Justin Parke

🏊🏼 The Great Siem Reap Flood 🚣‍♂️ How It Humbled Me 🌊🏍️

One of the most beautiful and worst experiences I've had in Cambodia were the truly epic Southeast Asian Floods of 2011.

🚪🌊 Open The Flood Gates 🌊🚪

I was living in Siem Reap when the 2011 Southeast Asian Floods hit, the result of an epic monsoon season and poor urban planning.

Siem Reap became nothing less than "WaterWorld" for nearly a month, but even Kevin Costner would've struggled to survive in what most Cambodians shrugged their shoulders at.

I had only lived in Cambodia for about a year at this point, and was just starting to have meaningful conversations in the Khmer language when the flood happened.

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🙏 Beauty In Adversity ✨

The lowest part of town is where I lived, above a new school I had just started working for, and also where all the town's water came rushing to during the flood.

You can see me pushing my bike in the above photo on the left. It doesn't look deep, but after weeks of currents flowing down the streets, holes the sizes of cars opened up in the roads, and you never knew when your bike would randomly descend into the abyss.

Something about the way the Cambodian people handled this great adversity in stride really humbled me and made me fall in love with the country and its people. I went out nearly every day during the flood to take pictures and watch life continue on as usual for most Cambodians.

The beauty of it was such a humbling experience, and taught me countless unforgettable life lessons. Cambodia is a place where you can show up to work soaking wet, covered in mud, missing a pant leg or reaking like body odor because you just pushed your moto for a half hour, and nobody even bats an eye.

🏘️ It Takes A Village 👍

Recent Cambodian history is full of tragedy and hardship, but these unique experiences strikingly set Cambodians apart from neighboring countries. Even in bustling Siem Reap, random people looked out for each other during the flood as if it was one big village.

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This attitude of looking out for each other was contagious, and I happen to spot some slightly distressed looking faces that didn't look like locals.

Okay, I wasn't exactly a superhero, but I took a half-hour out of my day to help some semi-stranded Vietnamese tourists score some baguettes, something that was in short supply at the time.

Can you spot the Dutchman in the green poncho? That's my close friend and co-worker Anno, who is partial to hanging out with monks in his free-time, regardless of water levels.

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](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/justinparke/Hehljp0Y-9.JPG)

The Cambodian people are so resilient and adaptable to changing economic and environmental conditions, and they show great innovation in the face of adversity. This experience taught me that suffering is a choice on some level.

😊 Just Smile Your Way Through It 😎

There are countless articles to be found about Cambodia being the "land of smiles," and it's very true. The Cambodian people are full of negative experiences, but yet smile more than just about any other people on Earth.

While eating at a roadside pop-up cafe, an SUV came by and it's wake actually raised the water level from my ankles to above my groin in a few seconds, causing me to let out an "eeeeeeee!!!!!"

Yes, I would be attending my ESL classes soaked from the navel down, and everybody at the cafe found this pretty funny, and I turn joined in on the laughter. No apologies were given nor necessary.

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](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/justinparke/HMN5sCHy-9.JPG)

The flood wasn't all fun and games, there was suffering, I had to help identify the body of an Irish friend and co-worker who apparently, while intoxicated at night, attempted to pee in the river and lost his footing, and the river took him.

You can see in the above picture that it's hard to distinguish river from road, something that might've been an issue in the death of my co-worker.

Not too much changed at my school during the flood, only a few days of classes were cancelled when the water was chest-deep. I learned to laugh with my students as I watched them trudge through the water at the end of every class.

Even the maintenance thought our canopy was hilariously high, causing him to stack a few ladders and laugh while he nervously made some repairs at altitude.

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I got mildly electrocuted no less than 3 times during the flood, and that taught me to give thanks for every day, especially when you wake up after a good shock all alone in your apartment, a little confused.

You never know when you will be riding your moto through the wrong puddle and look over and see a 1 meter thick bundle of power lines drooping into the same body of water you're in.

Give thanks for life each and every day. Cambodians know this better than most people on Earth, and they can teach it to anyone with little effort.