Farewell

My last week in Cambodia has started. I have moved back to Phnom Penh, and I presented the preliminary results of our biodiversity indicator research some days ago in front of my supervisors and other people involved in related topics. The last two months of this internship I have experienced as intense as I have spent a big proportion of my time in the rice fields, in front of the microscope, or on my laptop. Still, I had to come to realization, that I could not conduct all the measurements and sample collections I have planned initially. I mainly underestimated the time it takes to seperate and identify the insect individuals in my samples, and therefore had to scratch some of the ideas. Luckily, I have understanding and supportive supervisors with experience. They recognized the missing time before I did and made clear that I will have to cut things, and that it is okay. This enabled a more realistic planning of the last few weeks and a successful completion of the work in Battambang. In the presentation I held, I was talking about what biological diversity means in the Cambodian rice context and what approaches I used to measure the state of it in the rice fields. I am looking forward to further evaluate my measurements and exploring what informations on the local biodiversity I can draw from them.

But first, I am extremely excited to return back home, seeing everyone and everything I love again - and very soon welcome my nephew to the world <3

The last days in Battambang have been emotionally dynamic, as I had to say goodbye to many loved ones I got to know, and also to the city itself, which I have gotten to like a lot. I have met people here which set a new bar of selflessness and kind-heartedness.

Living in Battambang and working on this topic has been a time rich in learnings and experiences I could have not imagined in prior to make.

I have for example discovered a new depth of interest for living organisms - what they look like, how they live, and how they interact and complement each other in an ecosystem. My perception of what 'living' means, has expanded, and the borders of my categorization of an individual organism has started to blurr. If an insect is dependant on a plant to eat, and the plant is dependant on bird-dung to grow, and the bird is dependant on the insect to eat: the result is one system that stops working if one of the elements are removed. The same goes for a human individual as a system with organs: If the liver is removed, the human stops working. My thought here is, that an ecosystem can be seen as one living being, greater than the sum of its parts. We often think of ecosystems as deliverants of functions and products, which humans can exploit for food, medicine, clean water, air, etc. - when in fact we are in middle of the biological system I am starting to call a living being. This starts to sound a lot like a pocahontas movie, but I think that we don't have this enough internalized.

I have also learned important things about myself and what I wish for myself. It may be as ironic as it sounds, but first of all I have learned, that I will never go so far away from home ever again in my life. I have come to understand that my wellbeing is not dependent on travelling to far away places, even though it is narrated in so many media I am in touch with - sometimes direct, sometimes more subtle. However, what my wellbeing IS dependent on, is more what I already have and carry with me. I have found and arrived since a long time. Growing up and living in a caring circle of family and friends, having access to healthy foood, safety and shelter, and being healthy: It means that I have the ability to do something else than fighting for survival. I can strive for knowledge, I can steer life and I have the social motility to be activistic. If taking a plane is one of the most direct forms of contributing to a cascade of climatic extremes, I have no reason to fly again, nothing to find in another place so far away. I am questioning myself, on why I had to go to Cambodia to find out, that I have everything I wish for. Maybe the feeling of temporarily missing these things made it obvious.

One of the most important learning is drawn directly from Battambang citizens I got to know here. All Cambodians share the grief of the genocide happening between 1975-1979 during the Khmer rouge regime. Many people speak openly about how their family was affected by this time - how death was present always and everywhere, as well as fear, hunger, diseases, displacements, separation. But even if majority of the people have made personal acquaintance with scarcity of the most basic human needs, today the common citizen stands upright and warm-hearted. Their deeply felt pacifism and social coherence stand out. The impression this has left, is hard for me to formulate in words. But making connections to recent war crimes and humanitarian crises across the globe, I see a common bedrock across the worst events in human history: separation of one group into subgroups. During the 70s in Cambodia the separation has been about education, job, and religion - but I think that the lines between the subgroups can be drawn by any identity feature, which humans use to define themselves with: geographical origin, any cultural phenomenon, sexuality and gender, ethnical background, etc. And my biggest learning is that this separation is not just imposed from external actors on society - it must be deeeeeply embedded in the way people see the world and look at each other. Most important to acknowledge in this thematic, is that all of these identitiy features we give to ourselves and to others are constructs. Without people believing in them, they have zero power. Trying to figure out the deeeper roots of the madness of entiire societies - in history and in modern times - breaks my brain and makes obvious, how little I still understand about humans and the willingness to hurt others.