The Castle

I've already written this up for my newsletter but decided to post it here too because a) some people who read this blog don't receive the emails and b) I finished it after midnight last night and there were several obvious typos/ mistakes today. (Lesson learned. Draft at midnight but edit in the morning. Or go back to preaching where nobody cares about spelling!)

Today I went to see Chean Run's new house. Here's how it happened:

A couple of months ago Mr Run's family asked for help with their children's education. we gave school uniforms, backpacks, books and stationery supplies. in those visits it was obvious that the family was struggling to meet their basic needs. Their house, for example, was falling apart; missing walls, holes in the bamboo floor and natural 'skylights' in the thatched roof. But we don't do houses.

Mr Chean Run, 44, is married with six children. He rides a bicycle eight kilometers every morning to get to work and pulls a cart back and forth across the Thai-Cambodia border for a daily profit of about $2.50. What makes his labour even more impressive is that his left leg was amputated above the knee after a landmine injury in 1988. (Chean uses a prosthetic leg.) He takes pride in working for his family. When a large NGO asked if they could 'help' by taking some of his kids in their orphanage, Chean and his wife refused. I didn't want to try to 'fix' everything. And anyway, we don't do houses.

At the same time as we were getting to know Run's family, I received an email offering $100 for flood relief. Unfortunately, we'd already responded to some local needs in October and by November the flood crisis has disappeared with the rain clouds. I asked if the money could be used to help rebuild a house of a flood-affected family?

I thought about it for some days and then we went back. 'Excuse me, Mr Run, were you affected by the floods?' Run's wife looked like she was going to burst into laughter! She answered, 'Yeah, the water came up to about here [pointing to mid-thigh]. We were wet, cold, sometimes sick... all the poor in the low-lying areas were affected by the floods.' She was probably thinking, 'Why do the foreigners ask such stupid questions?' Err.. coz it leads me to another question. 'Could you use a hundred bucks to do some reno?'

Chean was delighted! He couldn't stop saying, 'Thank You!' Over the next few days he called our staff several times with detailed updates of his building project. We let him know that we could give some labour if he needed it, but Chean did it all by himself!

It was pretty cool to see their new digs today. Chean replaced the thatched roof with corrugated iron, his wife chose the colour for the rubber walls and he put in the bamboo floor. Before, the holes in the floor were so large that Chean was forced to sleep on a plastic bag straight on the group underneath the house. Tonight there's enough room for all eight of them inside the room. We admired the house. We took fruit to celebrate. I talked with 13-year-old Chenna about her Grade 4 classes and she read me a story from her Khmer textbook. We invited 9-year-old Sophoan to join in a football tournament. We also invited Mr Run and his wife to stop in our new office for lunch one day next week, conveniently located a couple of meters from the border where he works pulling carts. I hope they will come because we don't really do houses... but stuff lunch is a daily event.