Hope Is Not Just a Word
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: If all goes as planned, we are arriving in Bangkok for a week of quarantine about the time you receive this email. But as we know, the best laid plans and all that. Here’s hoping Derek doesn’t complain too much about the flights.
This is another essay I dredged up from the wayback machine; I wrote it in 2016, early in our travels.
Hope is Not Just a Word
Hope is not just a word. This is what I’ve concluded during our two weeks in Cambodia. It has a tangible meaning—one that we could feel and see and touch—and taste.
One of the memories we’ll take with us, filed away under “what it means to make the world a better place,” is the restaurants we ate in. I won’t pretend: we didn’t have the nerve to do our usual intrepid food adventuring. I couldn’t handle the idea of street stalls in a place where lack of infrastructure means you have to step around piles of garbage everywhere you walk. We stuck with restaurants, tried-and-true, well-researched, well-populated. And (almost!) every one was amazing.
I don’t mean “amazing for Cambodia.” I mean flavors-exploding-in-your-mouth amazing.
What we quickly figured out is that the best ones are training facilities. We talked to a Swiss woman who came here for a visit, fell in love with the people, and never left. She opened a restaurant, hired a chef, and started recruiting at-risk young women from the countryside. “At risk” in Cambodia means: at risk of your family selling you into slavery, so they can feed your younger siblings. It means at risk of being married off at 15, and having 10 babies by the time you’re 35. It means at risk of dengue fever (currently at epidemic levels) or malaria or a host of other preventable illnesses. It means at risk of going into prostitution to feed all those babies.
The restaurants—the good ones—hire young women before they reach that point, and teach them how to work in a rapidly growing tourism industry. More than once, our food arrived, and the server stepped back a few feet, and . . . watched us eat. It was awkward, but endearing. We realized that if you’ve never set foot in a restaurant before, correct waitstaff behavior might not come naturally. The learning curve for these young people is steep, but it will give them many advantages, one of which is English.
In every country we visit, I try to learn a few words of the local language. I started doing it because I thought I’d need to know the basics in order to get by. For what it’s worth, it has been unnecessary much of the time—we can stumble along with pointing and gestures, if necessary. And in Cambodia, English is the first thing all these training places teach.
We hired an English-speaking driver—Peach—to take us from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh on Wednesday. It took about five hours, in a well-used, older Lexus SUV. The roads were rough, traffic unpredictable, and at one point there was so much dust I couldn’t see out the windows. We didn’t die, which became my primary goal about an hour in.
Peach is a smart guy. He was on the phone constantly, organizing and directing his “group” of drivers. He told us all about his business, how he started as a tuk-tuk driver and began learning English from tourists. I questioned him about it—he learned some in school (which I assume was sometime in the 90s), but mostly he’s picked it up since then. Now he has the cushy, lucrative job of driving back and forth to the capital, almost always with passengers in both directions.
His “group,” the drivers who depend on him for clients and leads and guidance, haven’t reached his level of independence yet. The problem, he told us, is that most of them don’t know enough English. He expounded on this for a while, waving his hands around for emphasis. It’s hard, he said. You have to work at it. He really seemed to care about helping these guys—he seemed so frustrated that they hadn’t all figured it out yet.
But when he dropped us off at our hotel in Phnom Penh, and I thanked him in Khmer, he grinned from ear to ear.
If Cambodia has taught me nothing else, it’s that words matter. English matters to Peach. But Khmer matters to him too, deeply. The people here have been nothing but kind to us, but every one—every single one—has beamed at me when I said hello, or thank you in Khmer. That’s it—that’s all I know how to say. It feels so inadequate. Dude—it took me five minutes to learn to say two words, when you’ve spent years learning my language, so that you can drive me/bring me food/clean my room/wash my clothes.
But every person—EVERY person, without exception—responded when I said hello in Khmer. Even in the city, it won me a smile, at the very least. Several asked me how I had learned their language. Several others thanked me—thanked me! For knowing two words!
The best one was at lunch yesterday. When I greeted our waiter with Su Sdai, he beamed at me.
“How do you know Khmer?"
“I only know two words—Su Sdai, and Arkun."
“I teach you more words!"
So we spent the rest of the meal in Khmer lessons. He would stop by our table and teach me a tidbit—goodbye, his name, how to ask for the check—and finally, “my friend.” He drilled me on that one, making me practice it. My friend.
It is to my eternal shame that today—only a day later—I cannot remember the word.
Take care,
Lisa
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