Ever since the bus accident in Thailand that changed the fate of my own students’ field trip, I have been struggling with the guilt of what it means to be a middle-class western girl volunteering in the developing world. While my students’ vacation was altered and their opportunity to see the beach eliminated, I knew that I would be setting off for a six-week Southeast Asian excursion – a venture that prompted many people in my village to ask me, “But how can you afford that?” To me, the fact that I have so quickly became a typical tourist makes the point of my being in Thailand feel a little bit fraudulent. How authentic can my experience really be, if after six months, I retreat back into the comforts of my life before?

This feeling has been heavily compounded by my time in Cambodia. My summer began with Rylee visiting Thailand, and the teal water and towering limestone pillars of Ko Samui made it one of (if not the) most beautiful places I have ever been. Something we discussed quite a bit as we made our way out of paradise and into the northern cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai is how much Thailand and Europe diverge, landing often on the differing infrastructure between the developing and the developed world.

If I had been under the impression that Thailand was underdeveloped, a week in Cambodia has rewritten my designation of poverty. Siem Reap was abuzz with tourism and nightlife, backpackers looking for a way to find themselves and vendors looking for a way to make a profit. Two other WorldTeach teachers and I played into the tourism and the nightlife as well, visiting Angkor Wat at sunrise (the largest religious monument in the world, originally built as a Hindu temple in the 12^th century and quickly converted to a Buddhist place of worship), seeing the famed Cambodian Carnival, and biking around the charming town and its green, rice-paddy surroundings.

It was our visit to Tonle Sap Lake that renewed my feelings of tension between being a tourist here, and the reality of life for this culture’s inhabitants. Presented through backpacker websites as an excursion amongst charming, floating fisher villages, our visit to the lake consisted of riding in a speedboat down the river and viewing the immense poverty on either side of us, with cameras at the ready. Dilapidated houses were built on unbelievable stilts that become means of survival during the rainy season. Skinny children ran naked on the shore, which consisted of piles of trash that leaked their way down from the land and into the polluted water. The experience was reminiscent of wandering a zoo; but it wasn’t caged animals that were seeing, it was people with a quality of life so low that I could barely believe it existed. I’ve seen and studied both poverty and development before – this was the first time I toured it, and it didn’t feel right.

Journeying from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh rearranged my awareness once again. I had never before been witness to piles of trash that my mind keeps aligning with the snow mounds of a Wisconsin winter. The city is teaming with rats and roaches, and idle men who are either leering at me or soliciting me at all times. My friends and I were involved in an elaborate scam in Siem Reap, and in Phnom Penh, a motorbike flew by me with an attempt to snatch my phone, which luckily I held tightly enough. I spent a good half-day despising this city, and then the rest of the day considering the poverty that makes people desperate to do anything to survive.

Part of my interest in coming to Cambodia was the post-conflict status of the country. I spent one day touring the Genocide Museum – Tuol Sleng S-21 – a high-school-turned-torture-prison for suspects under Pol Pot, and one day touring the Killing Fields just outside of the capitol, where over 3 million Cambodians were slaughtered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The fields themselves were a vast expanse of enormous divots, looking as if one hundred separate craters had impacted the earth. In reality, these gaping spaces were where mass graves had been excavated once the genocide was over.

A sweet, 20-year-old tour guide in Siem Reap had told us that Cambodians might be a smiling people, but that the suffering is nowhere near finished. The Phnom Penh audio guide reminded me that “every Cambodian, in his or her own way, is still struggling with the events of the recent past.” Recent it was, taking place between 1975 and 1979, and barely having been recognized or tried by the end of the millennium.

How easy it is, for me, a backpacker, to come into Cambodia and look with disgust upon the trash and annoyance upon the vendors vying for my business. The ramifications of the country’s atrocity have saturated every part of life here – from failing infrastructure to lack of education to poverty to desperation to thievery to prostitution.

One of our first nights here, we started noticing some unusual happenings at the corner mini-mart – older, white men seemed to be walking around with small Cambodian children in an unsettling scene. We confided in our hostel staff – is there any number we can call if we see something suspicious? Not really, we were told. Every day since the incident, the staff members have approached us to thank us for our consideration. “It is so kind of you to care for Cambodian children. Thank you for watching out for my people.” Heartbreaking, no?

I think that there are a lot of ways to tour a place like Cambodia. There’s the mentality that Cambodia is poor and that our dollar will stretch further than the imagination. There’s a party scene that is exacerbated by $1 cocktails. There are beautiful beaches and an opportunity to learn about the peaceful eastern Buddhist mentality, a chance for people to break from their 9-to-5s and briefly dabble in the art of Zen. For the tourists I’ve encountered with this mentality, Cambodia has been a place of party and peace signs. There’s also the reality of city-life, where the pollution is palpable, the heat is unbearable, and the inauthentic, rude city dwellers disappoint my fellow travelers. It’s easy to make this kind of journey all about the individual – whether pleased with the cheap cocktails, or distressed by the petty theft. The concept that I’m really trying to take with me is that, as tourists, we are only passing through Cambodian reality, and it’s our duty to stop and reflect on what this means instead of merely stop and stare.

I know that seeing what I’ve seen has forced a cultural education upon me and has reignited my passion for my Conflict Management degree. I hope that I have the courage to use this trip to overcome my feelings of guilt by actually contributing to post-conflict development. I also hope to share the experience with no intention of being pedantic. Cambodia needs kindness and it needs help, and that help can come in monetary value in the form of tourism. I just hope that people who endeavor into the developing world to find themselves find an equal helping of compassion for the people here.