The ideal travel experience would be a guilt-free, stress-free trip in which one meets different types of people, experiences a different culture and becomes a better and more knowledgeable person through the process. Of course, that never completely happens. If you are aware and conscientious, you might, for example, feel some guilt for spending your tourist dollars in a country where people lack rights and, of course, every country has its problematic aspects: political, social and economic. Most of the time the negative stuff is, however, kept sufficiently under wraps for folks to come over and have a good time without noticing it, so your moral trip wire never gets sprung.
But what about going to a country where stuff is so bad it can’t be kept under wraps? I am proposing a radical travel reset and shooting for the meaningful, challenging and transformative by advocating travel to, perhaps, one of the 47 countries that the UN has listed as the “least developed” countries in the world. These are currently called “4th World Countries”. You would go somewhere actually expecting unresponsive government, bad services, poverty, everything you’d like to normally avoid on a vacation.
It would be a counter-intuitive travel situation where you would see unpleasant things, feel unpleasant emotions, and think unpleasant thoughts, but you might come away with a greater empathy bandwidth and a deeper commitment to work toward positive change in yourself and the world.
I am throwing this suggestion out there because I recently went to Cambodia, one of the 47, and I was deeply affected by witnessing more significant poverty and hardship than I had ever seen before, and I developed a deep sense of wrong about the situation of the (wonderful and kind) people there. I can also now more clearly see the mistakes developing nations are making: catering to White expats, building gambling casinos, filling the country with redlight districts and tourist traps instead of developing a diversified and productive economy, relying on half-plundered, thousand-year-old temples instead of developing infrastructure and industry, letting a “strongman” possibly pocket money instead of distributing it. By the way, in regard to Cambodia, it comes in around 150/180 in countries ranked for corruption (above Nigeria but below Afghanistan).
I did not look upon the problems in Cambodia from the perspective of a person from a flawless society. My homeland is riddled with racially segregated cities, extreme class divisions and discrepant opportunities, a racially and class-biased criminal justice system, evil economics, unprincipled politicians lining their pockets through their positions, Bible-thumping gun nuts… I guess people from Denmark and Switzerland can come to my homeland to increase their empathy bandwidth.
So who the hell am I to go to Cambodia and stare? But I did anyway. I went for the temples and was engaged by the suffering. And you know what? If people from more “developed” societies go to places like Cambodia (or the USA) and can offer real help somehow, the people who are suffering are not going to reject it. So go to a 4th world country (or my country) and tell people about what you saw and spread the word about more than the lovely beaches. The key is to go to a country where you will be relatively safe. Follow State Department guidelines and advisories.
My compassion was initially engaged and strengthened by the political situation of Cambodia. I was there during the turnover of political power from a man who had ruled the country for 39 years while, according to numerous news sources, stifling all political opposition. He (Hun Sen) was handing the government over to his son (Hun Manet). There were posters and images of these smiling guys all over Phnom Penh. I had read about Hun Sen in Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls and Ganja by Amit Gilboa.
I partially went to Cambodia to see whether the conditions of the country had changed much since the time when this notorious book about broke and dissipated White expats indulging in a multitude of affordable vices in Cambodia in the 1990s had been written. Actually, conditions had nowhere to go but up, although they probably should have gone up much more than they did. It seems that the recent economic growth has been due to the garment sector and foreign companies benefitting from inexpensive labor. Personally, I call this “growth through sweat shops”. I also believe economic figures of growth are skewed by the fact that a noticeable super-rich class has developed in Cambodia in contrast to 62% of the poor folks.
On my first day in Phnom Penh, I stumbled across the most confusing and out of context public monument I had ever seen. It was a monument to people who had been massacred at a pro-democracy rally in March 1997. News sources in the West do not consider Cambodia to be a democracy, so I wondered how such a monument could have been established in a public park, in a non-democracy, easily observable to everyone. How did they get away with doing this, I wondered?
I later learned that opponents of the current government in Cambodia, as well as human rights groups, believe that Hun Sen was probably behind the massacre. Since an American was also injured in this 1997 attack, the FBI investigated and also concluded that Hun Sen was most likely connected (members of his body guard unit heaved the grenades). So this monument would be like, oh, to pick one example, General Pinochet allowing a monument to torture victims after his CIA-backed coup in Chile.
Well, think about it (let’s be hypothetical). You want to be a dictator. There’s money to be made even in a ramshackle place shaken and torn apart by a history of colonialism, genocide and civil war. You send thugs to a rally for a political opponent and they heave grenades into a throng of people who really believe there are going to be free and fair elections. 16 innocent people get killed, including a teenage girl who just wanted to make a little money by selling sugar cane juice. 150 people are injured.
People are outraged by the massacre and the coup launched after the election and they propose a monument to those innocent people murdered in cold blood, so there is always a reminder of what happened when Cambodia was possibly inches away from responsible government and resurrection. You, the hypothetical dictator, say, “OK, go ahead, build the darn thing! I don’t care.” Well, if you try to stop it that’s proof that you want to cover this up, perhaps because you were connected to the killings. So you allow a monument to be built to martyrs of an attack by your body guards.
Nobody ever gets arrested for the attack although the FBI identifies suspects (one is a high ranking general now), but a pro-democracy monument gets built with the blessings of the guy who might have launched the grenade attack which crippled democracy, in a country where he (a former Khmer Rouge officer) ruled for 39 years and then handed power over to his kid and the kids of his cohorts. Orwell never saw this coming. Jake, it’s Cambodia.
This monument made me sad from day 1. Very sad. I went back to the monument the next day and placed flowers there. I said a silent prayer for those who were killed and maimed. I remembered that teenage girl and I saw her in the sweet and respectful teenagers all over the city. I thought of the political prisoners currently in Cambodian jails and those who left the country for their safety. I thought about the fact that many people in Cambodia live on $3 a day or less despite 39 years of rule by a “strongman” with absolute power and certainly the capacity to put money in people’s pockets instead of his own. Then I continued to have my heart broken on nearly a daily basis by other things I witnessed in that city.
There were, of course, the many redlight districts with tacky bars and inexpensive (often teenage) prostitutes. Do a little research and you learn these young women are pushed into this line of work through poverty and they use this money to help support their families because life is so poor there. Their lives are destroyed as their social status becomes ruined and they are not able to ever get married or get better jobs. But they are there to cater to the foreign guys, especially from a couple nearby developed Asian countries (but you have your aging White sex tourists as well). Lately more and more teenage Cambodian boys have been pushed into this line of degrading work.
The redlight district bars are universally tacky and an insult to the Cambodian people. One is named after a famous Joseph Conrad novel and has replicas of religious imagery found at Angkor Wat and the National Museum flanking a dancefloor with flashing lights and roaming lasers.
The lack of industry and jobs outside of sweat shops has led to an overabundance of people trying to fend for themselves, like the tuk-tuk drivers, who are super aggressive in their competition against each other for whatever tourists they might snag for an overpriced ride. The tuk-tuks (a cheap, motorized form of transportation) represent how people were largely left to themselves and forced to develop their own economy around the foreign expat. You see guest houses (cheap hostels for cheap foreigners), restaurants with English names, bars with English names, all over the place.
You’ll sometimes find people or families living outdoors. In front of my hotel there was a family that lived in a cheap, rickety plastic tent so that the dad could repair tuk-tuks and motorbikes or fill their tires with air 24 hours a day. So my personal term for this is a “tuk-tuk/bar-girl economy”. The government does not stimulate jobs in the city and the urbanites have to find ways to please foreigners for a living – by driving tuk-tuks or working in bars.
Go to the new fancy indoor market that all the YouTubers marvel over and you might be met by barely clad children begging for money. Talk to some of the White expats from South Africa, the UK, Germany or the States and you might hear something like, “Cambodia is so convenient for me! It’s really economical. You can live like royalty here.” I had to ask myself, why hasn’t my government helped these folks? Why can’t we do something? Apparently, US aid has been curtailed due to concerns over human rights and political prisoners. I guess my government feels if it sends aid, it will not go where it is supposed to. I can understand this. The dictatorship is just a curse which keeps on giving.
Yes, I think we need this travel reset option. We have an obligation to find and witness evil wherever it is, inside and outside of our own countries. This might be a good step toward meaningful change. If a country has problems that it can’t even sweep under the carpet effectively, the world’s narrative has to reflect that. Maybe we are never as helpless as we think.
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Sources/Further Reading:
List of the 47 Least Developed Countries (worlddata.info)
Cambodia’s garment sector is expected to grow by 8.1% in 2023 – The Cambodia Daily
Cambodia: Opposition Politicians Convicted in Mass Trial | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)
At Long Last, Signs of Justice for 1997 Cambodia Massacre | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)
Who is Hun Manet? PM’s son anointed as Cambodia’s next leader | Cambodia | The Guardian
2022 Corruption Perceptions Index: Explore the… – Transparency.org
RICH, MIDDLE CLASS AND POOR IN CAMBODIA | Facts and Details
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author