The Shoe Rule

I have just one question for travelers wanting to work in Cambodia:

Do you wear shoes?

Shoes are the best indicator of competence in Sihanoukville.  The town is somewhere between civilization and a deserted island where scorching hot pavement is littered with shards of glass.

Despite this, a lot of tourists insist on walking around barefoot. I'm a pragmatist, and there's no logic to this trend except for a foreigner's insistence on "going native."  But, if anyone has adapted to the heat and treacherous, man-made terrain, it's the people who have lived here since the dawn of time. And they wear shoes.  If a local isn't, then it's not a noble "be-one-with-nature" reason.  It's because he or she is poor.

Maybe my patience runs thin with the no-shoes-by-choice crowd because I worked for an NGO that had a monthly budget for children's shoes.  A good portion of our days were spent cleaning wounds and subjecting young children to painful antiseptics because they stepped on a rock or broken beer bottle.  These were not "kids being kids" cuts.  They were "Try not to retch while I wash off this hemorrhaging flesh wound" injuries.

And yet, as I walk down Serendipity Beach Road under the equatorial sun, there is never a shortage of white people playing a perverse game of hopscotch to get from point A to point B.  Point B is never one of the countless shops that sell $2 flip flops.

At least there's one saving grace for their habit.  If they walk through the river of shit that runs down the hill from Sokom Guesthouse to the pier, they'll develop incurable rashes and infectious boils that double as signs that say, "Don't interact with me." 

Also, the shoe-less provide hours of entertainment for the kitchen staff at Monkey.  There's nothing like a big Barang lad navigating scalding hot gravel and hopping past the window to give someone a moment of zen during a busy shift.

It's safe to assume that if someone comes up the road looking for a job, they have been here for at least a month.  They've realized that working on the beach as part of a revolving door of idiots will lead to an early grave, but they don't feel like going home yet.

So why -- WHY -- do some insist on not wearing shoes?  I get it.  You're in Sihanoukville.  you would wear Daisy Dukes and/or an ill-fitted tank top if the POTUS came to dinner.  But, if you hike up the road from whatever cesspool on the beach and fail to stop in a shoe shop, then I question your sensibilities.  Why should you be trusted with a cash register and an unsupervised, limitless supply of booze?

Of course, I'm not saying shoes = responsible. I am, however, absolutely saying no shoes = irresponsible.

A Love Story Between a Girl and Her Water Filter

The Super Tunsai is, hands down, the best purchase we've made for our home. It uses a clay pot to filter water until it's 99.9% pure.  It cost $28 from a local store called Electronic City.  We love it so much, I made Torie buy one when she got to Sihanoukville, and we gifted one to my mom so she could stop paying for water deliveries.

The most impressive aspect of the Super Tunsai is that it's made, start to finish, in Cambodia.  You can see a video (a poorly produced one, but a video nonetheless) of the Super Tunsai warehouse by clicking HERE.

I lived in Cambodia for a full year when Lee discovered the water filter.  About 9 months before, when I was working for Let Us Create, our little town was visited by the USNS Mercy, a massive, fully equipped naval hospital ship that runs humanitarian missions.

Part of their mission was bringing water filters to poor neighborhoods that may not have had access to clean water. I know three separate NGOs who were given these filters, and they were complete failures at every site for three reasons:

• They used several different types of gravel that couldn't be sourced in Cambodia.
• They required constant monitoring to make sure they didn't break.
• When a problem arose, we had to email the water engineers (who, by that time, were back home on the other side of the world), who could only troubleshoot using educated guesses.

With the amount of time we spent trying to figure them out, we could've just bought clean water for $1.25 and spent our working hours doing other things.

When Lee brought home our Super Tunsai, I had a "where have you been all my life" reaction.  All it needs is a good scrub once a month, and even our son drinks water from it.  It's paid for itself several times over.  In fact, Lee put two of them in one of his businesses.  Since the only overhead is it's initial cost (plus pennies for tap water), customers can refill their water bottles using the honor system and put 1000 riel ($.25) into a collection box for the Sihanoukville Tourism Association.  That money is then used to pay workers to clean the beach.  

The filters are an illustration of a problem with most international NGOs. It's the idea that "stuff" from the first world is better and more capable than "stuff" here. But, when money is invested in local resources, it's invested in the entire town.

Those Who Need

Charity work is a paradox in Cambodia.  Last year, I visited conCERT, an organization in Siem Reap that helps potential volunteers weed through the over 300 NGOs based in the city.  With a population of 896,309 people,  36% live in poverty, according to conCERT's website.  That's about 322,571 people, or 1,075 per NGO.  Of course, some NGOs, like Friends International will work with more, and others will work with just a handful.

Compare that to Sihanoukville with a population of  278,259 and no up-to-date data on how many people live in poverty.  The last I could find on it was from 1997 when there were half as many people and an illegible map of income per capita.

But here's some math: Sihanouk Province is 868 square kilometers, or 320.6 people per square kilometer.  Siem Reap, on the other hand, is 10,299 square kilometers, or 87 people per square kilometer. It's safe to assume that Sihanoukville has at least the same percentage of people in poverty, but probably more, since most workers here are migrants from the countryside working in the factories (which account for 655,000 jobs, nationally) or in unskilled labor like construction.  I've always said that Sihanoukville is like the Wild West of Cambodia.  It's a kingdom of its own, within the Kingdom of Wonder.

As far as I know, we can count the number of active, registered nonprofits in Sihanoukville on one hand.  In the last two years, I've always wondered why there's such a disparity in charitable work between the two provinces.  Here's my professional and scientific hypothesis: Siem Reap is a better place to live.

Numbers are moot.  You can just visit the two towns and see how different they are. The booming tourist economy that surrounds the Angkor Temples has turned Siem Reap, a small town, into the most cosmopolitan town in the country, after Phnom Penh.  When we were there last week, I saw the road to the airport had a bike lane.  A BIKE LANE.  There are also 5 star hotels that contribute to a hospitality industry rivaling any First World holiday town.  And don't forget the air-conditioned coffee shops.  Oh, the air-conditioned coffee shops!  Coffee shops as far as the eye can see!

Ask any random tourist what they think about Siem Reap.  When I was visiting with a friend at Under Construction in Siem Reap's Wat Bo area, I met a middle-aged woman from Washington.  She had only spent 3 days in Siem Reap, but had adamantly decided it was her favorite town in all of South East Asia.  And this is AFTER visiting Saigon and Hoi An.  She said the people are smiley and polite, there are lovely shops, and OH MY, the CULTURE!

I told her it's a good thing she didn't have time for Sihanoukville.  She would've left with a bad taste in her mouth.  In fact, a long-time Siem Reap ex-pat told me he was sad his ex-boyfriend wants to move back to Sihanoukville.  Because, and I quote, "He deserves better than that town."

Back to my original point, Siem Reap's 300 NGOs aren't necessarily placed where they're most needed. They're not "being the change" -- a phrase that if I see one more time on Facebook, I'll throw my computer against a wall.  They're following the change created by travel books, magazine articles, and TV shows that say everyone needs to see Angkor before they die.

Sihanoukville NEEDS change makers.  We don't have ancient ruins and our beaches aren't near as nice as Thailand's to attract tourists who demand the air-conditioned coffee shops.  But with the exception of a few extraordinary, patient people, charity workers who will commit a year or more of their life in the Wild Wild West are few and far between.

Sadly, with the discovery of oil near our shores, Sihnaoukville is on path to being a boomtown.  But, roughnecks on oil rigs aren't usually followed by bike lanes and 5 star hotels.  Instead, we'll get more human and drug trafficking, as well as corruption within our self-contained government. What do-gooder in their right mind would want to move here?

Sidewalk Enterprise

Every morning at 6:00, a boy who can't be older than 14 arrives to the sidewalk across from our apartment with a large bag and a bike pump.  For the next half hour, he inflates about thirty penguins.  Then, he sits.  A few times an hour, he'll adjust the penguins that moved from their orderly columns and turn them so they face the street.  If one is dirty, he'll replace it with a clean one that he wiped down earlier.

His busiest times are before and after school.  Over the last four days, I've seen him get six sales.  Two to a moto drivers who had a small children, one to a man in a Lexus who wouldn't open his door all the way to inspect the penguin (he even yelled at the boy to back off), two to me, and one to a teenager who arrived to the penguin site immediately after me.

It's almost like a lemonade stand, but the money goes to his family (who, I think, are positioned around Sihanoukville selling the same penguins) and he sits behind the collection all day, 6 am until sunset.  I was prepared to pay a dollar for the penguin.  It was 5000 Riel ($1.25) so I shelled out the extra cash in support of small business, then noticed the penguins all say "dolphin" in stock script on their sides.

I used to think he attended school during the afternoons because I looked over one day and saw an older man there.  Alas, the boy was behind the man's moto, inflating a brand new penguin for the man's son.  When I spoke to him, I asked him if he spoke any English.  He said, "aht," which means no.  It's safe to assume he just works.