8th of March
In the name of International Women's Day, I want to tell you a short story.
If I were to pick a moment in life which has the most impact on me, it would have been the summer in 2015 when I went back to Phnom Penh for the most innocent souls I have met - says EVERYONE who was in volunteering programme ever. No, hear me out.
I first met these girls in 2014. I went back because the imprint they left on me was indelible. For every difficult moments and challenges I encountered since then, their shy yet firm voices echoed in my mind and kept me going forward. That month passed by incredibly fast. In all honesty, most of the time I just listened. To what? Their stories, their ups and downs, and most importantly, their dreams. I saw not only their smiles but the tears they held back in the darkest time, heard not only their laughters but the screams they yelled in the past for all the unfairnesses. The longer I looked at them, the more imaginations of the possibilities they could have had if they were given the chance.
"I want to be a doctor so that when the children are sick, I can help them. I didn't have money to see the doctor when I was sick. I don't want them to be me."
"I want to be a teacher. When I learn, I think I am like everyone else. It makes differences."
"I want to be an engineer. I know that school, MIT, in United States. I want to go there and build things."
So often we are used to the narrative of "follow your dream" and that "with determination you can make everything comes true". Here's the truth: the truth is for most of the children that are accepted into one of the hundreds of orphanages in Cambodia, they are well fed and provided enough education. That's all. Once turn 18, they are no longer a liability of the house. With little to no resources, many of them end up living and barely living. With the demand of cheap and cheaper labour in less developed states, it makes it seems like giving them a job to survive is what's fair and enough. But is it? Or is it actually depriving their odds of becoming whom they really want to be? when a man with bare stomach is provided food in exchange of unethical work hours, does he really have a choice. If one have the resources to provided that piece of bread, does he not also have the capability to offer more?
You can't make the dreams come true for opportunities that are simply not there. And who to say that their dreams are not just as ordinary as ours? So here's to cheer for the strength these young ladies showed, and to remind myself and whoever is reading this that there's still so much more we could do, that we have to do, to create a fairer and better world.
