Foreigners welcomed with a smile in Cambodia

We live in the Cambodian equivalent of Mayfair. A house in Boeung Keng Kang 1 can cost $2m, in a country where GDP per capita is nearer $1000. Apartments with swimming pools can be rented for $2000 per month; coffee shops with air-conditioning can charge $5 a cup; food can cost $30 in a restaurant; and flash cars are parked everywhere. This is ex-pat ville.

This is one is definitely more than $2m - owned by the family who have the license for Tiger beer.

Amidst all of this are the cheap local market, street food stalls and Cambodians eking out a living, often by serving the needs of wealthy foreigners. My sense of inappropriateness if eating a lavish dinner or drinking an expensive cocktail comes from my fear of what these people will think when they see me.

They see us come to their country, mangle their language, remain ignorant of their culture and spend exorbitant sums on things that are strange and foreign to them. They see the places that they know change to look more like the places we come from. And then these places remain too expensive for them to access.

People in developed countries get annoyed when people from developing countries live in their country and take the low paid jobs. Can you imagine what it would feel like if it were all of the high paid jobs that they took?

Whilst they would become doctors, engineers and bankers, you would work as a waiter, in a shop or as a taxi driver. You would practice for hours without books or teachers to learn their language, whilst the foreigners are pleased with themselves because they can say no and thank you in yours. 

You would copy phrases that you hear to greater endear yourself. Everybody becomes a sir or madam and you never stop enthusiastically offering your services because it might help you get another dollar. Any feeling of resentment is submerged by the need to earn money and the knowledge that it is through serving these foreigners that your family can eat.

What do you think that this would do to your feeling of pride? Yet, I do not see any resentment but instead have experienced kindness from people we work with, tuk tuk and moto drivers who take us places, staff who serve us and people who we see in the streets. A smile as wide as their faces is usually what greets us.

In other countries, tourists can complain about being ripped off and taken advantage of. So far, that does not happen to a great extent in Cambodia. Either, the Cambodians have not worked out how much they can rip people off or they are just not willing to do it. Sometimes, if you ask for a price, you can sense a hesitation whilst they consider whether they could get more than normal and if so how much more. Could they try to eke out an extra 500 riels (less than 10p)?

In fact we have experienced the opposite; people giving us stuff because we're foreign. Children at a pagoda in Kratie gave us fruit for no reason other than that we were foreign guests in their village. Teenagers in Battambang made a grasshopper from coconut tree leaves and gave it to us because we were talking to them. A food seller in Takeo gave us extra snacks whilst we were resting after climbing a hill. They gave to us even though they had less than us.

Our local moto taxi driver invited us to join a family celebration at his house, where not only were we treated to as much food my belly would allow, but he also gave us how home brewed wine that he had kept special for years.

As more tourists come, attitudes may change, but maybe not. I do feel that we are lucky to have been here at this time though.

Gordon

In Cambodia, nobody can be perfect

Cambodian’s have accepted the notion that “nobody is perfect” to such an extent that they do not even have the word “perfect” in their language. You can say that something was good, very good or even extremely good. But you cannot say that it was perfect.

We learn our mother tongue without thinking about the rules that structure our language; we follow the rules almost naturally. When learning a language, not only do you have to learn new vocabulary, you also have to learn new rules. Rules that sometimes can seem strange.

Cambodians pluralise words in a totally different way than in the English language. For instance, we would add a ‘s’ onto the end of the word such as: “he owns expensive cars”. In Khmer, you would say the word for expensive twice to indicate that there is more than one expensive car, so the sentence would be structured as: “he owns cars expensive expensive.”

Cambodians also seem to be so far advanced in eradicating gender bias that they do not even have different words for he/she, him/her or his/hers. The same word is used for them all. When I was trying to describe to colleagues that I was going to visit a friend and her wife in Viet Nam, it took minutes of confused sentences before they understand that:

1. my friend was a female (not helped by platonic friendships with the opposite sex being abnormal here)
2. my female friend was married to another female (again, a scenario not that common in Cambodia)

Such experiences have opened my eyes to the deficiencies that languages can have. In that conversation, understanding was made more difficult because the language cannot differentiate between she and he. Languages enable us to communicate concepts but if we cannot even communicate the concept of perfection, can that concept even exist?

I remember learning, rather sceptically, about how language can restrict our knowledge, but now I have seen how this can happen and how it is harming the education of Cambodian children.

In Khmer, they do not have a word for a lesson or period, such as a period of maths in school. Instead they use the phrase “study hour”. However, in Cambodian schools, a study hour is not the same as an hour. In primary schools, a study hour is forty minutes and in secondary schools it is fifty minutes.

At this point, I would like you to pause, ensure that you have understood the paragraph above and then consider this question: if a primary school child has five study hours in a day, how many (normal) hours does that child study for?

If you can answer that question correctly, then you are doing better than one of the Secretaries of State for Education in Cambodia, and indeed a host of senior directors in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport.

In the Cambodian national curriculum for primary education, there are 950 study hours per year. If a study hour equals 40 minutes, then this means that there are 633 hours and 20 minutes in a school year, which is one of the lowest in the world and below the internationally expected 800 – 1000 hours per school year.

However, because the concept of a study hour equalling only 40 minutes has not been grasped, the Cambodian government reports internationally that there are 950+ hours in a school year. At a meeting with the top people from the Ministry of Education last week, I heard (yet again) that Cambodia compares well to other countries.

Now that I see how the structure of Khmer affects their knowledge and understanding, I wonder how the structure of English has affected my own knowledge and understanding.

Gordon