I came to Cambodia in January 2012 thinking that I would teach critical thinking. An IT-professional turned newly-minted philosopher might find a few people interested in such a pursuit, I thought. It turned out that I would be the one who learned to think.
This project started after students read the book The Giver by Lois Lowry. In a "utopian" society, all pain and conflict is eliminated through a combination of severely restricting personal freedoms and by the elimination of memory, of knowledge and understanding of the past. With memories of the past comes pain.
My students quickly realized that this society was hardly utopian. There is, after all, something important about memories. There is something important about painful memories even and something important in the sharing of them.
"Memories are meant to be shared," says The Giver. This project is a platform to share those stories.
Maria Montello taught at the Royal University of Phnom Penh for ten years through a program of the Maryknoll Lay Missioners out of the United States.
Maryknoll has been working in Cambodia since the early 1990s going back to the days of the camps on the Thai border. They have worked in many areas including development of the deaf commmunity and their language, service to those with HIV/AIDS including introducing anti-retroviral drugs to Cambodia, training and empowerment of vulnerable women, primary education of Cambodia's poorest, work at the Royal University of Phnom Penh including building several departments and the library, and research in emerging issues and solutions.