Shock: Scot admits the power of English

Just after we arrived in Phnom Penh, we were walking through The White Building - concrete blocks of claustrophobic flats crammed together with unlit walkways and ground levels furrows. The White Building is notorious rather than desirable.

Front doors to the flats were often lying open so you could easily see the main living area. Staring out from one flat, placed over the dinner table, was a blackboard. Written at the top was the "Past Perfect Tense" with various English phrases underneath. Scrawled in chalk on the outside of the house's concrete wall were a list of English words and grammatical rules.

A Cambodian home in The While Building complete with a white board full of grammatical rules. I kind of love this picture. Plus, we've got a white board now too!

I could not help but stare. I never saw any of the family but I began to think about what drove the parents to obviously put so much effort into helping their children learning English. What did they think learning English would do for their children? What life would learning English provide? The answers become clear pretty quickly.

Nothing to do with this blog - but you can guess what the next one may be about

The EU recently asked Cambodian charities to apply to a specific fund for Cambodia. All NGOs had to do was read the guidelines and submit an application. Except the guidelines were in rather technical English with no Khmer translation. And the applications all had to be done in English as well.

Just as most donors act similarly to the EU, most research in Cambodia is published in English too, even when done by Cambodians for Cambodian NGOs, meaning only a few Cambodians could even conceivably read it. This is a country where if you are aged over 30, your school years were spent surviving the Khmer Rouge and civil war so education levels are understandably low.

In meetings, native or very fluent English speakers (Dutch, French etc) rapidly go back and forth, whilst many Cambodians are still, in their heads, translating what they want to say from Khmer to English. Soon, the conversation moves on and they miss their chance.

Just another photographic interlude to lighten my oh so serious topic. We used one of these ferries to go to Vietnam. Could stand right at the edge with no barrier.

All of this means that if you don't speak English, then you're not in the game. You don't even get to warm up.
Cambodia is losing people who may have the skills and intelligence to be brilliant in certain jobs/professions but never get the chance to because they don't speak English. If speaking a second language was a prerequisite for your job, would you have got it? Plus, those professionals who do speak English devote all of their time improving their English rather than learning other skills.

If you speak English, you're in demand. It's hitting home how being born in a wee city in Scotland has already given me a step up on the rest of the world.

Ciao / Au revoir / Lea hai
Gordon