Preachy blog

Experience is not always the kindest of teachers, but it is surely the best

-Spanish Proverb

You know, you can get so caught up in this fundraising lark that you lose sight of the big picture.

WARNING:  Preachy blog post alert!

So we’ve done really well on the fundraising and assuming everyone takes the wine they ordered and everyone comes to the dinner they RSVP’d to and my liquor license comes through (details right?), we will have surpassed our fundraising goals.

But then, I ran an errand for my husband and met a woman whose husband is a veterinarian and every year they go to India with Veterinarians Without Borders and de-sex dogs to help keep down the street dog population.  She told me that on a previous year, floods came through killing a number of people and destroying homes.  Instead of spending their time de-sexing the dogs that year, they shoveled mud.  She told me that in going to a developing country like Cambodia (or India), I needed to be kind to myself because you almost leave that country to return to your comfortable western lifestyle with a sense of survivor’s guilt.

We talked and I recalled my time from 2004-2009 as a refugee lawyer, where every day was survivor’s guilt.  I could work 70 hours a week and still feel like I wasn’t doing enough.  I finally learned that there was no such thing as enough.  And in that role, I was well-removed from the in-your-face experience of day-to-day life in a developing country.  I just listened, day in and day out, to stories of horror from those countries.  Of course, I would have felt like I had never done enough. 

Those five years took a huge toll on my physical well-being and on my psyche.  It is only now that I had begun to think that I was strong enough to face a challenge like going on a habitat build to Cambodia.

My fellow habitater, Michelle, spoke of a similar sense of guilt upon her return from her first trip to Nepal.  She blogged about reconciling the poverty she saw in Nepal with her life here in Australia.  At the time, I chalked it up to that whole Catholic guilt thing.  But I’m rethinking the issue as my own need to confront it approaches. 

I like my lifestyle – I’ve been wealthier and I’ve been poorer, but it all happened within a pretty narrow bandwidth.  I’ve no doubt that I will find begging children and starving dogs on the streets of Phnom Penh to be highly challenging.  But I think it is a challenge I’m ready to face. 

Weirdly, a lot of the criticism of voluntourism (a category of travel our upcoming trip no doubt falls within) attacks the intent of the participant, as in “voluntourism is nothing more than a way to alleviate guilt”.  In praise of voluntourism, participants say that the experience enables them to better experience the culture they are visiting . So which is it?  And why do you feel guilty after the voluntourism experience?  And is that a bad thing?

Embarrassingly, this conversation with a complete stranger and the thought of whether I could handle my time in a developing country like Cambodia, brought me to tears.  Hell, maybe it is easier to concentrate on the fundraising.