Many years ago I had the privilege of working with leaders in Cambodia who were creating a national and regional response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But HIV/AIDS wasn’t the country’s only challenge. These leaders had lived through the genocide/civil war with the Khmer Rouge and the occupancy by the Vietnamese. They were struggling to rebuild their country and repair the social fabric that had been so torn apart. On one of the days of our work together, the team I was working with helped this group of 100 leaders meet in regional groups to plan projects they could do locally based on research they had done in between meetings. Under a large wooden canopy, 12 groups of eight people sat in circles working together.

I watched them talk and laugh with each other. I watched them write flip charts in a language I couldn’t read. I watched their energy lift as they worked through the afternoon. Given the level of the challenges they were up against and the amount of trauma that they had experienced, individually and collectively, I was struck by their level of hope—hope that was rising into action.

Looking at the group I thought of the temples of Angkor Wat that we had explored during our first meeting together. Temples that took centuries to build—and I thought about the fact that the people who had this big task to rebuild their country and repair their communities were descendants of the temple builders. I thought about the fact that persistence and vision and hope were part of their culture—culture that had been briefly lost, but they were now rebuilding.

Where do you find hope? Because what I witnessed wasn’t hope that was polly-annish or sparkly. It was more what I have come to describe as mature hope. Hope that has grown up. Hope that has known sorrow. Hope that knows how to roll its up sleeves and take on the hard tasks that are needed to rebuild and repair. And maybe that’s the hope we need to be able to trust right now. The hope that has known sorrow. The hope that is exhausted. The hope that has lost its shininess –but is not afraid of getting its hands dirty—and moving one simple stone.

The Temple Builders
The temple builders are mostly tired
I think, not visionaries, so much as laborers
engaged in moving one stone at a time
with calloused hands and long ropes using
strength and leverage and hope.
One lifetime, one corner, one stone
is not the scale that we aspire to,
we want the finished temple before us
at the end of the day, we want to stand back
and admire our finished work, certainly
not our daily labor, one simple stone.
It isn’t some higher calling that gets them
up each morning, no, that is the old woman
who lived through the dark years,
the dark days, when no temples were built,
except deep, deep in the heart
where they could not be found,
or destroyed.
She knows, though they do not, why they
must build the temples, shifting them out of their
hearts, and onto the soil, one stone at a time.
She rouses them in the dark without apology,
for she knows without them the temples
will crumble and be buried in the hearts
of those who carried them for so long.
Now is the time for labor, she says, and she
hands them a pail of rice. This has built temples
for centuries, she says, and she doesn’t mean
the rice. Someone must hold the vision, she says,
and she doesn’t mean the temple,
or at least not the whole temple,
but the single stone
they will move today.
-Gretchen Schmelzer*

*Written at the end of the day with the groups in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. 2005