Podcasts

YR via RSS

For Educators
Teach Youth Radio
Curriculum

Youth Programs
CORE
Outreach

Cambodia

Poamrong Rith travels to his parents' homeland.

By Poamrong Rith

Last summer my family and I went on a trip to Cambodia. It was a 23 hour flight and we had to board in Korea and Hong Kong until we finally got there. It was very different from any place I've visited before. Going to Cambodia was an experience that I'll never forget.

Cambodia is very different from the US. I never imagined what it was like in Cambodia until I finally went there. It was very humid and hot compared to the Bay Area, where I live. It was hot and it was raining even though it was the winter — and it was even hotter at night! The only kind of showers people took were cold showers, and with buckets (now I know why my mom always had one in our bath tub!). When we slept we didn't need any blankets.

There were a lot of things that I wasn't used to when I visited Cambodia. One thing was all the dirt roads and cracked, pot-holed pavement. There were lots of people who even wore masks while they rode on their mopeds to protect their faces so that they didn't get sick. There were no freeways, so if you were traveling far, you were traveling slow and on cracked roads for long periods of time.

When I walked down a street in Cambodia it would be so weird because their language was so familiar to me. They were speaking the same language that my parents spoke! Now I understand where my parents came from and how they grew up. My parents always loved to eat fish. They would always have dried fish and I thought it was weird. But in Cambodia, everyone ate dried fish. You could see them drying the fish in nets outside their houses and out their windows everywhere. I always thought my parents were weird until then.

I was happy to see my parents in their homeland. They acted very different when we were there. It was a side of them I had never seen before. They seemed happy all the time and never got mad about anything. I think they just missed it so much and that they finally felt at home and not like the foreigners they are in the US.

My parents always told me stories about how they had it rough when they were growing up. My mother would say she had to walk five miles to school everyday. My brothers and sisters would be like, "Yeah right," but when we visited we were surprised because she probably did have to walk that far to school everyday. My parents always stress about us getting an education and good grades. I see how lucky and fortunate kids are over there just to be going to school and learning. They strive to get an education because it is hard to get a job in Cambodia.

A lot of the places that we visited had many homeless people — not just grown ups, but little kids. There were kids that looked five years old begging and asking for just 100 reals, which is less than a nickel. It made me sad sometimes to see them because they reminded me of my little brother who is eight. Almost everywhere you would go there would be the homeless, the crippled, or the abandoned asking for money. You think the US had a high poverty rate, but it's nothing compared to Cambodia. There is no welfare there. And with Cambodia's bad economy, jobs are rare.

When we would walk down the street the natives immediately knew we were from America. Maybe it was our clothes because we were the only ones with tennis shoes, backpacks, and shorts while everyone else dressed in slippers and plaid shirts and had their hair slicked to the side. Maybe it was the way we talked. Even though we shared the same language, we still spoke a lot differently. When we talked they giggled because they said we spoke like children. We didn't have a huge vocabulary like they did. There was a lot of Cambodian grammar and words that I hadn't learned before. They might have thought we were from America because we had light skin while everyone else had dark tans. And the whole time we were there we were constantly being stung by mosquitoes. We had mosquito bites and bruises everywhere when we came back. They said that the mosquitoes liked fresh blood, that's why we were being bitten so many times. Even the mosquitoes knew we were foreign!!

Going to Cambodia was very fun and was a great experience, but when I got home I was glad to be back. I was glad to be back in the US where I felt comfortable with cable television, hot showers, concrete ground, normal temperature, hamburgers and pizzas and no more mosquitoes! I was glad to go back to my own bed and sleep on my own pillow and see all the familiar faces. But I was also sad.

I missed Cambodia for a while. When I was there I got to live in a world I didn't know existed-an exciting world that was so different from everything that I was used to. We got to ride mopeds everyday and we didn't even need licenses. We got to drive without light signals and stop signs. And the nights there were beautiful. There were hardly any buildings so when you looked up at the stars in the clear sky you could see everything. I missed all the relatives I discovered. There were so many aunts, uncles, and cousins there that I didn't know I had. I thought we had a small family until I visited Cambodia for a month. It was a great experience and I enjoyed my visit a lot. If I was asked to go back and we didn't have to go through the airplane ride, I would accept in a heartbeat — but I wouldn't stay long.

— Poamrong Rith is a freshman at Oakland Technical High School.