Category: Cambodia

Free Dinner: Whoo Hoo!

Anika Raffle4 Comments

For these two weeks of winter break, we have V.I.P. guests who have met us in no other place than Cambodia. The first week we spent in Siem Reap and had a lot of fun, and we are in Koh Rong enjoying a tropical beach vacation. And now there is nothing that can stop us from having the time of our lives.

Or so we thought. We knew that we were taking risks by coming here — for there is two mosquito carrying diseases, malaria, and dengue fever. But then there were other kinds of risks we didn’t expect. The rooms: there were cracks in the floor, and a half inch tall one separating the bedroom and the bathroom. The stains on the sheets and pillows are unmissable. They creeped me out a little bit, but what made my mom mad was the shower situation. By now I have figured out that the whole hotel shares the same water source, so the quality of your shower depends on if anyone else is taking one at that same time. If everyone in the hotel is taking a shower with hot water, then chances are, no hot water with come out for you. It is extremely hard to wash your hair because only a trickle comes out. And if you want something close to normal spray, then your shower will be freezing cold. The best way to wash your hair is to use the outdoor public showers. They are also freezing though, so you can not have a good situation, whichever way you go.

The restaurant is the only source of food that is safe for us to get to and eat for at least a mile. So when the manager wants your Mom to stop blabbering, he lets you dine freely for one night at their restaurant. My mom has complained less since we got that experience. Now, Matilda, my 10-year-old VIP guest has been taking every opportunity she gets to say, let’s tell the manager about this twerk and get free dinner again!

If there is one lesson I have learned from this experience it is that if you want something bad, you have to fight for it. Speak up! Shout it out for the world (or just the manager) to hear, and maybe, just maybe, you will land yourself a free dinner, and you can say, I earned it!

Hope for a Cambodian 4 year old

Paloma RaffleLeave a comment

Sokhem is a small 4-year-old Khmer boy. His name means “hope.”
Hope for all the things he didn’t have.
Hope for a fully working body.
Hope for a community where people have enough food to eat.
Hope for a water filter so he doesn’t get sick every month.
Hope for a better home — stronger than just sticks posted in the mud.
Hope for better quality clothes.
Hope for a better body brace because his broken shoulder hurt whenever he moved.
Hope for all the things he didn’t have, because for a four year old, hope is something you can always have.

 

Cambodian School Kids

Anika Raffle1 Comment

When they jump up into your arms…
You can’t help but feel their charm.
When you feel how light they are…
You feel so guilty for the lunch that they can’t afford to have and that you had in a polished and clean jar.
If they bonk their head with a soccer ball…
You high-five them and their spirits don’t fall.

Hold out your sanitized hands…
And they will high-five them, if not one kid, a whole band!

And what about jump rope, well isn’t that great…
Especially because it can fit eight! 

If you want a multi purpose tool…
You can buy coconut bowls at the school.
And if you get something off of their shelf…
They use the money not for themselves!
If you want to know where the money goes…
This list on the wall definitely knows!

This school is not a fool…
Yes it is really cool…
It supplies the students with free tools…
Yes this is such a fantastic school!!!

I am a Puppy

Anika Raffle1 Comment

I am new to this world. I am helpless and tiny. I am half the size of a newborn human baby. I am light brown. I have a little button nose. I have four siblings. I am the smallest of all.

When I first opened my eyes three days ago, I saw my mother, then a hut, then a lake. My home. I live among many other litters, but I am glad to be part of mine, right where I am. On a levee. With a family. In Cambodia.

I am a child of a loving mother. I am a sibling of loving sisters and brothers. I am a loving sister.

I squeal when I get taken from my mother. She runs at the feet of the human who took me. She doesn’t attack. She is tired. I look down at her, willing her to save me.

But now I am noticing this calm girl’s arms. I can sense her feelings. This girl loves me. I am being taken back to my mom. I am put down, back with her.

I see the girl walk away as sorrow creeps into her. I bark a little, and make her smile.

I am new to this world. I am helpless and tiny. I am the little thing that brings you a lot of joy. I am a puppy.

Technology in Cambodia

Hayes RaffleLeave a comment

An elderly man sits on the ground on the side of a dirt road and types on a laptop. YouTube logos top the 4G plan ads along the roadsides, as if Google sponsored the major highways here. Cell networks are surprisingly decent here compared to other developing nations I’ve visited in Asia. People are starting new businesses and taking up new hobbies, but censorship runs deep and internet adoption is sporadic. Some observations of Cambodia:

At a computer lab at a foreign-funded after-school center, 400 children learn basic computing skills every 6 months. Due to lack of time, they don’t get much deeper than the basics of MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but I pointed the teacher to the Kahn Academy and explained that there is a lot of good free educational content online. We had a conversation about what should come first: “computing skills (MS suite)” or “internet skills (Chrome+Google).” I argued for the latter – my kids’ first computer was a Chromebook – but he had never looked at it that way and perhaps didn’t know how that would lead to marketable skills for his students. I pointed out that at least that way the ESL children could listen to more native English speakers on YouTube or khanacademy.org. He seemed unconvinced but interested to see if things were really free.

A YouTube power user nestled a tech rig among rural rice paddies. This twenty year old lives in a traditional stilted house in rural Cambodia. Like all farmers we met in the country here, his house is prepared for the annual floods by situating the floor a couple meters above ground, and they are surrounded by their family farm. Unlike some others, his house is on the electrical grid so he has enough electricity to power a laptop and speaker system. He proudly shows me a slick korean cell phone with HD cameras and his YouTube channel, replete with dozens of videos of him and his band playing traditional Cambodian music on xylophones. The family puts his cheap Singaporean laptop and speakers into service to play pop music, and he laments that the machine is too underpowered to do video editing very well.

On Christmas night, we bump into a tuk-tuk driver with a karaoke party coach. He pulls an android tablet off the handlebars, turns on the data connection, opens YouTube and tells us to pull up any song we like. After the six of us sit down in the two facing bench seats, he hands us microphones and we drive off with lights flashing and music blaring. I guess 4G is good enough here for the enterprising entrepreneur to drive tourists in style!

But be careful what you say online! The locals told me that if you criticize the government you can get your accounts shut down, or worse. One guide’s friends will travel to other countries like South Korea to speak up about the Cambodian government. While the internet may be lauded in the west as a fountainhead of democracy, it need not be all that. Fear tactics can go a long way, as every terrorist and totalitarian regime knows. Here, the internet is becoming a tool for commerce and education, with free speech and access to media easily put aside by a communist state.

A Building on a Poor Foundation

Hayes Raffle1 Comment

The houses here in Koh Rong, Cambodia are crooked. They are falling down, the wall boards rotting, the footings leaning in uncomfortable directions. I thought the structures were just old and weathered from too many salty storms, and then I noticed the new building that is being put atop poorly placed concrete pilings, pilings which are sloppily nestled in shallow sand near the shore. It won’t last long either.

Last night I was telling the kids about the Khmer Rouge, and how Pol Pot led a genocide that wiped out an entire generation of educated Cambodians. Forty years ago everyone with money or an education was summarily executed by the Khmer Rouge. If you ran a business, they killed you. If you had gone to school, they killed you. If you spoke a foreign language, they killed you. If you wore glasses, they killed you. They killed one quarter of the population. Who was left? Militants and simple farmers.

Although the Khmer Rouge officially gave up 18 years ago, they are not gone. The prime minister is from the Khmer Rouge. The left-over militants walked out of the jungle in the 90’s and have reintegrated into the police forces. Our guide is afraid of the police. Who knows who you’re taking to when a police man pulls you over – it could be a former assassin.

And be careful what you say — everyone knows you might disappear if you speak out against the government. The government works for the government, not for the people. Locals describe it as a communist state following China’s model in which elections exist in name only and those in power work towards total control of the society. They fear that Vietnam is really running the show here, and in Vietnam the Vietnamese fear that China is running the show there. Perhaps that is true. A puppet master pulling strings.

The crooked foundation on that new beach house seems symbolic of the Cambodian people’s situation. They would like to improve, but they seem not to know how. As a result of the Cambodian genocide, they have no elders, few educated people, and they lack teachers who can help them improve their lives. With a deeply corrupted government, education dollars are not going towards reeducating the children, who are only allowed to attend school for 4 hours a day.

That new beach house probably won’t last twenty years. The Cambodian economy similarly is not set up to grow. In killing off a whole generation of the educated and business classes, Cambodian leaders have destroyed the knowledge and know-how that it takes to compete on a global scale today. How will Cambodians improve the lives of the people here? Will they learn to put the foundations deeper, anchored in stable bedrock? Will they choose to educate their people, and anchor their society in modern skills and knowledge? I hope so, but signs are not promising. The slow passage of time may weather their social structures just as it will weather that crooked home, leaving the people with an un-ending supply of basic problems that keep them busy.