Holiday in Cambodia

The Cambodian portion of our trip was in many ways my favorite, and I wished I could have more time (I particularly wished for my sick day back.) But, it was also easily the most frustrating portion of the trip. Cambodia is fascinating and infuriating.

It has such an incredibly tragic history, with the people getting betrayed right and left by bad actors all around. From the French colonizing to their King (Sihanouk) constantly switching sides in the political struggle (he’s in as deep with the Khmer Rouge as anyone) to America using them as a pawn to poke at Vietnam, a country we by all rights should never have heard of.

The international community has finally developed some long overdue sense of shame at how Cambodia has been treated, and is now falling over itself to demonstrate just how sorry it is. There is aid money pouring into Cambodia at present, from every agency you’ve ever heard of. And it seems to be following the typical western development aid model – bring in well paid outside consultants to dream up giant infrastructure projects, without really consulting the locals. This is the model that development aid has been following for 50 years, and the developing world is still developing. Cambodia has many large damming projects of the Mekong on the drawing board that will be paid for by western governments. The locals aren’t getting a lot of say in this.

You see large SUVs fighting for space alongside scooters on the streets of Siem Reap, mostly driven by Cambodians. It would take 100 years of the average Cambodian’s salary to purchase a Toyota SUV, but this town is lousy with them. When you’re making that much more than your neighbors, I think it’s a sure sign something has gone wrong somewhere. In defense of the traditional development model, Cambodia was stripped of all of its technical skills, and maybe they really do need western experts. But, people don’t need education to understand the basics of the market economy they are trying to develop – I think the idea of a market is something in our genes. Letting the locals have more say in how they spend their resources strikes me as a more sound idea (on the other hand, the locals keep electing the Cambodian People’s Party, headed by former Khmer Rouge member Hun Sen.) Meanwhile, there are kids driving cows through rice fields, instead of sitting in school learning math and science, and other kids being sent out to beg on the streets.

One of Ev’s roommates from this last summer is working in the development field, and she tells stories of people working on fat contracts for NGOs in the developing world, rich enough to afford large houses, with full staffs of servants, and not speaking a word of the local language when their tour is finished. I realize I’m biased to see a disinterest in language unfavorably, but how much can you say you understood about this culture and its needs if after a few years living in a country you haven’t made that basic effort? How much of the money that donors gave ended up in the local economy, and how much in the expert’s bank account? The development community is a racket, and it’s shameful.

There has to be a better model than the Big Idea model we keep pushing. (If you’ve been forced to listen to me drone on about this, you know that I think microcredit is a really interesting idea for helping locals get access to credit, one of the key components of any market economy) But I’m not an economist, and I’m sure this isn’t the only “radical” idea that isn’t getting much interest from the development bureaucracy right now. Surely there are many other things we haven’t tried yet.

Meanwhile Cambodia is again left to all the darker impulses we westerners can dream up. Massive, ramshackle development will overrun the ruins. Child sex tourism is apparently enough of a problem that there are signs up warning about it – we saw large signs with a painting of an infant, and text reading “Not for sale!” I’m convinced that things are better in Cambodia now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, but I don’t think they’re out of the woods yet. Even a rich stable economy like Thailand next door has troubles with democracy, and I can’t imagine that Cambodia has a more stable base on which to build democratic institutions.

Anyway, like I said earlier, the ruins are fascinating, and the country is, too, if more in a train-wreck sort of way, and we really only barely scratched the surface in our two full days here. Well worth the visit, as soon as things shake out in Thailand.