Zero margins

Being a former police officer, I’m very familiar with even the most obscure traffic laws. So, when I come to Cambodia, its such a struggle for me when I ride in vehicles and see the way they drive here. It’s almost like an organized chaos. The traffic laws, if there even are any, seem to be just a suggestion on how to operate a motor vehicle. For example, if you go to pass a motodump (small scooter) and there’s an on-coming car, both the scooter being over-taken and the on-coming car simply ease over slightly onto the shoulder to allow you to pass down the middle of the road. No one gets mad. No one tries to cut you off. There’s no road-rage. It’s just sort of understood that you allow the over-taking vehicle back into its proper lane without any animosity from anyone. Everyone obeys the “you do for me, I’ll do for you” golden rule. You won't see that on your evening commute in Atlanta.

Another sight you won’t see in Atlanta are cows! Yes, cows own the road here! They go wherever they want and, like the local drivers, they seem to have no regard for the traffic laws. In fact, just yesterday we were driving out east of Banteay Meanchey to visit the “soldier camp” – a cluster of huts just outside one of the Cambodian Army bases where the soldiers who work on the base and their families live. As we were driving there from Poipet, we went to pass a scooter on the right carrying a couple of dead pigs on its rear rack. At the same time, another scooter was approaching in the on-coming lane and was attempting to over-take said cow walking on the opposite side of the highway. Even further behind the on-coming scooter, a green Toyota Camry was quickly approaching to over take the on-coming scooter. So, you have our van passing a scooter in the east bound lane and a Toyota Camry passing another scooter while its passing a cow in the westbound lane. As you might’ve guessed, all five “vehicles” arrived at the same point in the road at roughly the same time – and no one braked!! We came so close to the on-coming car and the scooter that, for the life of me, I still don’t know how we didn’t end up in one of the rice patties beside the road! I’m not exaggerating, there couldn’t have been more than an inch or two of space between both cars, both scooters and the cow. Talk about a small margin of error!!

That started me thinking. Not only do Cambodians have very little margin of error in overtaking passing motorists; they also live with very little margin in every other area of their lives. Andy did a series a while back called “Take It To The Limit” in which he talked about margins in your life - don’t buy a bigger house than you need, don’t buy a faster or more luxurious car than you absolutely have to have, don’t run up credit card debit, save for retirement, live within your means, etc. All of these things impact your margin in case of an unexpected financial set back.

Well, here in Cambodia, people are living at their limits every single day...with zero margins. In the U.S. we like to “save up for a rainy day” by opening a savings account. Here, the vast majority of Cambodians don’t even have a bank account. In fact, of the three times I’ve been here, I've never seen one bank. We also buy insurance (flood, fire, home-owner’s, auto, etc.). Here, one flood, one traffic accident, one fire can financially ruin an already desperate family in the blink of an eye. Our farmers have crop insurance in case we have a “bad year;” not so in Cambodia. A bad year here means even less food and more hunger. We have “disposable income” that we spend on movies, sporting events, entertainment, dining out, etc. In Cambodia, the concept of “disposable income” is about as foreign as the language they hear us speaking.

In America, we have food in our refrigerators; most Cambodians don’t have refrigerators much less any food to store in them. They live, not day-to-day, but meal-to-meal – they have absolutely zero margin. All of these things play a role in the human trafficking problem because, at the core, human trafficking is a by-product the poverty – after all, desperate people do desperate things. When you have no food to eat, no roof over your head, no means of supporting yourself, no education, then selling your child to a brothel or into slavery becomes less unconsciousable. Now, of course, I’m not saying that every parent who sells their child into slavery is on the brink of starvation. But I am saying that the mentality of Cambodia as a whole, thanks in large part to the Khmer Rouge regieme, is that “you do what you have to do to survive.” And until the poverty level improves significantlty and people begin to live with margins, we will continue to see desperate people feel they have no other option than to do reprehensible, dispicable, unimagable things like selling their children to survive.