Think our government is corrupt? Take a trip to Cambodia

Timaree Schmit 

philadelphiaweekly

Corruption within government marred the beauty that was Cambodia for our writer.

Keeping pace with the latest outrageous thing Donald Trump has done is exhausting. Every day offers a new opportunity to cut funding to a social service, empower discrimination, put a billionaire in charge of a department they simply have no business being a part of. So it was nice to be on the opposite side of the planet from him for a couple weeks.

This time last month I was in Cambodia, enjoying 100 degree weather, khmer cuisine, and the awkward feeling of being obscenely wealthy. One U.S. dollar is worth about 4,000 Cambodian riel. In practicality, the locals have little use for their official currency, favoring the stability of American money. And my money went far: the average meal cost only $3, beer is less than a dollar, an hour-long massage was around $10.

Side note: You can shoot 30 rounds of an AK-47 for about $40, should that desire arise.

After the soul-denting process of getting through immigration at the Siem Reap Airport, my friends and I grabbed a $12 half-hour taxi ride to our hostel. This was our introduction to driving in Cambodia, a cross between Black Friday shopping at Walmart and Super Mario Kart. The division between lanes is more of a suggestion, and vehicle speeds can vary by 40 mph. The same road is shared by bicycles, cars, packed buses, and motorcycles carrying entire families. Unsurprisingly, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death here.

“Every day 7 to 10 people die on the roads in Cambodia,” our taxi driver tells us as we pass an accident where a man can be seen on the median, bleeding from his legs. “The ambulances are the fastest in the world. They compete. You pay them and they take you to the hospital.”

This kind of corruption is expected; it’s part of doing business, as well as getting out of trouble. We heard story after story of normalized extortion. “One time a policeman stopped me and then walked me to the ATM,” a tour guide told us, “another time all I had was a Coca-Cola and he was thirsty, so he just took that and left me alone.”

The traffic and the corruption may seem unrelated, but they’re both results of a nation mangled by colonialism and decades of war. Cambodians have learned to be resourceful, as well as even-keeled in the face of trauma and injustice.

“You held an election recently?” our taxi driver asks us. We dread this question – now we have to talk about Trump – but we grumble affirmatively. “You are very lucky,” he says, “you get elections every four years. We have had the same guys for decades.”

Next door to Cambodia there’s Thailand, a much wealthier nation, which we also visited. Technically it has a king, but military coups have been a regular occurrence since the 1930s, the latest one just 3 years ago. The current junta is oppressive: they declared a nationwide curfew, banned political organizing and censor the internet and its media. Meanwhile, after the long-ruling king died last October, the royal family declared that – out of respect to their mourning – no one could get married for a year. If you think about it (and I did), it’s people put up with repression from two different forms of government, simultaneously.

The weeks in Asia raced by and we headed home. While I was grateful to get back to westernized plumbing, I was not amped to return to a herd of elephants or the latest tweetstorm from our President. The corruption of Trump’s cronyism and nepotism is infuriating, but the takeaway is, I suppose, that it could be worse. That’s both an optimistic mantra and a warning.

I’ve been fortunate to know governmental stability in my lifetime, to avoid war on my doorstep, to have (in theory, anyway) an impartial justice system. All of these things are not a luxury to take for granted. This means recognizing the privilege that comes from living in a nation built on both colonialism and principles of valor.

And it means vigilance and resistance, aiming not to return America to some previous idealized state, but to build it towards the great nation it can be.