Volunteer in Cambodia: 'Life doesn't seem as special here'

“It almost seems to frustrate people because I’m not here for prostitution ...” former Emerald Coast resident Matt Chambliss says of his volunteer work in Cambodia. “So many people are here on vacation, and I’m here doing business.”

As a member of the Planting Peace charitable organization, Chambliss, 26, is working in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, to find housing for homeless amputees — a sizable population in a country where land mines are widespread and one in every 200 people is an amputee.

“I saw homeless families nursing and sleeping in the brush next to all the tourism,” Chambliss said, “and thought, ‘This is crazy.’ We found a small village, wrote a check and the eight families — maybe 60 to 70 people — were in homes for around $3,000 a year total.”

Planting Peace is the brainchild of activist and former Destin resident Aaron Jackson, best known for a campaign to rid Haiti of parasitic worms infesting the residents there. Jackson, who was a CNN Hero, was invited to set up a Planting Peace program in Cambodia and invited Chambliss, a former golfing buddy, to join him.

Chambliss, who has been in Cambodia roughly three months now, said he’d previously worked in El Salvador and Belize, “mostly building houses and creating wells for the people there. This is a very different form from those previous trips because of my extended time here.”

Chambliss said that since war engulfed Cambodia in the 1970s, families have been torn apart and killed, to the point many people no longer have blood relatives to live with. Many parents, he said, make ends meet by selling children into prostitution or “renting” them out to a tourist.
“We are doing our best to reverse this cycle,” Chambliss said. “Life doesn’t seem as special here — this might sound funny, but it’s like we treasure our lives more or something. Maybe the war and all the death seen by these people created a sense of failure or lack of respect for themselves ... They treat their own people like dogs or something.”

Chambliss said that once he arrived, thinking about himself was “out the window — focus on the lives of others. To see and feel people hug you is a great feeling, not involving money but real love. I never felt it until I came here.”

The biggest problem, Chambliss said, is that people are constantly trying to “scam or work you over. If you are not careful, you can end up dead, or dead broke.”

With conditions so desperate, Chambliss said, many Cambodians have no chance to look beyond the day’s survival: “We are focusing on showing them a future. People here only see what is now, not what is to come.”

Chambliss said one thing he’d like to tell the Emerald Coast is to travel and see the world and how different it is from America.

“We have such great lives in the USA, we take it for granted. Live life and enjoy what you have is what I have learned here.”

WANT TO HELP?

You can donate to the Cambodian relief work through plantingpeace.org, or by calling (850) 376-5600.