put sar commune, Takeo Province – The old man scooped a bushel of spent rice stalks into his arms and threw them in a pile. His grandson, Riem, scooped kernels from basket to bag. Tanned the same dark color, both worked quickly. Dusk was coming. After that, the work would be done.
Dark comes completely in Put Sar commune. There are no streetlights, no karaoke parlors. Sometimes a moto cruises through the dark, briefly illuminating the families of the village in a simple still-life.
But from the second stories of the houses that line the commune’s only road, the halo from Phnom Penh is visible. Just 30 km away are the lights—and allure—of the capital.
For some, the lights are a source of hope for the next generation. The city offers education, a chance for a better job, a chance to improve the village.
For others the lights are a bitter reminder. They remember people who have gone to the city full of expectations only to fail to find the opportunities they were looking for. In Phnom Penh they found themselves cut off from the support of friends and family. They encountered frightening new urban threats—anonymity, AIDS and crime.
What the bright lights of Phnom Penh signify depends on who you talk to.
Ask Kum Thourk, a 39-year-old mother.
She’ll tell you that if the children can get to Phnom Penh, they have a chance to become “rich or powerful.” Then they can come back and help the village.
“We are poor and have no way to think about development,” she said, “so we hope the children will….We hope they would think of their own home village.”
Some of the children do think of their village. Some of them want to do all they can to better the lives of their families and neighbors, who for generations have lived under a single cycle of rain, planting, cultivation, harvest.
But the children don’t necessarily want to be rich and powerful.
“We want to live in the traditional way, [but] with more clinics and schools,” said Kay Sinop, a 17-year-old boy who, if he can raise the money, wants to attend university in Phnom Penh.
He would become a civil engineer if he could, “because we had the war, and the war destroyed the infrastructure.”
Look no farther than the village’s road, and Route 2 that leads to it. The highway from Phnom Penh is thick with dust and traffic. Flooding has claimed some of the road, which is already scored with deep ruts and potholes.
The local road in Put Sar is much worse, plagued with huge mounds of dirt, mud puddles, sinkholes and rocks. Kay Sinop sees these problems every day when he bicycles to school.
“We want to learn and to use our knowledge to fix it,” he said.
His classmate, Khuon Sreilak, would rather mend humans than highways. She wants to become a doctor, but she still wants to return to the village and help improve health care here.
“As a doctor, we can help people,” she said, adding slyly, “and make better money too.”
Better money would go to the family, she said, not to a modern, lavish lifestyle exemplified by some other Asian countries: “We don’t want to live like the people in Japan or Bangkok. We want to keep our culture—with a modern standard.”
None of them, though, have ever lived in the city and have no way of knowing how living there might change their views. For now, the city is an interesting diversion from farming and village life. They go for festivals.
“We like to go see new things,” said Nop Samnang, 19, who also said he preferred the traditional way of life.
But for some children, even the village culture could use a little revamping. Following her friend’s lead, Lan Chantol was quick to point out that some traditions could be better. She said she wants better education for women—a tall order in a country where a only small percentage of girls continue school after their primary education.
“The government must encourage the girls to go to school,” she said.
But for women to make real advances, there first needs to be a change of attitudes in the village.
“The problem in this country is, first, economics. No money,” she said. “Second, the cultural tradition: Women cannot move away from the kitchen.”
She stole a glance at her friends, and the headmaster of the school standing nearby. “We are worried about this.”
Lan Chantol is facing her last year of school, and with it a reckoning between the future success she dreams of and the role she will have to accept if she fails..
“Next year, I will take the exams,” she said. “If I fail, my parents will stop me from studying. But if I pass, maybe I can go study in Phnom Penh.”
The stakes are high for her, she said.
“If I fail the exams,” she said, “I can do nothing but marry and do housework.”
There are some in the village who have already fallen by the wayside.
Nim Phoy, 18, had to stop school in the third grade to help earn money for the family. He made the move to Phnom Penh and found nothing there but disrespectful people, he said.
For three years, Nim Phoy lived with his aunt in the city, hawking newspapers on the streets to earn money for his mother back in Put Sar.
“I didn’t like Phnom Penh,” he said. “I didn’t have my parents living there, so people looked down on me.” His job—and the low income it provided—was not enough to earn him respect. Neither was it enough to keep him away from the village.
“If I had a better job, I would have stayed there,” he said. “I could not make money selling papers, so I wanted to come join my mother.”
He knows a better education would help him, but money is too tight, and he is embarrassed about going back to the school now that he is so much older than other students. “I’m very shy,” he said. For now he makes a living building fishing traps for the village.
A group of villagers had gathered as Nim Phoy spoke. While they explained life in their village and made jokes, a mangy dog trotted by. Its fur dirty and its tail bent, the dog was covered with sores. It was also missing patches of skin and fur.
“That dog has AIDS,” one woman said, provoking a round of laughter. But her joke also carries with it the high level of ignorance many rural Cambodians have toward one of the deadliest problems to creep into the countryside from Phnom Penh.
Two villages down, HIV/AIDS is no joke. For Ly Vanna, a 42-year-old widow, a move to Phnom Penh meant a first-hand lesson about the deadly virus.
Sitting around a crowded table lit only by a kerosene lantern, she ate dinner with four of her children. He husband died of AIDS nearly a year ago, she said, before her youngest was born.
She and her husband lived in Phnom Penh so that he could work as a porter, though he sometimes had to travel as far as Koh Kong province to earn money. Ly Vanna believes her husband visited prostitutes in either of those places, and that’s how he contracted HIV, she said.
As far as Ly Vanna knows, neither she nor the child have HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. She hasn’t been tested for the virus—she doesn’t see much point. However, she has noticed that she’s developed the same persistent cough that was the first sign her husband had become ill.
When he died, Ly Vanna moved to a house in Put Sar, bought for her by a relative. But with no land to work, her only income comes from the sales of sweets she sells from an ad hoc stall in front of her house.
She relies on neighbors to give her food sometimes. Her only hope is that one of her children gets married so she can live with them.
“My family depends on my daughter,” she said. Twenty-two years old, her daughter makes about $50 a month and sometimes sends money home. She works not so far away, at a garment factory in Phnom Penh.
