What to Expect in Cambodia

Hi everyone,

I’d like to take some time in this post to discuss a short “what to expect in Cambodia” piece that will hopefully help put this trip in context for the other IRES Cambodia students and their family members, some of whom I’m sure are quite concerned about their young, 20-something relative traveling to an unfamiliar country on the other side of the world for a few months.  Let me apologize in advance for, well, just all of my writing in general.  I’ve been disposed to mathematics, science, and engineering for upwards of a decade now; writing, much to the chagrin of my liberal arts professors, was never my strong suit.

First, let me take a step back and introduce myself. My name is Michael Benson, a PhD student at Villanova University (VU). I traveled to Cambodia for the first time in December of 2014, and have visited again two more times before this summer’s trip, totaling something like 3.5 months in Cambodia over the course of those prior visits. While I’m certainly not an expert on the Kingdom of Cambodia, I’m definitely the student on this trip with the most in-country experience, so this summer I’ll be in charge of coordinating the rest of the student team, helping my teammates to acclimate to life in Cambodia as best as possible. This will include helping them with their lodgings, pointing out which foods are good or not so good to eat (both in terms of what tastes good, and what might make them sick), and, not that this will be necessary, but help with medical assistance for anything more severe than Cambodia’s version of Montezuma’s Revenge.  Due to my experience here, and due to the desire of our advisor, one Garrett Clayton, PhD, to create blog posts, I figured I’d kick the blog off with a bit of content about my first time here and what my teammates should expect.

The first time I traveled to Cambodia, I was coming to test and demonstrate my then senior design project, the Low Cost Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robot, to a group of people I had only interacted with a few times from the Golden West Humanitarian Foundation (GWHF).  Even for someone with a fair amount of international travel experience up until that point, the trip was definitely still very stressful. Not only did I have to deal with the stresses of traveling to an unknown place, but on top of that I was also worrying about demonstrating this robot that definitely wasn’t assembled the week before to GWHF.  I flew from New York to Phnom Penh with a box full of wires and electronics in my backpack that I was sure was going to cause me to be detained by the TSA (for better or for worse, I was not). My team and I assembled the robot in a hotel room in Phnom Penh that simultaneously overlooked the royal palace and a plaza full of homeless people. To top it all off, there’s a nice 11 hour time difference to deal with, so around lunch time our bodies were regularly screaming “GO TO SLEEP“.

I guess what I’m trying to get across here is, yeah, parts of this trip will be stressful.  It’s kind of unavoidable. Luckily, the most danger you’ll likely ever be in is of paying too much for a tuk-tuk ride (to the moms and dads reading this – I promise, it really is very safe here).  So. Safe, but stressful. I’m not really doing a good job of selling this trip at this point, am I?

Fortunately, I have good news. Despite the stress, this trip is going to be freaking awesome.

Southeast Asia, Cambodia included, is absolutely amazing.  I have a hard time comparing Southeast Asia to anywhere else I’ve been in the world. The architecture, the culture, the people, it’s all so unique, and the team will get to partake in all of it. A quick Google Images search of “Cambodia” will result in viewing some incredible views of Angkor Wat (and many other temples in Siem Reap), the royal palace, and more.  The students here are going to get to experience all of that.  On top of a planned trip for the team to visit Siem Reap in the middle of July, members of the team are already planning on using their free time to visit everything from the royal palace in Phnom Penh to the beaches of Sihanoukville.  In fact, tonight the team is planning on going to a local temple to partake in a ceremony to celebrate tonight’s full moon.  The team members aren’t just here working, they’re here living in Cambodia.

In addition, the team will get to interact with the Cambodian people. And let me tell you, the people of Cambodia are some of the kindest, hardest-working, most positive people you’ll ever have the opportunity to meet. Strangers will invite you into their home for dinner.  Monie, a local partner for one of VU’s projects in Cambodia, will routinely invite visiting students to her home for elaborate feasts that rival those put together by my grandmother on holidays. Not only will the team get to interact with people just in their daily passages, they’ll also get to work with Cambodians that work in STEM and robotics fields as well, including both Cambodian workers at Golden West Humanitarian Foundation as well as students at Cambodia’s premiere technical college, The Institut de Technologie du Cambodge.

And, finally, the team members are going to have the opportunity to work on robotics and mechatronics projects that are relevant to the problems in Cambodia.  Team members will get the chance to learn about local problems here and how to engineer solutions for them, utilizing the skills they’ve learned in the classroom at their respective colleges while learning new skills along the way. This includes projects such as the Low Cost EOD Robot (where I got my start with work in Cambodia), the MineBot (a robot tasked with humanitarian demining operations, such as area reduction), and more.   Each one of these projects involves not only solutions to local problems, but also will require students to learn how to resolve problems in low-income nations that are trivially easy to tackle when at home in the United States.

So I guess what I’m trying to get across is, this trip is going to be stressful, sure. But it’s also going to help forge better engineers.  Engineers with a sense of how to address and solve international problems. And along the way, they’ll also get to experience all the wonders Cambodia has to offer.

At this point, I’ve written over 1000 words without a single number or equation, which means it’s definitely time to wrap up. So with all that being said, guys:

Have fun.