|
|
8
to 12 August 2009
Mission to Cambodia 2009
Some Past Projects in Cambodia
2008
Chea Chum Neas Mortuary
in partnership with Brahmavihara
(Cambodia AIDS
Project)
From the
time we began working in Chea Chum Neas hospital in 2006 we
wanted to do something to make their desolate and neglected
mortuary an appropriate space for the newly dead and for those
who mourn them. In 2008, thanks to Fireflies, a Singaporean
Buddhist Charitable organization, we were able to bulldoze the
filth; renovate the building and roof; have pictures of the
Buddha painted for the vestibule and for the inner room where
the bodies are kept; bring some potted plants; and clean and
restore the space. The photos show the building in several
stages of renovation and during two ceremonies. The first
ceremony was informal on the day we finished installing the
plants and doing basic cleaning. We were honored to have Ching
Porn, the head of a nearby Vipassana center and a close friend
of the late Samdech Maha Ghosananda, join us for chanting and
give a short Dhamma talk. The second, more formal ceremony took
place when Fireflies returned to Cambodia in late March. Two
monks from the Salvation Centre Cambodia organization and an
achar we have known a very long time (he is the one caring for
the bones of Vy’s child in the website section on funerals)
conducted the ceremony, including an eye opening for the Buddha
picture. We were honored once again to have Ching Porn present,
as well as two representatives from Fireflies, representatives
from the hospital and others from Salvation Centre Cambodia.
Following the ceremony we assisted Fireflies in distributing
packages of necessities and money to all the patients, caring
for the living as well as the dead.
http://www.brahmavihara.cambodiaaidsproject.org/mortuaries.shtml
The photo of
the broken statue in the desolate mortuary is by Bennett
Stevens. The rest of the photos are by Beth Goldring.
Email from Ven
Beth Kanji Goldring.
An American Zen Nun in the Japanese Rinzei tradition. Founder of
Brahmavihara/Cambodia AIDS Project
From: goldring <goldring@online.com.kh>
Date: Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:31 AM
Subject: july/august letter from beth
To:
goldring@online.com.kh
Dear Friends;
The biggest news this time is our retreat from July
10-19, which went amazingly well. Sheila Robinson, who has
studied with many distinguished teachers, taught it with
clarity, warmth, humor and great skill. Her topic was the Five
Hindrances. What I admired especially was the systematic and
practical way she took us through them, never without warmth and
humor, but systematically: what each hindrance was, how it
worked and what were some strategies for dealing with it as it
arose. This combination of deep understanding, clarity and
practical wisdom was also completely apparent in her daily
meditation instructions and in the metta practice. I was, of
course, not present at her interviews with people. But I saw the
practice taking hold in the way people sat and walked and ate
and carried themselves in general. And their later reports were
both loving and appreciative. This is the first time my staff
has had systematic interviews; they loved the way Sheila would
adjust their practice when things came up, and her deep
understanding of their processes.
Trent Walker, who translated, was delayed two days
by the death of his beloved smot chanting teacher (he had
been in attendance throughout his teacher’s illness,
hospitalization and return home to die). We had an excellent
professional translator in the meantime (the person who is
translating The Issue at Hand into Khmer). When Trent
arrived he threw his whole self into both translation and
participation in the retreat. Goody for us!! Especially when his
translations for the cook meant that we started getting
incredibly wonderful meals. I ran around doing things (I never
realized how much work being a retreat manager is: all the
details!!!), rang bells at the early morning sit, got to
meditation instruction and dhamma talks, and got to sit
and sometimes walk otherwise. The full schedule was from 5:00
a.m. to 9:30 p.m., with rest time, especially for the AIDS
patients. After the first couple of days when I rang the 4:30
wakeup bell everyone was already dressed and ready to go to the
meditation hall; they would have sat until midnight had we let
them.
As I said last month, the
retreat was held in the meditation hall Ven. Yos Hut Khemacaro
build behind the hospital he supports in Prey Veng province,
about 100 kilometers south of Phnom Penh. Except for
Sheila and me, people slept above the kitchen/dining room, in
rooms also used by the French doctors Ven. Yos Hut brings
several times a year to provide free medical care. My office was
also there. Sheila and I slept in another room at the top of the
main hospital building, with a gorgeous view of the surrounding
countryside from the patio. The meditation hall is behind the
hospital separated enough for real quiet and close enough to go
back and forth easily. Sheila’s interview room was in one of two
small chapel buildings, with a large standing Buddha.
All my staff, except for Keo, who had measles, participated, in
addition to Van SiVorn, who has organized and lead the
Dhammayietra (Cambodian peace walk initially headed by Maha
Ghosananda), since Maha became unable to do it and has continued
it after his death and two Western friends, Andrew, a man
working in agricultural fair trade here (mostly cashews and
honey) who also helps Ven. Yos Hut with projects, and Trent’s
significant other, a wonderful young woman. Andrew also
helped a lot in preparation, including a day and a half spent
tying ropes and hanging the individual umbrella mosquito nets we
all used. After the retreat I heard stories from my staff about
scorpions coming up to each net, trying to get in, and then
trying the neighbor’s net instead. In the end, we closed doors
and windows at night, making it hot but safer for both us and
the many kinds of insects.
Fireflies, the wonderful Singaporean
Buddhist charitable organization who allowed us to renovate the
Chea Chum Neas mortuary several years ago, supported the whole
retreat, except for the umbrella nets, which Ven. Yos Hut
donated, and a couple of other donations. We are deeply, deeply
grateful to them.
I have lots of pictures. Will try to get them onto
the website and will have them for the slideshow this year.
It is not often I get to report on something with
such unequivocal happiness. I treasure the fact that I can do
this
Staff and Administrative News:
There isn’t a lot of other staff news. Keo had
measles but has recovered. Noeung has finished the second month
of her probationary period and already seems to have been with
us for years. I was worried about her ability to do a retreat
when she had only been meditating for a month but she did fine
with it, worked a bit too hard in fact (both Sheila and I, in
different ways, had to counsel her on the difference between
working flat out and working intensely but wisely) but settled
in fine at the end. Morale is fine. It always amazes me how
wonderful morale can be in the project when the kindness that is
extended to patients is extended mutually.
What I see also is a great deal more realistic
confidence and ownership in my staff’s work. Not only are they
skilled in knowing what to do, especially where direct care of
patients is concerned, but they know they are skilled. They are
much less hesitant to disagree with me or correct me or point
out something I need to know and don’t understand. And most of
the time they are right. And when they aren’t they listen to me
about why. It is a real process of maturation and leaves me with
a great deal more freedom. Of course, I am sometimes ambivalent
about this.
So I go around making trouble expanding this and
that and leaving us with the question of how to get it all done.
With the support of a kindly, generous Australian couple we are
now seeing all of the AIDS patients in Prey Sar prison (65 last
month and increasing, since Roussey hospital is testing all the
prisoners so that they can get care) and will start seeing about
a dozen tuberculosis patients as of next month. It is mindless
work: we see each of them for a moment, give them a packet of
noodles, canned milk, hard candies, monkey balm and $5/month,
but it makes a lot of difference to their general health and
provides some encouragement. .
We continue to support people’s coming to Phnom Penh
for medicines, both from the provinces and from the resettlement
sites. We have set up a system for people coming from the
provinces where they will receive support money from the
hospitals rather than from us directly, but I have not yet been
able to get the necessary forms and lists written. I hope to
within the next few weeks so it will be in place before I leave
for the US. We go to the large resettlement sites every two
weeks; both to Andong, where we have 51 patients, and now also
to Tuol Sambo, where they moved families from Borei Kela. There
are now 64 patients there and more may come. Housing there is
vastly superior to Andong; there are rows of green zinc sheds,
divided into rooms, each with a toilet. They have electricity
and a well and are close to the road and market. There is an
elementary school less than 100 meters away. But people are not
happy to have been relocated so far from the city.
The three new houses the Australians (actually the
man’s 88-year-old mother) built in Andong are finished. They
have zinc roofs and woven bamboo walls and are on stilts. The
flooring is bamboo slatting and all three families have cleaned
up the areas under the houses for use. People are very happy
with them.
There is the third site, Dey Krahom, where we have a
few patients; we go there once a month. Conditions there are
truly horrible and not likely to improve in the near future.
People were dumped in a parking lot, near building sites, with
no resources at all. Most people have snuck back into the city.
There is talk about moving the people even further away.
Fireflies, the Singaporean Buddhist
charitable organization who funded the retreat, will be visiting
next week. They will donate food, kramas (Cambodian
scarves) and a little money at the resettlement sites and at
Chea Chum Neas hospital, learn reiki and come with us for
patient visits, see some of Ven. Yos Hut’s projects (especially
for building school bathrooms and water supply in remote areas
of Prey Veng), visit the Wat Opot orphanage and see some other
organizations.
We have begun buying extra strength surgical masks
for Chea Chum Neas because of the problem of undiagnosed
multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. In Roussey hospital, the HOPE
hospice and other places we go the multi-drug resistant tb
patients are either excluded or separated, so that my staff is
not at risk from them. But five of my staff are AIDS patients,
and one of them nearly died twice from tb. She began to be very
worried about catching tb again, or catching the multi-drug
resistant kind. We continue to use regular masks most of the
time but are using these where there is special risk. I am
asking friends who work in hospitals or have access to donated
medical equipment to help us provide these masks, which are
expensive.
Patient News:
With all the discussion of transportation, support,
housebuilding, special masks and retreats it becomes easy to
lose sight of the day-to-day ongoing work of caring for
patients’ emotional and spiritual needs which is the foundation
of all our efforts. In many ways we have become a lot like other
charitable organizations, doing our best to respond, within the
parameters of what is possible for us, to unending material need
and essential services that are lost in the gaps between other
organizations. There is nothing wrong, and a great deal right,
in doing this.
But the backbone of our work, the daily visiting of
patients in hospices, in their homes, in the hospitals, remains
our central purpose and remains what we do best. I tend to write
less and less about this because it is my staff who have taken
this over, going out four days a week (the fifth is for dhamma
study) to be present with the desperately ill, dying,
recovering, isolated, terrified and lonely. To listen to
problems, chant, give Reiki and Healing Touch, and embody
compassionate presence so that the patients can feel, behind it
all, the deep compassion of the Buddha and his teachings. My
personal work has moved over time into supporting their efforts
as best I can: emotionally, financially, through training. I am
still looking for ways in which my staff’s voices can be heard
in these letters.
We have had 15 deaths since the last letter, mostly
at Roussey hospital and at Maryknoll hospice. We have very few
at Chea Chum Neas because Maryknoll tries to bring dying
patients to their hospice so that they can die under easier
circumstances.
Proh, whom I wrote about last month, the man
believed to be brain dead, continued to improve for a time and
was transferred to Maryknoll. He became very, very hungry,
eating all the time and looking around for more; responded to
chanting, speech (although he couldn’t talk he would make an
effort) and reiki; and began to gain weight and strength.
Unfortunately, his condition has begun deteriorating again.
Yesterday evening Ramo, my oldest staff member, asked if he
could go to see Proh every day until either his condition
improves or he dies.
Yong An, our cancer patient at Korsang organization,
is doing brilliantly. We were told she has cancer in her lungs
and colon, throughout her body. But she has gained weight and
strength; her terrible bedsore at the base of her spine has
closed up and healed; and she is optimistic. She does not know
about the residual cancer and we have no interest in telling
her, since there is no medical treatment for it. We do not know
how long she will live but right now she is enjoying really good
time, surrounded by support and love.
Sok Da is another story. Or many other stories. She
continues to live and did not, as we expected, die when we were
on retreat. The following week, however, was another major
crisis. Visiting her is a 100-kilometer trip, half of it off
road, by motorcycle. It takes about 3 ½ hours each way. I am
finding it physically difficult, especially because it is
accompanied by so many emotional crises. When Pheap and I went
up Tuesday the 21st she was paper thin, had a
terribly high fever, and her mind was wandering. For the first
half an hour, during which I was speaking with her and doing
reiki, she kept asking why I didn’t come. Then she was
hallucinating that her dead daughter, who died as a baby, was
coming to take her. Then it expanded that her daughter was
coming to take her to Thailand. When she was having this
hallucination her face became quite peaceful and joyous and
beautiful. By the end of the visit she was more lucid although
desperately ill. In addition to everything else she is getting a
lot of pain from both her prolapsed uterus and her cervical
cancer. We tried to see about getting a caregiver for her in the
village but there didn’t seem to be anyone. We left, leaving
money for the monks and achar to come and chant, and promising
to come back Saturday. Friday night they called from the village
to say not to come. They said she would die within the next day;
that the old people in the village, the achars and the monks
were chanting for her; and that we should wait until it was over
and come and take her bones and the children. So we didn’t go.
On Monday she was much better and called Pheap to complain about
how we hadn’t come and to tell us she wanted some crabs to eat.
She yelled at him for over half an hour. I went up on Tuesday
with a bedpan she wanted, the crabs, and some codeine for the
pain. She wasn’t able to urinate and I was worried that the
uterus was blocking her urethra. But it may simply have been
that she had no urine. She was running a fever, although not as
high, and drinking very little. In any case, she has been able
to urinate since. The village found a caregiver for her, a very
kind woman, who quit after two days because Sok Da was so
abusive. So she remains alone, except for the considerable
support she receives from the villagers and for her two younger
children. The older child was there the weekend she was expected
to die but went back to work when I was coming. The middle
child, who does everything for her, is becoming deeply exhausted
by the process; the youngest child, who normally screams and
cries a lot, has begun sleeping all the time and sitting by his
mother in a stupor when he is awake.
This is a long, hard, deeply demoralizing process.
It is good for me to be in the center of it, especially since I
see patients so little. My staff do the work with such beauty
and strength that I am tempted to forget how hard it can be. But
the task is to love without reservation, without stint, without
begrudgement, not stupidly or blindly but unconditionally. With
all of it she is a very good teacher for me.
Some people have asked about favoritism because Sok
Da receives so much material as well as other support. She has a
donor, an Australian nun in the Tibetan tradition, who is
supporting the cost of the visiting and the many, many things
Sok Da asks for. We would do a fair bit of it otherwise;
certainly we would visit; but we would not be able to provide
nearly as much as we are providing.
There is more, of course, but I think this is
probably enough for now. I leave for the US September 5 and will
write one more letter before then, with the usual two-page
project description.
love and bows,
beth
What I love about watching my staff at work is the
specificity with which they know which patients prefer what kind
of treatment: who likes to have their back massaged, who loves
extra candy, who grumbles unless three different people work
with them, who lights up when they enter the room. All this
daily work goes on in the background of these letters but in the
foreground of the project.
|
|
.JPG)
.JPG)
