Gecko Tales

A Long Day in 1995

Finally, the day of the long awaited Youth Conference dawned. Only two days before, did we finally, after a few months, receive permission from the SOC Cambodia Government to run the Conference. For the Maher family, dawn had yet to come as we began to finish packing at 5 am that morning for the three hour trip to Kompong Som. I would be driving my friend's Toyota pick-up while he drove a '75 Dodge ambulance, gift of the U.S. Army to YWAM. We were both loaded with equipment for the conference; sports stuff, white-boards, easels, medical supplies, an overhead projector and our own stuff to boot. I had my family and two Cambodians squeezed semi-comfortably into the truck.

My first hint that Monday, Jan 8th, wasn't going to be a banner day came to me when I arrived at the place where we all planned to meet. There were plenty of campers, carrying their mats and traveling bags, but no buses. Wait a minute, there's a bus over there! That was the good news. The bad news was that it looked like a bus Uncle Jed and Jethro might feel proud to travel in. Only a new coat of paint seemed to hold it together. Those buses were laughing in the face of entropy, mocking the first two laws of thermo-dynamics. A sinking feeling in my stomach began to crop up. These buses definitely weren't what our man in charge of transportation promised to deliver. I found my man and asked him where our buses were. I found out that the police were closing the road because the King was arriving from the airport and we were forced to move all three buses off the road, immediately! Not wanting to get the police irritated, the bus drivers parked in the first place off the road they could find. In doing this they ended up blocking peoples driveways, and were forced to move again and again. Of all times for the King to show up. Who does he think he is??! Meanwhile, campers were milling about, trying to find the buses and in the moral malaise of the moment, forty unregistered campers got on the dilapidated buses, unnoticed. We knew something wasn't right when we had about forty registered campers who could not get on the buses. We crammed them in the ambulance, and in and on the vehicles of the missionaries that would be taking part in conference. The police were ordering us to leave the area immediately since the road was now open. We had no time check out the over population problem.

The caravan was now rolling, ever so carefully, toward the sunny beaches of Kompong Som, with those three (vintage 1960) house-paint blue, Chinese buses taking the lead. Uncle Jed and Jethro would truly be proud!

Over the next 60 miles, one bus overheated at least five times, every 10 miles or so it seemed. The crew would race to the nearest swamp to fill up their 5 gallon jugs. Meanwhile the ambulance had blown a tire. My friend Harry had checked the condition of the tires and there wasn't a bit of wear on them.

After the first blew, it became quite evident that these were the original 1975 tires. They were twenty years old and dry rotted but it was difficult telling just from looking at the outside of them. I stayed behind to follow the ambulance, just in case. And it was a good thing, too, because it soon blew out another tire. We had no more spares and both tires were beyond repair. So there sat the U.S. Army's gift to Christianity on blocks on the side of Rt. 4, halfway to the coast in the midst of an area commonly used by the Khmer Rouge. What to do?

The plan was that I would continue on and when I got to the coast, I would buy two tires and bring them back before dark (which is when the action starts). We stopped a big Red Cross truck and loaded it up with supplies and extra campers from the ambulance. Harry waited with the vehicle. As soon as we drove around the bend, we saw great black plumes of black smoke rising up into the air. As we approached the smoke, we prayed that it wasn't coming from our buses. Maybe entropy was having the last laugh. Only a mile further down the road an entire village along the highway was on fire. Tongues of fire were leaping across the highway from both sides preventing us from getting through. We were waylaid about an hour, all the time wondering about the buses that did make it through.

The faulty bus had overheated once again about 30 kilometers ahead of us and the whole caravan stopped to wait for it. With the convoy were about six vehicles driven by missionaries from various Christian Organizations. My Southern Baptist friend Steve, his wife, and four girls got out to answer the call of nature and to stretch a bit. They failed to notice a group of mine clearers sweeping the side of the road. the four girls were in the middle of answering nature’s call when the C.M.A.C. group detonated a pile of mines out in a rice field. This did not go over very well with Steve, who is perhaps a little up-tight at times. I had personally invited him to do a workshop at the conference so he felt free to let me know of his displeasure concerning the detonated mines that scared only his family.

Breakdown, fires, flats, mines. What other surprises are lying in wait for me around the next corner, or should I ask?

Well, we almost made it the rest of the way to Kompong Som with out incident. The Red Cross truck decided not to go all the way so the twenty campers in the back hired a few taxi's (not in the conventional sense of the word) to take them rest of the way. When Chhon and I got to Kompong Som, we could not find any tires there so Chhon went back to pick up Harry, leaving the Ambulance unattended, at night, in a Khmer Rouge area. The next day Harry found tires and hitched a ride back to the ambulance. He was very surprised to find the ambulance in one piece rather than a frame and chassis. He put the new tires on and drove it back to Phnom Penh, belching fire and smoke from the muffler as twenty year old gaskets failed. No one noticed. Business as usual for Cambodia.

I thought this day was an incredibly bad omen for Cambodia first Nationwide Christian Youth Conference and the months of hard work all of us put into organizing it. Things could only get better. Couldn't they??

The rest of the week turned out to be great. Cambodia’s first Interdenominational Youth Conference was an historical event actually happened. Cambodian leaders worked well together and with the expat missionaries. Seventy percent of the campers came from the Provinces, and were from many different denominations and backgrounds, so their was a good representation of the whole protestant church. Campers were housed in the old ‘haunted’ 7th Story Hotel, which had bullet marks and RPG scars left in the cement from the war days. By the time we got through with the conference, so say the villagers, there were no more ghosts left.

As I write this on April 3rd, 2006, The EFC Youth Commission is running their 11th annual Youth Leader's Conference with key speakers, pastors Heng Cheng, Barnbas Mam, and Uon Seila, who have attended all 11 conferences.

I complained about the lawlessness, the traffic, and the weddings and funerals at high decibils starting at 5 a.m. and ending late at night right under my apartment. I complained about being gouged or for a few bucks everytime I went to buy something or do business somewhere, just because I was a 'barang.' I complained about the crime, the dust, the rain, and the heat. Did I mention the taffic? I think I did. But I didn't complain too much about injustice, because being a foriegner, even a poor foreigner, I could still buy my way out of most situations if I had to. As much a being a 'barang' in Geckoville is to experience things being out of one's control, money is the great leveler.

I didn't really understand just how much hopelessness their is attached to being powerless. In Geckoville, the people are powerless unless they have a position in the government of Geckoville, power, or wealth. All the rest are subject to land-grabs where they can lose everything at the whim of some greedy power hungry general who has the means to fudge land titles and remove people from thier land which has been in thier family for generations. Garment factories pay forty dollars a month and attract many young women from the country-side who find out that living expenses eat most of that up by the end of the month, and they have nothing to send home to their hungry family members in the Geckoville country-side. They have to sell sex on the side. Some get AIDS, STDs, or get pregnant. Most women have husbands who are unfaithful, and they bring home HIV/AIDS to their wives. Children are born HIV positive and when their parents die from this disease, they are now AIDS orphans that no relatives want to take in. This is only the tip of the iceberg in Geckoville, and how can one empathize with being totally powerless if you haven't been there yourself?

Having spent twelve years in Geckoville, I have only experienced the feeling of being powerless here in the land of the "Home of the Brave." I'm going broke trying to pay health bills, having an insurance company policy that has a $500 dollar deductible. Prescription meds are really costing me! The family car was hit by a lady that broadsided us, and her insurance company is playing big time games with us, and after a month our totalled car is still sitting at the auto body waiting for the insurance company to claim liability. Gas prices are close to $3.00 per gallon. The Home of the Brave is a place where big Oil companies, Pharmaceutical Companies, Insurance and Healthcare corporations are gouging the poor for ever increasing profits. For the helpless poor, the Home of Brave is fast becoming 'The Home of the Grave.' The poor are becoming poorer and people of middle level incomes are becoming poor. And how can the powerless gain a voice in the Home of the Brave? You can't. Even when you vote, you wonder if you can trust those who are doing the tallying.

By making abortion and same sex marriages the central issues of the culture wars, the Religious Right has thrown up a smoke screen that obliterate's the church's call to address social issues where people are oppressed and suffer from excesses of such monoplies as mentioned above. The church should be a voice to government, but a voice of reason, not a voice of self-serving agendas. Where is the Religious Right confronting this Administration's penchant for greed and the oppression of the poor? You'll notice they are only vocal concerning matters which do not affect the purse of the wealthy.

"Geckoville' and the 'Home of the Brave' have more similarities than I would have ever thought. I am understanding a little bit more now, that when the 'Home of the Brave' tries to tell Geckoville that it needs more democracy, many people, and not only residents of Geckoville, become indignant because democracy just can't happen in countries that have such a large gap between the rich and the poor, like the 'Home of the Brave.'

Although there are few things more hopeless than feeling powerless, I am glad I was afforded this opportunity to experience semi-powerlessness during my brief stay in the 'Home of the Brave.' I can now return to Geckoville somewhat more able to empathize with the Geckoville citizens, and point them to a true hope that can sustain people in the worst of situations, the hope that comes a long with being a citizen in the Kingdom of Heaven, whose King is the Lord Jesus Christ. His Kingdom is where the poor and oppressed are prefered customers. I wish that were true of the Home of the Brave.