On November 5 we had our first big culture shock as we moved from the gleamingly modern, highly organized, obsessively clean Singapore to Siem Reap, ancient capital of Cambodia, famous for ruins of hundreds of temples, and a city where motorbikes and tuktuks (carts pulled by motorbikes) are the main way of traveling because they are more maneuverable on narrow, unpaved roads and in heavy traffic.
View from our apartment, thanks to local Friends
Singapore is clean and sparkles. The subway (MRT) gleams and is air-conditioned. We saw workers wiping down the stainless steel railings at train stations and even the harbor gets a clean (link to video). You feel totally safe here — contrast that to home — yet everything is managed. Even the government provided housing (which 85% of people live in) has racial quotas so that each neighborhood maintains the same proportion of ethnic groups as the country as a whole: 75% chinese, 15% Malay/Singaporean, 8% Indian, and the rest “other”. This is intended to promote the multiracial harmony for which Singaporeans are proud.
But there is no place here for protest. The same party has held the majority in Parliament since 1959, and there have been only 3 prime ministers — two of them father/son. If you want to give a public speech, it must be submitted and approved by the government beforehand. The secondary language you study in school (other than English) is determined by your race, which comes only from your father. Certain laws are very strict–on the customs/immigration form they remind all travelers that possessing drugs can earn you the death penalty.
While the various races seem to live together in harmony, and Singapore tour guides take great pains to point out a corner that has a Hindu temple, a Mosque, and a Buddhist temple clustered together, tolerance only goes so far. A Quaker gay Friend, whom we met at worship on Sunday, described the informal “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy that inhibits him being truly himself at work, for fear of either him losing his job or putting his employer in an awkward position. We also learned that the Quakers in Singapore have not officially become an organized Meeting because to be a non-profit organization in Singapore, you have to have a certain number of Singaporean citizens leading the organization, and most of the Quakers are ex-pats!
Siem Reap is vastly different. Yet we have felt equally as safe.
Marsha (and our luggage) taking the tuktuk from the airport in Siem Reap.
Siem Reap is the gateway to Angkor Wat. The name of the famous temple that features on Cambodia’s flag, as well as the name of the UNESCO World Heritage area around Siem Reap that has hundreds of temple ruins in it. (More about temples later.) Before the mid-1990s, few foreigners came to Cambodia because of the genocide of the communist Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-979 and the civil war that raged after the fall of Polpot (leader of the Khmer Rouge) until the mid-1990s. But now, the town is flooded with tourists (mostly Chinese). The result is a split personality town in which ritzy resorts sit cheek by jowl with tin shacks, and 60-person tour buses vie for parking spaces with tuktuks.
But what was most astonishing to us is the way that Siem Reap is awash in plastic. Plastic garbage litters the edges of every road – major and minor. Plastic bags are used for everything from carting fish from the river to the market, to carrying your styrofoam takeaway dish from the street food stall. In a single day of touring the Angkor Wat temples, our guide provided us with over three liters of water each — in individual 1/2 liter bottles. Multiply that by over 2 million visitors to Angkor Wat and your head spins! When we asked our guide how the garbage was dealt with he pointed to the many small fires burning in front of houses and shacks. “We burn it” was the simple answer.
Culture shock aside, we have had a good time in both cities, of which we will tell more in later posts (link to video of our tuktuk ride).
Green Edges 