A PERPETUAL PRESENT

Here's the deal:

You want to go to university. You want to study English. You are young, and bright, and you are tired of dropping off both Khmers and foreigners at the front gates of schools that you have never dreamed of stepping foot inside, let alone attending.

But now you are dreaming, you see, and your dreams are big. Problem is, so are your children. And so is your wife, come to think of it, who is eight months pregnant.

Do you stop your job? Do you go to school full-time to ensure the prosperity of your future, thereby neglecting the realities of the present?

This is what a lot of Cambodians face. There are dozens of universities popping up all over, promising degrees, which they will undoubtedly deliver, with one small warning: DOES NOT GUARANTEE A JOB UPON GRADUATION. (Actually, the schools won't carry this warning, and everybody knows that anyways -- there are thousands of students, and hundreds of jobs, and those jobs that do exist will go to those with money and connections, period. You bet people are worried.)

So this is the thing -- it's easier to ride a motobike around and pick up people and drop them off than it is to go to school. Know what? It's more profitable, too. Once you graduate, and you get a government job, and you're on the path to respectability and progress and achievement, you are congratulated with a salary of about twenty U.S. dollars a month.

Know what a moto-taki driver (motodop) can make, if they're lucky?

More than twenty bucks. Not a lot more, no, but more. And when you have a pregnant wife, and crying, hungry kids, more is more, no matter what the amount.

I don't know what's going to happen to Cambodia. Nobody does. Women are getting a university education for the first time in who-knows-how-long, and the people, the young people, are certainly smarter than their elders; after all, all the really smart ones were decimated during the Khmer Rouge era.) There is still cheating and corruption amongst the young whippersnappers, of course, but that's par for the course. They are bright, and they motivated, and they have mouths to feed and families to make proud.

And yet...

There aren't a heck of a lot of jobs out here. And women are still second-class citizens. And Cambodia is still, first and foremost, an agricultural nation. None of the university educated young 'uns want to go back and work on the farm, however, because there's no money in that, no esteem in that, and besides, the government jobs have air conditioning. And who can blame them? But what that means is that nobody is really studying how to properly farm and irrigate and innovate this country, in rural terms; nobody, as far as I know, is interested in creating a structure that will allow the majority of Cambodians, those living in small villages and communes, to thrive and prosper and heck, maybe even feed their families. And, on top of that, the education system, pre-university, is abysmal. Everybody bribes their teachers. The teachers themselves are not educated. Nobody wants to teach in the rural areas because the money's no good. And the teachers themselves make only twenty, thirty bucks a month, which means that they have to get two, even three jobs, which means...

You get the point.

Cambodia's future is wide open. It's better than before, of course, unquestionably, but then again -- how can it not be better than genocide, or a foreign, Communist power ruling over your homeland? There are lots of signs of improvement here. You have to look closely, true, but they're there, nevertheless.

But there is still that moto-taxi driver, you see. He wants an education. He wants to learn about the world, and English, and the world beyond Cambodia. But he has a wife, and family, and while nobody likes to drive around Phnom Penh at midnight, tracking down backpackers, hoping to give them a lift, the present will always win out over the future, every time, and that's what worries me about this country the most -- it's in a perpetual present, until that unknown point in time when the future catches up with everyone, and by then, you see, it's too late.