Arfanis
Krom Akphiwat Phum (the Group to Develop the Village) is a Cambodian non-government organisation, financially supported by the Overseas Services Bureau of Australia, which works to redevelop trust and cooperation in villages where the fabric of life has been destroyed by armed conflict, propaganda and corruption. It has a basic philosophy that development begins by combating hunger and rebuilding dignity, trust and cooperation of the village people. It sees dignity and food as closely linked.
The narrator of this book, Meas Nee, is a founding member of Krom Akphiwat Phum who tells a simple but powerful story of his experiences and the work of restoring village life.
Meas' experiences are similar to the lives of many Cambodians who suffered during the Pol Pot years. He begins with his early memories of war, images; as a child it all seemed a game to him until the war spread into Cambodia. He was about 13 years old.
Meas also describes village life in Cambodia: the customs, superstitions and traditions. The village is as a community built on trust, honesty, hard work and self-reliance — considered to be the binding elements of the social system. These very same elements were the ones to be destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, replaced with the a single thought — survival.
The Khmer Rouge stripped their victims of all dignity and expression. Meas recall: "[We] could not talk, could not cry. It was like being squashed into the shape of a box; unable to express anything."
Meas tells us about life during the Pol Pot period not only to provide a background to the devastation and suffering but to give the reader an insight into the effects that these horrific events had on the minds of Cambodians and the problems this created in future interaction with the foreign aid community. The loss of dignity and trust and the humiliation experienced prevented the return to village life as it was before.
In Cambodia now there are more than 200 hundred international organisations providing over $100 million a year in aid, implementing hundreds of projects ranging from HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns to the digging of wells. There are as many different approaches to projects as there are organisations, some successful but many with few long-term benefits and others which do more harm than good.
Organisations work with budgets that must be spent quickly; foreign governments want results. Foreign workers have little time to listen, and have their own ideas on how things should be done. Meas' response is that projects need cooperation, not theories of community development devised by westerners with little understanding of the Cambodian psyche. Forced cooperation only reminds villagers of life under the Khmer Rouge.
Building roads, bridges and hospitals is not everything. Aid and development in Cambodia also mean " rebuilding spirit, life and relationships". Meas compares the village to a basket that has been broken. It can be rewoven slowly and gradually, but only by those who will take the time to stay close to the village people and build trust with them
Krom Akphiwat Phum's success comes from its workers spending many months in the villages, sleeping overnight, listening to the people, sharing their sadness and dangers in order finally to be accepted and trusted.
[Peter Arfanis is a volunteer worker in Cambodia.]