Week 1
After a forgettable series of
flights I arrive in dusty, humid, hot Siem Reap and remember what it was I
liked about this place the first time around in 2014. Not the heat, nor the
dust, but the buzzy, laid back place that rides a fine line between European
expats wandering around on scooters and opening funky, waste free, dairy free
eco cafes and very rich asian tourists staggering out of buses without air
conditioning and being herded from one organised visit to the next. Well not so
much a fine line as a yawning great chasm, but there you go, that’s what makes
the town so much fun to be a part of.
And then there are the locals,
the ones putting up with it all in the hope that their children will benefit
from the above and finish high school
and perhaps obtain a scholarship to go to university. Even so it won’t
guarantee them any kind of well paid job. I spoke to a waitress the other day
and she said that she has an accounting degree but who needs accountants in
Siem Reap? I suggested that perhaps she could go to the capital city Phnom
Penh, (345km south) and find a better paid job in her chosen career and she
looked at me with surprise. ‘I have never left Siem Reap and I couldn’t leave
my family” she said. So she works as a waitress making I imagine around $80-$120
per month. I’m spending $5 on a meal and thinking it’s great value and she just
served me her days wage.
And then there are the middle
class locals, those whom I’m working with at the Plan International Regional
Office. Many of them drive cars to work and they have spare money to spend on
going out to dinner with friends once every now and then as we did on Thursday night.
But they are still
doing it pretty tough. Some of the women in the photo are married with a couple
of kids and their husbands work in other regions and only come home on the
weekend or every two weeks. So they have to juggle kids and elderly parents
living with them and getting kids to school and picking them up on their own.
Which they do because they don’t have a choice. Their wage is spent on their
children, their parents and often poor relatives who might have come to Siem
Reap from very poor villages to be looked after by their richer city based aunt
and uncle. So as one of the women said
to me, my wage must be split five ways every week and it doesn’t go far.
So I find myself in a strange
predicament. Living in a town that has houses like this (below right) next to buildings like my hotel below. I'm reminded that in Brisbane I live in a wealthy suburb, close to the centre of a wealthy and prosperous city, where those who don't have cars are generally choosing not to own one.
I can drink the water
straight out of the tap, who cares about traces of chlorine and fluoride, I
won’t get typhoid or other devastating water borne diseases. I can be fussy
about what I eat, what I wear, what I do for work and where I live. I have
choices! Most of the people I see and talk to here don’t have choices. This is
the single biggest thing that differentiates wealthy developed countries from
poor developing countries I think. And this links in with Plan International
Cambodia’s strategies; to improve the health and education of children in
Cambodia with the purpose of enabling them to have choices when they get older,
empowering them to be decision makers, free thinkers, innovators, and future
leaders.
On a final, less sombre note,
I present my modus operandi of independent transport. An electric scooter, (me being terribly
environmentally friendly and all that), or it could be that it was either this
or a bicycle.
Appears that foreigners aren’t allowed to hire motorcycles in
Siem Reap for fear of causing accidents! Which is hilarious considering the
locals can start riding from the age of 15, don’t need a licence for bikes
under 125cc, (majority of what you see on the roads) and have absolutely no
idea of any kind of road rules. Completely ludicrous really but there you go.
Anyway, I am plotting legal ways of obtaining a more speedy set of wheels that
involves getting my official work permit and ‘borrowing’ a scooter, rather than
hiring. We will see how that plan evolves over the next week or two.
It rains heavily every couple
of days, the kind of steady, heavy drops of rain that makes you think the
rivers might be up if it doesn’t stop, here it’s just normal at this time of
year and the water dissipates within hours from the city roads. But there are
large bodies of water everywhere in the country side and all the rivers and
lakes in the region are swollen with end of monsoon season abundance.
Everything is lush and green and the almost daily occurrence of rain at some
point during the day brings welcome relief to the massive heat and humidity and
just for an hour or two, the dust is gone.
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