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[Apr. 28th, 2008|09:17 pm]
Scott
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I mentioned before that I wanted to think extremely poor people can still be happy, because otherwise my mind wouldn't be able to take the amount of sadness and empathy it would need for all the poor people I'm seeing.
There are a lot of poor people in Cambodia who are definitely not happy. Some of them - lots of them - beg me for money. Sometimes I give it to them, especially if they're missing limbs. More often I don't, because most of the travel literature I've read says not to encourage beggars, who might in touristy areas probably earn much more money than legitimate workers. Also, if I were to give money to every beggar I saw, I would go broke in five minutes flat.
But it's still emotionally taxing to keep refusing money to people who look pretty miserable. And sometimes you've got to put up defenses, dehumanize people. I know that some people do it by race or religion. If people are a different race or religion than you, they're not really important and their suffering doesn't matter in the same way real people's does. Most people justifiably condemn this kind of thinking. Other people draw the line around their country. I can't think of how many times I've heard someone say we should take care of Americans first, and not worry about foreigners until everything in our own country is perfect. Most people don't condemn this kind of dehumanization, which saddens me.
I thought I had gotten beyond that sort of thing, where I swept the vast majority of the human race under the mat, but an incident today makes me think I'm just doing it in a more complicated way.
Around Angkor Wat, there are a few thousand Cambodian children selling postcards, water, handicrafts, and anything else that can be sold to tourists, usually for about ten cents an item. There's a rule of thumb never to buy stuff from children, because it encourages adults to send their children out to sell stuff to tourists. So all these children were shoving stuff in my face and yelling at me, and I was pushing them away, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.
When the children figured out I was going the opposite direction from the wat (I was actually headed to a hot-air balloon in the area) most of them lost interest and found other tourists to attack, but a couple trailed behind me and started talking. A few of them were describing the merits of their postcards in broken English, a few were trying to make fake-friendly conversation in the hopes that I would feel an attachment to them and then buy their stuff, and a few were just screaming "BUY THIS!"
I try not to talk to the people who start conversations with me, because I know from experience they're just trying to make me think they're my friend so they can guilt me into buying stuff. But it was a long way to the hot air balloon, and the children were really persistent, and I was kind of bored, so eventually I started talking to one girl, who was about seven or eight.
"Where are you from?" she asked. She probably spoke the best English of anyone I've heard in Cambodia.
"I'm from America," I said.
"Oh." she responded. "I like America."
"Do you know a lot about America?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "The capital is Washington DC. There are three hundred million people. The first president was George Washington. Now the president is George W. Bush. There are fifty states."
"Wow," I say. "That's really good. I come from a state called California."
"California has thirty million people. The capital is Sacramento. The governor is Arnold Schwartznegger. He comes from Austria."
"Wow. You..."
"Austria is a country in Europe. Its capital is Vienna."
"Wow. Do you know every country? What about India?"
"It's in Asia, west of Cambodia. Its capital is New Delhi."
"And how many people does it have?"
She thought for a few seconds, then looked like maybe she might cry. "I...don't know."
So I told her it had a billion people, give or take. Then I bought everything she was selling, and gave her five dollars, which doesn't sound like a lot, but in Cambodia that's a day's wage for a reasonably skilled laborer. She ran off with the money before I changed my mind, which is too bad, because after I had a chance to think about it I realize I should've given her more and told her to buy some books with it.
So, I guess I learned something about myself. It is relatively easy for me to ignore the plight of poor foreigners, as long as I assume they're dumb (and I start with the assumption that most people, foreign or otherwise, are). But smart people are for me what Americans are for those America-first people; I can bring myself to not care about a lot of people, but I can't bring myself to not care about them. They matter to me, in the way that everyone should matter to me but can't because I don't have enough emotional resources. In fact, all day I found myself worrying about her, and hoping she manages to get out of the selling-postcards-at-Angkor-Wat business and to a decent school at some point, even though I haven't spared a thought all day for any of the multiple-amputees I've seen wandering around. Not sure how I feel about that.
Oh, yeah. Angkor Wat is terrific. I'm going to see some of the rest of the monuments tomorrow, and I'll post about it then. |
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