Volunteer trip brings poignant lessons, experiences

Seeing Cambodians “make do with a smile on their face” is what stands out for Jasperite Rich Potter upon his return last month from a volunteer holiday with Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program.

Potter had always thought he’d like to go on an international humanitarian aid trip, so when the head of a group going to Cambodia stayed in his Bed and Breakfast last summer, he seized the opportunity. 

Part of a group of 20 volunteers from Canada and the United States, Potter and wife Cheryl visited southeast Asia from Oct. 23 to Nov. 7. While there, the volunteers helped build three houses and one outhouse.

“It’s very labour intensive, everything was done by hand,” Potter said. “We unloaded about 4,000 lbs. of bricks by hand out of the back of a truck.”

The group built one house and the outhouse using bricks and mortar and the other two projects were renovations of wood homes on stilts. “We stripped off what were thatch walls and roof and redid them with wood posts and siding, and then added the metal roofs,” he said. “We got those four projects done in two weeks.”

The homes the volunteers constructed consist of a single room in which the residents would hang fabric to create rooms. “The homeowners themselves typically pitched in,” Potter said. “They would have about a five-year mortgage they would have to pay, they have their commitment as well.”

Though the volunteers pay to go and donate their time, they stand to gain a lot from the experience. “Really the lesson for us is how they make do with a smile on their face,” Potter said. There are a number of concerns facing the country, including the stress of an “astonishing birth rate,” and the memory of the genocide that took place just 30 years ago.

“We went to Phnom Penh, and to see all the evidence of the genocide – killing fields, five acres of land pocked with 20-foot holes, grown-in graves,” he said. “There were hundreds of bodies in each grave they dug up.”

There was much to learn during the brief exposure to the foreign culture, including a reminder of a trip the couple made to Asia two decades ago. 

“It affected us back then in seeing the majority of the world really lives in quite a very unmaterialistic manner,” he said. “The big lesson to us then and to revisit it again was first how happy and normal life can seemingly be without the stuff.”

Seeing a place where people experience great poverty made Potter appreciate how fortunate he is to live where he does. “In Western society, Canada, Jasper... it’s just amazing what we have,” he said, adding the average salary in Cambodia is about $150 a month. “They really have very little but they were very generous and happy.”

Siem Reap, where the group stayed in Cambodia, was dry and humid, and got brief late-afternoon rain showers daily, Potter said. “Out on the countryside, it was amazing, there was a lot of kids, animals, water buffalo, pigs, chickens, dogs. Bikes, motorcycles, trucks, going up and down narrow roads, water everywhere, and kids playing in water.”

And Cambodian fare is “great stuff,” he said. “Curries, seafood, rice of course, chicken, beef – all those things. We ate really well and inexpensively, to go out and eat in a standard restaurant was about $6.”

A trip like this is something Potter would like to do again. “And some day I’d love to get a group of Jasper people to go on one of these builds,” he added.