New set of eyes

IN MARCH of 2010, I was told to be part of a CSR (corporate social responsibility) activity in Cambodia—to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. We were a team of 11, from different Millward Brown offices in the Southeast Asian region. For five days we were freed from office work to do brick-laying and cement-mixing under the hot Cambodia sun.

Not all of us knew each other well; some of us came to know each other only through e-mail. This made the assignment look more exciting: aside from the prospect of finding new Cambodian friends, we were going to meet colleagues from Southeast Asia.

I was assigned to take care of the team, to keep tabs on each team member, meaning, to make sure we all go back home in one piece. The task proved to be challenging, after all this was a bunch of driven individuals, “brewed” in a fast-paced working environment, all workaholics. Needless to say, each one was all set and ready for a new experience. All of us left office work behind and just “stopped” … to slowly be part of the other side of reality.

Every day we would travel to the work site, a totally rural area—and an hour away from—Phnom Penh. Each day we would wake up very early to prepare for eight hours of intensive manual labor. The first few days were horrible. Our bodies were just not built for physical work, not to mention, the very, very, very, VERY hot sun we had to labor under. Each day I just turned from brown to browner, to brownest. All of us were aching all over, eating like a construction worker, and craving for sleep.

But each day, progress was evident. The bricks became walls, and then we were already making preparations for the roofing.

Our last day came, and the skies decided to rain. The rain only made more challenging our last day, which gave us doubts on whether the house would be finished in the afternoon. But the team members’ spirits were up and the roof was installed.

We had a little ceremony in the afternoon, which included, as one highlight, the handing over of the symbolic giant house keys to the two families who would be living in the houses we built. We exchanged a lot of thank you’s for each other’s presence. The parents were very grateful that they would now have a house to call their own and secured for their children. The team was indeed grateful to find themselves become a part of someone else’s future. It was a very meaningful ceremony for each one of us, also for the families.

Of course, being the Asians that we are, we just endlessly took photos that we felt would never be enough to capture all the emotions that afternoon. There will never be enough words to describe the whole experience. We went back that night filled with so much joy.

What I picked up from this experience is a new set of eyes, eyes that seek to see beyond words; even more, eyes that seek to understand even without words. Language did not feel like a barrier to communication and understanding. Even if it needed some extreme body exaggeration—like extra head nodding or extra jumping up and down—just to get the point across, we were not at all inhibited by any of these. Each one of my colleagues stretched themselves to understand and to be understood. Extra patience was key to “stop, look and listen.”

Stop … to take in the experience and accept the realities of poverty.

Look … to understand more what could not be explained in words, even though well observed.

And listen … to understand more deeply that the “core” of experience lies in how we have lent ourselves to it. It wasn’t important that we knew zero about manual labor. At the core of it, all that mattered was that we all had the heart to commit.

(Joni Gail A. Morales, 29, worked as a consumer researcher with Millward Brown, based in Singapore.)