Jordan in Cambodia...Again

First of all, if you have not read/watched/listened to Sharon Eubank's BYU speech entitled "Turning Enemies into Friends," you need to hit that up. It is amazing! I loved her message. Here is the link:  https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/sharon-eubank_turning-enemies-into-friends/ . She talks about service to others, using our free time to do good and be productive rather than wasting it, and especially about helping others. Many of us feel that we should invest significant amounts of time and money into helping save the world. We want to build schools or wells or make quilts or 72-hour kits or go on humanitarian trips. These are all worthy endeavors, but she says that the biggest gift is us ourselves. We are the gift. We have the ability, each one of us, to change lives just by helping people feel loved, safe, and welcome wherever they go. The world is full of so much hatred and divisiveness, and we have the ability to share light and goodness wherever we go, and that is fre...

Botevy was a poor mother looking to provide for her family. Eventually, once she became more financially secure, she noticed other children suffering in poverty with a lack of resources to help them escape their conditions. She knew she had to help, so she began taking these children in and providing them educational opportunities and let them live with her so they could have a chance for better futures. She used her own money until she could finally establish an organization that obtained donations from others to fund her efforts. She has since been able to assist nearly 100 children, many of whom have gone on to serve LDS missions and are in college. Anna is a devout Christian who came to Cambodia and fell in love with the country. She started a restaurant that employed underprivileged Cambodians and taught them new skills that could help them escape poverty. She has employed hundreds of Cambodians, all of whom still keep in touch and come to the restaurant because they feel valued...

It's 6:30 AM, and the alarm wakes you up, if you haven't already been woken up by the crowing roosters, the cultural wedding music being blasted from megaphones nearby, the creaking wooden bed frame, or the heat. In Cambodia, life begins with the sunrise, which is almost always before 6 AM, so sleeping until 6:30 is late here. After a quick shower to cool off and clean up, I'm already sweating again by the time I put my clothes on. The temperatures this time of year hover around 95 degrees, with a heat index almost always well above 100 degrees. It's toasty, but that can't stifle the excitement of being in a country full of culture, history, and truly remarkable and friendly people. A typical day begins with a quick breakfast, likely a Styrofoam container of rice and pork with eggs and pickled vegetables, a popular breakfast dish here. After shoveling down our food, we get on our tuk-tuks to go teach. Tuk-tuks are a common and popular mode of transportation here. ...

Life has been so busy! Ever since our first week of cultural/historical exposure, we have been on the go constantly. After leaving Siem Reap, most of the group went to Kampong Cham, the province where most of our project work will be taking place. However, I, along with 5 other team members, went back to Phnom Penh to work at Cambodia's first dairy farm, Moo Moo Farms. We did a service project here at the beginning of the program, but now, we would have the opportunity to help the founder, Kenny, with a different project. He wants to provide free milk to school children in the area, but his business doesn't have enough revenue yet to provide it free of charge. So, he enlisted the six of us to research the best model for reaching out to donors in America to help raise funds for this cause. We spent several days in the city seated at a coffee shop (gotta take advantage of that WiFi) researching different donation models in different social enterprises. We found many different opt...

Siem Reap is like a breath of fresh air. Not literally...the air is still dusty, there are still indeterminable stenches in the air, but there's just a feeling here. The city is so alive, especially at night, which is contrary to anywhere else in Cambodia. In the evening, food vendors line the streets calling at you to come try their food. You'll pass by grilled meat, fruit smoothies, fried rice and noodles, all for cheap prices. Tuk-tuk drivers will call out trying to find more riders. Sellers at the market exhibit their most enticing products. You can get a full body massage for under $10. As a cherry on top, why not have fish suck the dead skin off your feet for just a couple bucks? At night, a street downtown livens as all the bars and pubs open up and blast their mixtapes of both western and Khmer pop music. No wonder they literally call this road Pub Street. I could walk around this area all night. I love it. There's another side of Siem Reap, however, that's ...

Does April 17, 1975 ring a bell to anyone? I clearly wasn't in the picture, but my parents were in school, my grandparents were probably at work. In Cambodia, however, it was the start of 3 years of living hell. The Khmer Rouge regime, headed by the radical Communist dictator Pol Pot, entered Phnom Penh with cries of peace and the end of years of political unrest. Hours later, they ordered the evacuation of the city with threats of an American bombing of Phnom Penh. In reality, they were clearing out the city to send its inhabitants to rural work camps. There, any educated people, innovative thinkers, or those with connections to western ideas were slaughtered; the rest were worked to death. They were forced to work on farms to triple the rice production; in blazing heat and receiving only two bowls of watered-down rice porridge per day, this was essentially a death sentence.  Over the course of 3 years and 8 months, over one quarter of the country's population was killed, a...

Everyone has needs. We all need food and water and shelter. That's common knowledge. Some people need extra attention; others need more alone time. Those who know me personally know that I frequently need a snack to hold me over till dinner. But what about knowing the needs of development work? Our first 2 projects here at HELP focused on needs. Our first day was spent walking the unpaved roads surrounding an orphanage for underprivileged Cambodian children and literally asking the people in the neighborhood what their needs were. We sat down outside of homes on flimsy plastic chairs asking what could help improve the community. What did they actually want to see happen? What were their concerns? We got a variety of different answers, many of them great ideas. But the same two kept popping up: paving the road and teaching English classes to the children. When organizations come in to an area, there are hundreds of different projects they can implement, but in order to find the mo...

Hello to all family and friends and any others who may have come across this blog! My name is Jordan. I'm a 22 year old student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I study Public Health with a minor in International Development and hope to go on to medical school when I finish my undergraduate studies. I am passionate about traveling and hope to provide healthcare and education to those in developing countries as part of my future career. Luckily for me, I have an opportunity to do some of that right now. This blog will highlight some of my experiences as I travel to Cambodia, a place very dear to my heart. I lived in Cambodia for 2 years as a volunteer missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then again for nearly 4 months as a project intern for the Cambodia Oral History Project, a BYU project that obtains through oral interview and archives the stories of elderly Cambodians to preserve their histories. This year, I have the opportunity to go...