The Baby Room

This morning at church Baby was fussy enough for me to make a quick exit out of the service and into the adjacent 'Baby Room.' A couple of other women and a handful young kids were already there. One of the ladies started talking and it turned out she was there as a grandmother. Instead of the typical mom-to-mom diaper talk or expat-to-expat culture shock talk the two of us jumped into deep discussion in no time. After touching upon the above two topics extremely briefly, we started talking about Cambodia today. Namely the social issues that the nation struggles with the most. We talked about the destruction of families during the Khmer Rouge period, the difficulty of trusting ones neighbors after a genocide, about child abuse and sexual slavery. Then we talked about land rights, concessions and loss of ancestral land, the destruction of fragile ecosystems. And finally about socially conscious photography. All this in a matter of 30 minutes of casual interaction. I'm looking at Baby Room in a whole different light..!