Hey, those are my friends you're talking about

I get this question a lot from expats : What do you think of Cambodia?

Usually it’s said with a little smirk, a smile or a sort of knowing look in the eye, because they know what you’re going to say. It’s what everyone says, among expats. It’s the only story you hear, just with different variations, but for the most part it never changes.

They like the weather and they like how easy it is to make money and live. But the people?

All I ever hear is how Cambodian people make life difficult. How they have no ambition, only play around on their cell phones and never work, never learn, resist passive-aggressively, and generally speaking the country would be better off if Cambodian people were not as they are.

There are exceptions, but they are exceptions, few and far between. I can count them on a few fingers, the people who have positive stories and outlooks, who are not convinced that the people of this country are either lazy, stupid, or just generally annoying and frustrating.

Most people, when pressed further, will admit that they don’t really think Cambodians are stupid, just uneducated, and they know there is a difference. But either way, there’s nothing to be done. There’s nothing there.

Let’s be clear: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime took a culturally and industrially advanced country and razed it to the ground. They killed the culture, the education, and yet still even now the tribunal has not yet officially established that what happened was “genocide.”

Let’s also be clear: the formal western professionalism and training and discipline does not exist, if it ever did, it is gone, vanished, lost. The education system is pitifully funded and the teachers have not been formally trained. I’ve asked a couple people what they are studying, because everyone is in university and studying something (that’s 60 percent of the country population under twenty-five). Banking and finance for one, and I wonder – to work where?

Where can he work with that? In a bank in Cambodia with the other thousands studying the same thing? What if he wanted to get out? You go anywhere else with a degree from Cambodia right now and they laugh you off. Another guy is studying tourism, with a few million others. That might get him a little further, but not much.

Someone described it to me as realizing this country is deeply intellectually and emotionally hurt, and that is true. Most Cambodian people I’ve met are emotionally much more immature than their western counterparts. But where have they learned? Their parents are scarred, and there’s a void of emotional coaching. Emotions aren’t discussed, treated, talked about—it’s Asia, for one, and why would you? There’s too much hurt there.

It is also true that there is a general lack of energy and ambition, and certainly a general lack of the cut-and-dried western professionalism I and my expat counterparts grew up with, were drilled with since childhood. Smartphones just got here, and everyone is always on them. There is no real professionalism training. The teachers are late. There aren’t role models for that.  

What I mean to say is, the genocide is over now. But the country, and it’s people, even those who never experienced it, are scarred by it. That is the truth, and there is truth to the expat stories.

But there are times when it is all I ever here, and I just get tired.

Because I’ve met young people who think differently. I’ve met Cambodians who are passionate. I’ve seen sparks, I’ve watched people push themselves, and be proud. I’ve talked with people who don’t like what they see.

Yes, of course, they do stuff that bothers me, like answer their cell phones at inopportune times or come late to important things.

But I see potential. Someone told me right now there is nothing, maybe the kids who are in high school right now. Yes, but I would also add those in university. The kids my age.

They aren’t going to change the country in two weeks, or two months, or two years. Does any country change so fast? Time takes time. They don’t know how yet, they don’t have the tools, and maybe they won’t ever. But at least a few of them will make sure their children do, however that happens.

The older generation cannot physically overpower them forever, because they are dying. There are so many young people, and there is potential. They don’t know it yet. They haven’t grown up, hit walls, fallen down. They haven’t had the hard teachers, the tough training. The survivors of the genocide are farmers. They have no education to pass on, and the young people now have to figure it out themselves – all while being bombarded with modernity that no one has ever taught them to use or abuse. They are faced with an enormous, fast-paced world, with very few tools to deal with it.

And yet.

Beyond all the potential or no potential, the future and the past, there are these few simple facts:  I work with Cambodians on a daily basis. They make me laugh, make me smile. They’ve comforted me when I’m upset, I’ve comforted them. They make me angry sometimes, yes, and frustrated. But we’ve talked, laughed, shared jokes. Sometimes we just shake our heads and say, yeah, it just doesn’t translate.

Essentially, I’ve found them to just be people, trying like the other five billion people in the world to be happy, and these are the stories I never hear from the expats. It’s always about how life is being made difficult, or how the country is messed up, but not about people being people, people you can talk to, people who worry about their health (like anyone else), who don’t know if they can really do what they want (like anyone else), who get upset with each other (like anyone else) and wish things were different (like anyone else).

Those are the stories I live with every day. Not good,  not bad, just life, like anywhere else, with anyone else. Yes, in a completely and totally alien culture, but people like me. And when all I hear, day after day, time after time, is how frustrating, annoyed, uneducated, difficult, and generally upsetting Cambodian people are, it really gets to me.

When it comes down to it, the fact of the matter is that those are my friends they’re talking shit about. My friends they are putting down and dissing. Yes. Sometimes I do want to throw things at them. And so? Do we understand each other perfectly? Absolutely not. And so?

At the end of the day, those are my friends, and hearing them constantly put down hurts, as it does tonight, and the reason I took the time to write down these words and send them out to the world. The expats can have their reality, but I'm not part of it. 

I'd like to keep it that way.