Last month, my husband and I spent ten days in Cambodia participating in our first Habitat for Humanities build. I couldn’t believe what I learned in that short period of time, but here is my attempt to put some thoughts on paper. To start, here’s a couple of slightly random but interesting facts about this country:
- Buddhism is the predominant religion. Nevertheless, there’s ancient influences here in the culture that predate even Buddhism. This is evident in that everywhere you go, whether it’s a gas station or someone’s front lawn, there’s these colorful little spirit houses that are holdovers from animism.
- Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Asia. Tourism plays a huge role in bolstering the economy (it’s their second largest source of income), however much of the population lives on about USD 1 a day. If you’ve never traveled in this area of the world, you’d be amazed at the prices. Case in point: Four of us shared a nice lunch at a little café in Siem Reap and the total bill was USD 11.50.
- There is no McDonald’s in Cambodia. I know, weird right? We did see KFC and a Burger King, so it’s not like fast food is unfamiliar to this country. But the most ubiquitous of all fast food is not here, amazingly.
- Angkor Wat, the country’s premier attraction, is the largest religious monument ever built. I found a stat that said it used more stone than all the pyramids of Egypt combined! Go see it, you won’t regret it.
- The place is hot! We were in the “high season” according to Lonely Planet, which is supposed to be cooler, but we were still sweating like pigs after being outside for ten minutes.
Why am I writing about this on a blog about health and fitness? Well, I’m passionate about health in part because I believe it can help people live their best lives. We all have bodies that affect our quality of life. A great way to appreciate the ability to live a healthy life at all, I thought, was to use my resources, healthy body included, to aid someone who needed it. In the case of this trip, I thought I was going in as a strong, healthy person.
Turns out I’m much weaker than I believed.
Let me provide a list of things that bothered me on this trip: I got a heat rash that itched like crazy. An ill-advised milkshake at a local restaurant wreaked havoc on my digestive system. I ran out of clean clothes. The toilet at the hotel leaked. I had a perpetual bad hair day from the humidity. The hotel gym didn’t have air conditioning.
What a delicate flower I turned out to be!
Obviously, I knew that these were trivial things. I thought I was prepared to be uncomfortable, I just didn’t know how used to comfort I actually was until then. All my working out and eating well did nothing to allow my body to adapt to the crush of manual labor or the oppressive heat. Meanwhile, I watched in awe as a skinny local guy stoically undertook the hardest job there, digging and shoveling heavy clay, with hardly a break.
We managed to build a very small, very simple one-room brick house for a Cambodian family of nine (yes, nine!) people. On the last day of the build, we presented the house to them and the joy on their faces was so evident, I felt almost embarrassed. Our amateurish, slap-dash house was life-changing for these people. My bad hair was hardly the point.
I’m not even trying to start a lecture about first world privilege and gratefulness, though I did feel some of those emotions. I’m glad I could use my privilege and resources (including my healthy body) to make a small difference for someone who lived in the antithesis of what I was used to. But the experience also made me think about growth and the importance of being uncomfortable once in a while.
After all, our muscles grow when we break them down, which is not a painless process. We don’t improve our cardio fitness by sitting in front of the television. And our bodies don’t get the nutrients we need from eating only bacon and ice cream.
I like to think that I’m a growth-minded individual, someone who strives to challenge themselves in order to improve. However, my constant evaluation of how to improve my own health did not prepare me for minor heat rashes and the lack of AC in a gym.
All this to say, this trip was good for me. It highlighted my first-world ignorance of true challenge. I saw this build as a good workout (one day, my friends and I estimated we had burned upwards of 5,000 calories), when our digging friend probably did it every day of his life. I accidentally put my toothbrush under the undrinkable tap water and instantly worried I would get sick, when that family we built a house for was glad to have running water at all.
The trip gave me renewed energy, though. What else could I do to really challenge myself, I wonder? Where else could I stand to improve, and perhaps help improve life for someone else?
My thoughts on health and fitness are geared toward middle-class westerners, because that is the world I live in. This trip was a good reminder that there is much of the world that would be in awe of what we have available to us. Would they be shocked at how we treat ourselves, or would they only be envious?
Either way, I can say with certainty that I am grateful to be where I am. God help me to use that to add value, however small, to others.