The first time I heard about what would become the Khmer Magic Music Bus, I wasn’t even in Cambodia. I was listening to my colleague Steve describe a rest stop on a long drive through the countryside.

A rented bus had pulled over so everyone could stretch their legs: students, chaperones, and musicians from Cambodian Living Arts on their way to the Thai border to connect with a musician there. Mon Hai took out his khan and began to play. The khan is an ancient wind instrument with a sound that seems to carry its own history, distinctive and reedy. Strange to ears unfamiliar with it.

Children appeared around the corners of their homes. Cautiously at first, then more of them came forward, then adults from the village. Nobody wanted to leave.

In talking with the villagers, Steve learned something he hadn’t expected: these people had never heard music from their own culture. They’d never seen any live performance. Cambodia’s classical musical traditions are among the most sophisticated in human history. Here were Cambodians encountering their own heritage for the first time, delivered by chance on a dirt road.

Steve got home and asked me if we could raise money to buy them a bus.

I had come to teaching after a career in the business world, and I was still in that early stage where everything about education felt like a revelation. When Steve told me that story, something clicked into place.

A year or two before I’d started at the school, Arn Chorn-Pond had visited campus. Arn is a Cambodian-American activist and musician who survived the Khmer Rouge as a child, lost his family, was eventually adopted by an American pastor, and came to New Hampshire, where he then had to survive a different kind of hardship: the racism and hostility of 1980s America. He came and spoke to our students about his journey and his work with Cambodian Living Arts, the organization he’d founded to preserve and revive traditional Khmer arts.

That visit had planted something at our school. My colleagues Steve and Karen started taking students to Cambodia every year, building a relationship with Cambodian Living Arts that was different from what I’d come to think of as typical “poverty tourism.” They went back. Every year. The same people, the same organization, the same commitment to listening and sharing rather than arriving with answers. The Cambodians, many of whom I imagine were used to Westerners showing up once and vanishing, began to trust us. Something real developed.

So when Steve came back from the trip with the story about Mon Hai and the village, I said yes. Let’s give this crazy idea a try.

We coordinated a crowdfunding campaign (this was early in crowdfunding’s history) and raised enough money to buy them a bus. Contributors got updates, then video of the first tour. The musicians traveled to villages that had never had access to their performances. Word came back of moments not unlike that first rest stop, and other moments with large crowds coming to see.

We started a nonprofit. We gave presentations. We looked for donors. We couldn’t make it work. The connections weren’t there, the distance was hard to coordinate across, and I never found my footing as a fundraiser. Eventually the bus broke down. I stepped back from the project and let myself believe it had ended.

I carried that as a kind of private failure for years.

Then the folks in Phnom Penh reached out and asked if I could post a video to the Magic Music Bus website. A ten-year anniversary video.

I watched it and discovered that they had actually never stopped.

They had kept the work going, finding resources, renting buses when theirs broke down, continuing the trips to the countryside. The project had mattered enough to them that they’d found a way to keep it alive without my ability to help — driven in large part by Thorn Seyma, a vocalist known throughout Cambodia and the person who has been the force behind The Bus’s continued life. When I think about the organizational effort that requires (the coordination, the logistics, all of it with limited resources), I understand that The Bus continued because people who believed in its value made sure of it. How wonderful and incredible that is.

So I decided it was time to go see it for myself. I saved for two years and made the trip. Seyma organized the whole thing and traveled with us for three weeks, away from her family and her own work. I was told that my coming mattered — that showing up in person, after all these years, was something. I hadn’t expected that. I’d assumed I was the one receiving the gift, and I was, but it turned out to go both ways. I’ve written about that experience in more detail elsewhere. But one moment belongs here.

On the way to a music school demonstration we stopped at a village on a side road and once again Mon Hai took out his khan. I’ve written about what happened next. What I couldn’t fully write then was what it meant to watch that scene unfold knowing the story behind it — knowing it had happened before, in a different village, years earlier, and that the bus I was riding had grown out of that first moment Steve described to me.

Mon Hai has since had to leave his home. The last I heard, he was living in a refugee camp near the Thai border, displaced by violence. I think about that whenever I think about this project.

I went knowing I was an outsider. Cambodian Living Arts centers Cambodians, not the Westerners who show up wanting to contribute, and I understood immediately why that’s the only way this kind of work makes sense. I wasn’t there to lead anything. I watched. I listened. I helped where I could with whatever was in front of me.

Something that’s stayed with me: the people I met in Cambodia have so much they can’t control about where their society is. Decades of complicated history have shaped a situation full of limits and real hardships. Yet every organization I visited was full of brilliant, purposeful people finding ways to make their communities better with what they have available to them. They are not waiting for some improved future to finally arrive. They are getting up every day and deciding to find meaning through their work and their neighbors and their culture.

I think about that a lot lately. It feels like something this country can learn from.

Coming home, I knew I still couldn’t be a good fundraiser. That was never my talent. But I am a teacher, and teachers know how to make things useful to students and other teachers.

The Carrying Culture Project is my attempt to do exactly that. It’s a series of educational resources designed for secondary school teachers: international studies, global studies, anyone who wants to help students understand more about Cambodia and Cambodian arts. The first resource is a comprehensive Cambodian history timeline, calibrated for middle and high school students.

It took longer than I expected to build, because the more time I spent with Cambodian history (the ancient empire, the colonial period, independence, the Khmer Rouge period, Vietnamese control, UN intervention, and contemporary Cambodia), the more I felt the weight of a Westerner trying to convey someone else’s story. I don’t know if I’ve gotten it right. I’ve done everything I can to treat it with seriousness and care. I’m proud and nervous about it in roughly equal measure.

My hope is that a teacher somewhere opens this and finds it genuinely useful — whether they’re preparing students for a visit from Arn Chorn-Pond (he does a fall tour of schools every year), or getting students ready to travel to Cambodia themselves to work with the KMMB and Cambodian Living Arts, or just wanting to teach this history because it deserves to be taught. Whatever brings someone to it, I want these resources to make it easier for any teacher to bring this history into their classroom.

I don’t know what this will become. I thought The Bus had failed, and it hadn’t. I put everything I had into a timeline about a culture that isn’t mine to document, and I let it go anyway, because the benefit seems worth the risk of imperfection.

The Bus is still running. I helped get it on the road once. The Cambodians made sure it stayed there. And that feels just right.