Teenager brings smiles to Cambodia

via Khmer NZ

Monday, August 09, 2010

By WM. SHAWN WEIGEL, Special to the Local News

Everything you have is everything you need; anything more is a blessing.

It's a simple lesson that 15-year-old Jackie Viens and her mother, Carolyn, spent a week learning at a school in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

The mother and daughter duo were there handing out the 1,500-plus toothbrushes that Jackie collected over the spring to the children of Siem Reap as part of the Bright Smiles Bright Futures campaign.

Jackie, a rising sophomore at Unionville High School, got the toothbrushes by leaving donation boxes at all of the schools in the district except for Pocopson, which was sponsoring its own collection for other programs.

"She had a great system going where she videotaped a presentation for the morning announcements about what she was doing," Carolyn said,

By the end of spring, she had collected 1,557 toothbrushes — all of which has to be removed from their packaging and sealed in clear baggies in groups of 50 before the trip.

The packaging from the brushes amounted to over five bags of trash that otherwise would have ended up in a river, Jackie said.

"They don't have any trash disposal in Cambodia," Jackie said.

Carolyn added that many of the kids at the school were so poor that often times their only meal of the day was one they received while at school.

The toothbrushes, she said, help with more than just hygiene.

"The view is, better hygiene leads to better self-esteem, which means less absences at school," Carolyn said.

Although her family had lived in Asia previously, this was Jackie's first memorable experience with the sticky Cambodian climate.

After landing at a rustic airport, Jackie said her first trip through Cambodia was intense.

"I was just there with my jaw dropped and my eyes pressed to the window," she said. "It was unlike anything I've ever experienced."

After checking in, they went immediately to the school, via a tuk-tuk — a sort of motorized rickshaw. The 20-minute ride took the Viens through several villages and enclaves where they said they saw much poverty but were met with smiling faces.

"They really do live in huts ands shacks and they have nothing to speak of, but they are so gentle and kind and friendly and happy," Carolyn said.

When they arrived with their two suitcases filled with toothbrushes, the kids from the school immediately rushed out to see what they brought.

"A couple of them could speak a few words of English, and they came up to me saying, 'Books? Books?'" Jackie said. "A few could also say 'open,' and they were grabbing at the suitcases."

That started off a week of helping at the school where Jackie worked in the library, covering readers printed on thin paper in plastic to increase their longevity. She also worked in an English classroom with a teacher who handled duties at two different schools in the region.

Every morning at 10, the kids emerged en masse with toothbrushes in hand to brush their teeth in unison a large trough in the yard.

The toothbrushes Jackie collected provide each of the 650 students at the school with a year's supply.

The family also spent time hanging out with the kids, picking up some of the Khmer language and sharing some English along the way.

"They're absolutely adorable, and they're all dressed in blue and white uniforms," Carolyn said of the younger children who occupied the school in the morning. "All these kids would gather around and we couldn't communicate in language so we did it all in smiles … I think if we could have we would have brought our favorites home with us."

Jackie said that while she enjoyed the trip, it also provided quite an eye opener as to how people cope in a developing country.

She recounted a story where she watched a legless man with a homemade wheelchair pulled himself down to the river to bathe — a river she described as "green and disgusting" and less than sanitary.

"It hurts them, too, but it's what they have," she said, adding that the average life expectancy in Cambodia is around 50.

She also said that much of the trip proved a difficult adjustment from life back home in Unionville.

"The whole time I was scared," she said. "It was intimidating and a lot of the experiences were intense for someone my age."

One such experience was a visit to the infamous Killing Fields of the Pol Pot regime, where the bones and skull of the millions of victims rest in commemorative stupas.

"That's amazingly impressionable. A huge dose and a wonderful dose of reality," Carolyn said.

Jackie said the experience left her with a truer appreciation for what she has in life, including the things you take for granted every day like clean, running water and other public services.

"I'm used to going to UHS and complaining every day along the way, but these kids were so grateful for the littlest things," she said. "It was very heartwarming."

"I know it sounds corny, but we really left some of our hearts behind," Carolyn said, "But we hope to go back and find a way to keep on helping."