Personal Reflection Essay

                                                   Personal Reflection Essay
The thing that has perhaps made the biggest impact on my life over the past few years is my involvement in volunteer work. I was drawn to start volunteering because I felt it would improve the strength of my applications when applying to U.S. colleges, but I also wanted to do my part by helping others who are less fortunate than I am.  This is why I decided to travel abroad to Cambodia and dedicate my time to building houses for orphans. It was truly an eye opening experience for me, as I got to see the effects of real poverty for the first time, as well as how grateful people can be for every little thing in their life. It made me think about how I live my life and how fortunate I have been, and because of this I find myself becoming less frustrated and angry about the problems in my life because I am able to put things into perspective.
	My journey to Cambodia starts with an early morning plane ride to Siem Reap, one of the northern most Cambodian states that touches Thailand, and is noted for containing the world famous Angkor Wat temple. I am always amazed at how willing hundreds of people are to get in an aircraft and trust that the pilot is a competent individual with safety as their number one priority without ever having met him or her. It just shows how confident people are in their fellow human beings, they are willing to step into a massive airbus they have no control over and leave their fellow man in charge of their life for hours at a time. I slip on my sleep mask and bury my paranoia into my pillow, wishing that it would go away and allow me to enjoy myself for now, and hope that it will reappear on a more convenient day.
After a smooth four or so hours of airtime we touch down at the Siem Reap International Airport and I mentally give “team competent pilots” another point on the scoreboard. So far it has been a bit of a blowout against “team incompetent pilots” in my life, and I am certainly glad about that. I exit the front of the temple-shaped airport and begin to place a phone call to catch up with my volunteer organization, CVCD, and notice a strange looking statue sitting in the airport lawn. It reads “Siem Reap International Airport.” “Okay, that’s normal” I think to myself. I also see what I assume is the same text but in Cambodian print above the English text. Again, a pretty normal sight. What is not quite as normal however is the clay statue sitting atop the marble fixture, which shows a massive dog with two phallic like arms stretched out in the air as a dozen or so people cling on to dear life. I think to myself that this particular piece of artwork has a better chance of receiving appreciation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art than in Cambodia’s biggest airport, but who am I to say where art should and should not be? I take a mental snapshot of the piece for later as the vehicle I am waiting for arrives, a rusty turquoise van with the letters CVCD printed in black across the side, which by the way stands for “Cambodian Volunteers for Community Development.”
	I will advance the plot a bit here and skip over all the formalities where I met the wonderful people I will be working with over the next couple weeks, and instead dive into the details of the volunteer project. Essentially I am here because the organization needs able bodies that can assist with the massive project of building houses with just a handful of volunteers in a few weeks’ time. The volunteers on site were broken up into groups depending on what role you were assigned to do. Some were there as supervisors, others were there to put up the frame of the building, even more were there to nail wooden planks together, and others such as myself were there to assist the builders by handing them the necessary tool they needed at the time. This works like how a nurse would assist a doctor during a surgical procedure, I always had the right nail ready to go when it was needed, and I was also given the task of loading wooden planks from a warehouse into a truck that took them back to the construction site. This method of specialization meant that everyone always had something to do, there was no down time where some groups would be working and others would be standing idle. Even if you were there as an electrician that contributed by getting the lights to come on, you still helped out by loading planks of wood and clearing trash from the area.
	After two weeks of passing out nails and making trips back and forth between the warehouse and the construction site, we had completed the project and were ready to present the house to the children and supervisor that would be living there. I am glad there was no ribbon cutting ceremony because it would have been a waste of time; the children immediately sprinted from the van they arrived in to check out their new home while Meaker, the orphanage supervisor, spoke to some of the CVCD workers. I saw the kids run up and down the stairs and felt jealous over how much energy they had, they peaked their heads out of windows and tested out the faucets, and were amazed to see how bright the lights were and how much easier it would be to read inside. Day eventually turned to night and the children let out a final “Saum arkoun anak!” or “Thank you!” in Khmer, as Meaker led them back to orphanage for the last time.
	I must say the experience was exhausting as it was rewarding and eye opening, in order to build a house as fast as we did there could be no real down time, and if someone was not in motion their intentions would be quickly questioned. I was okay with this attitude though. I was there for a specific purpose and because of my team and the hard work we put in, we were all able to sleep a little better at the end of those two weeks knowing we had done something good. I plan to return back to Cambodia in the future and visit the children to see how they are doing and how their new home has affected their lives, and I hope that my volunteer experience will convince them to give back to their own communities. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to donate resources or money, but just about everyone can donate their time.