TGIF

It's Friday and the office is closed for one day--in compensation for the biggest Cambodian holiday: the Water Festival. The holiday actually lasts for about three days, and there are a bunch of organized teams who will boat-race each other. I'm excited, but we have to work during the days when the races actually occur. It kind of sucks, because it's the only chance I'll get to see it, and I won't see it. Oh well.

To follow up on my previous post, I was definitely stressed and unhappy when I came back from Vietnam. I'm not sure if I have moved out of that state yet, either. However, I have realized that it's my unhappiness with being overworked and not willing to work more than my designated hours anymore. I'm tired, but I guess any kind of work really calls for working more hours than you are paid for. After all, the pay was never the reason why I came here. It was the work itself. Am I regretting coming here, then?

The main reason why I've been so unhappy though is because of the girls and their actions. While they can be very cute, they can also be very rude in their ways and discriminatory towards each other. Moreover, cliques are very apparent. I guess this is "natural," but I see it more as social, and hence, things can be changed. How much we, as office staff, should be involved in their lives though is hard to determine. Plus, is our purpose to actually CONTROL them and their lives? Who the hell are we to do that. No one.

Last month, after an intensive nail training, the girls in the nail program decided to take off for a day to drink and party at a baby shower after they asked each staff if they could do so. We told them no. If one person says no, they should have respected that answer. We expect them to be at school in the mornings and doing their practicums in the afternoons, and they knew that. Anyway, we had a big meeting the next day. They didn't seem to regret their actions too much.

Yesterday, we sat in a circle to talk about "reputation" for our Soft Skills Class. Anh did a really good job, as always when facilitating that class, and came up with the idea of asking the girls to write about a time when their reputation to another was damaged, and the reasons why. The point was to get them to remember why that had occurred and to see how they can gain trust from others again. All the girls who disappointed us in September actually wrote about that very incident, and they cried. It really surprised me that it was so intense, because I never knew how they felt about us and the program, AND themselves after the big meeting. I'm glad they took us seriously. It shows the amount of respect they have for us.

I'm still not ready to go back to the kind of relationship I had with the girls before the incident though. It really affected how I have come to see anti-sex-trafficking and community work, and it has definitely scarred me.

Anyway, my optimism is still alive though.