How Much is Two Dollars Worth?
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re back in Bangkok now, resting up and thawing out after the get-up-and-go touristing we did in Kolkata and Bhutan. I am not accustomed to doing things every day.
A friend of mine is joining us for a couple of weeks; the three of us are going to Cambodia together, to see Angkor Wat, the ancient temple complex outside of Siem Reap.
It will be a revisit for Lee and me. The first time we went to Cambodia was in 2016; it had a profound effect on me then. I actually remember it as a formative experience. We saw so many things that my innocent, privileged, soccer-mom self had never seen before. Cambodia changed the way I saw my world, my country, and myself.
Cambodia’s economy has grown dramatically since we were there, and I look forward to seeing what it looks like today. Admittedly, the baseline was pretty low ten years ago; I am curious whether the changes will be obvious to an outsider like me.
I hope, for the sake of the Cambodian people I remember, that the economic growth has filtered down to the ordinary folks.
The essay I wrote back then is one that has stayed with me ever since, never far from my mind. Here it is, just as I wrote it in 2016.
How Much is Two Dollars Worth?
Cambodia has been sobering and eye-opening. I feel my privilege, and the basic human responsibility that comes with it, more profoundly here than anywhere I’ve been before. When I look at a naked baby, playing around the edge of the pig wallow under the house that is a one-room shack made of two-by-fours, and our driver asks if we drove a car in America (did we drive a car?? Of course we did. Sometimes two—three for a brief period), and I remember deliberating over which Gymboree outfit would be cutest for my rosy-cheeked babies to wear to Kindermusik class, I have a complicated, uncomfortable emotional response that is difficult to sit with.
He speaks so proudly of his children—3.5 years apart, just like mine—and how hard he’s working to give them an education. He drives rich tourists around, with the AC cranked up to shield us from the unrelenting heat, while all the elderly relatives who live with him make sure his children get to the private English lessons he pays for. He makes sure they have a few pennies every day, with which to pay their public school teachers, so they’ll get some attention in the class of thirty-seven kids. He is soft-spoken, compassionate, ever-concerned about our well-being, pushing cold water on us, warning us away from wrong turns and touts and scammers. He checks us over like a fussy mother before we go into a temple—Do you have your camera? Do you need another water? Do you remember where to find me? Take a flashlight—be careful. I feel guilty, but I am deeply grateful for the air-conditioning in his car. I suspect he never uses it just for himself.
When pushed, he tells us matter-of-factly about life under the Khmer Rouge—the hunger, the hard labor that was forced on the population, the loss of an aunt who had been a teacher, simply because she had been a teacher. The complete destruction of the educational system is what seems to bother him the most. We don’t push any further—we don’t need to. As I write this, I’m in a coffee shop, looking out the window at a man who has lost one arm from the elbow down. They’re everywhere we turn—people broken by war, by hunger, by landmines. Missing limbs—so many stumps and crutches and slings. The lucky ones have dirty rubber prosthetics, like you’d buy from a joke shop. It would be funny, if it weren’t utterly horrifying.
And yet. And yet. People are universally smiling and kind. We’ve encountered very few who don’t speak at least some English, which makes this an easy place for us to exist. We haven’t really interacted with anyone out in the country, which is where the worst of the poverty is, and where most of the population lives, but we’ve talked to people everywhere in Siem Reap. The accepted currency is the dollar—prices are in dollars, ATMs give dollars. Every restaurant we’ve been to has western food. A funny Muzak-version of “Home” by Edward & the Magnetic Zeros is playing in this coffee shop right now, and the television in our hotel lobby had CNN on this morning, making it difficult for me to avoid thinking about the Iowa caucus while I filled up on noodle soup & toast with mango jam. It’s all one world now, a sometimes startling, always interesting fusion of the familiar and the challenging.
It’s hot and dusty outside, and the streets are a little crazy, so I hired a tuk-tuk driver to take me to the coffee shop a few blocks away. He promised to return for me in two hours, even though I know there will be a phalanx of drivers outside the shop, clamoring for my two dollars, and willing to take much less. When I am ready to leave, I step outside and don’t see him, so I decide to wait for a couple of minutes. He’s driven me before, and asked me this morning if my husband was “staying inside the hotel today.” I like him.
Another man approaches, bows, & says Mr. Sid sent him. I am relieved—I didn’t want to be disloyal. I feel bad for the other hopeful tuk-tuk drivers, but I am pleased that Mr. Sid has worked out a way to get at least part of my two dollars, as well as whatever he is getting from whatever other fare he managed to snag. He hustles.
I feel out of place, like an obscene, extravagant pale queen riding through these dusty, crowded streets.
This is why we are here.
Take care,
Lisa
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