The Mission

I was thinking of what to name this post and wanted to focus on the mission each one of us have in life. This question once again 'poped' into my head not because I was at a retreat or doing a reflection but because I spent 3 days living with the Marist Brothers in Pailin, Cambodia.

Wonderful host, (from left) Marist Brothers, Bro. Bryan and Bro. Francis.

Although it was a very short time in terms of a lifetime of a religious, it was a nice and pleasant break from the fast-paced Singapore, even if leaving the country to do work counts. The Brothers were so welcoming that it feel as if I knew them for months or even years.

This is not my first time living with religious and some sort of a familiar feeling for me. However, it was different this time as the Brothers were quite new in Pailin and were still in their infancy stage of setting up a school, so everything even the infrastructure was very simple. Their main focus is to provide education for the rural poor, the poorest of the poor.

In Cambodia, education is not seen as very important, most families see the daily earning of a pitiful pay; working in the fields or in the factories as more important. In the morning, you see children don on their blue and white uniform and head off to school, only to see them heading back even before the the sun reaches its highest point in the day, for their teacher didn't come to school because they didn't feel like coming in. Opposite case back at home, where the schools struggle to keep the students in the school. How ironically sad!

Students walking to school early in the morning.

The Brothers thus provide this chance for the children in Pailin to gain access to some form of education, especially in the subject of English, which is compulsory and tested at the national examinations of Cambodia to gain access to the local university. Khmer is also taught there to young children, whose families are too poor to even pay the standard school fee of about 3 USD a month. There are other private schools in the town of Pailin as well, but their services do not come for free. So the Brothers are there to take in those who can't pay.

Boy learning English at the center the Brothers run.

At the end of the day, every students at least wants to head to the local university, in hopes of a better life, but it all boils down to paper qualifications. I've heard stories of students being smart but not able to pass the examinations because they didn't want to reward their teachers handsomely. So they suffer for doing what is right.

Girls riding a bicycle in the church compound.

Would you rather do what is right and learn something or bribe and know nothing, struggling and failing at the university. Teachers themselves are not well trained or educated and so it comes a vicious cycle of poor education. Well teachers are not totally to blame, as the saying goes "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys", but sometimes in political you pay much more than peanuts and yet still get monkeys.

Question I would like us Singaporeans to think about (especially the youth) is, do we know how much we have taken for granted? Like in the song 'Big Yellow Taxi', where it harps on the fact that humans tend to not know what we have given to us until it is taken from us. I see an increasing number of groups going overseas to do mission and service projects, increasingly encourage (through funding) by the government through the various ministries and councils established in recent years. It is good to go for such trips, to open our eye to the larger world, but with what intention? I think it is common to feel that we are better off and lucky to be in Singapore, some form of nationalism and bonus point for the government, but we tend to see that we are doing a great deed to them for coming to 'help' them. But, who benefit more, them or us?