As a culture there’s some differences. When travelling by taxi between provinces a comfort break at a roadside rest point provides an opportunity to buy handfuls of fried scorpions, spiders, crickets, and water beetles, a cliched shock to the western mind, but one that soon blends into the ordinary. The language is telling of the culture, how one addresses another depends on their age, the more elderly the higher the respect of the terms used, and family is of vast importance. Economically speaking there is poverty, and there is wealth, millionaires and destitutes and I’m not sure if the gap between them is greater or smaller than the UK. One of the compassions, the ‘good deeds’ I’m helping facilitate here is the buying of a new house for a lady and her daughter, currently dwelling in a partially collapsed wooden one-room shack without lighting. Next week they’ll also have a metal fabricated one-room house with solid floors and solar lights. It’ll cost around $800 we estimate, including the wages of local villagers to build it. She’ll keep the old shack as a kitchen. The poor are very poor. And the rich are very rich, driving back towards Phnom Penh huge gated communities are under construction, and parked outside glamorous restaurants cars worth a hundred new shacks line the street. It reminds me of London, the chic by jowl hotpot of money and lack. The rural poor lack basic necessities. In the next few weeks we’ll bring a selection of eyeglasses to the village, out of a room of some 30 adults a dozen raised their hands when asked if they had blurred vision. There’s very few opportunities for them to earn more than the subsistence level they currently achieve, buying a pair of glasses to help see may never have even occurred to them. In every country on Earth we meet the same phenomenon of inequality. I’m unsure as to why this natural or at least normal spread of wealth occurs, from multi-millionaires to those who can’t afford to eat that day. Some people are smart at making money. Others less so. And some are basically incapable of it for whatever reason. Maybe they’re looking after children at home? Maybe it’s just not a game they’re built for. Perhaps they’re comfortable in that place in society. Perhaps they have no choices. At least the rural poor have a natural environment in which to exist, the urban poor have a harder time, suffering the brutality of homelessness where even a crumbling wooden shack is an unavailable luxury. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or at least stay poor. This is an ancient truth, perhaps it’s a hangover from the survival of the fittest, a distorted version of natural selection resulting in an inverted criteria for procreation. The causes of poverty may well be multitude, yet the answer is as old as the assurance that the poor will always be with us, and from the same lips. That we should love one another. If only it weren’t so simple.
