Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

It is risky in Cambodia for a foreigner to open a bank account with only one name on it. If the person dies or is incapacitated or needs to leave the country quickly, it is almost impossible to recover the money from that account. As a back up, when I set up my ABA bank account, I got a debit card for it and gave it to Maryknoll Sr. Regina with the PIN. In case something happened to me, she could withdraw the money from ATMs.

I never used the debit card and when Regina left, she returned it to me. Recently I wondered where it was and when I found it, I saw it had expired. I put it in my pocket yesterday to go to ABA to renew it, but later in the day it wasn’t in my pocket.

Arriving at home, it worried me that someone could find it and try to use it. It was expired but it still worried me so I went to an ABA branch (they are open 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM every day in Cambodia!) and canceled that card and got a new one.

A few hours later I got a message from the DDP director. Our former social worker called him to say a tuk-tuk driver had found my card and wanted to give it back. And that’s what the driver did this morning. In the photo he is talking to our DDP guard.

I couldn’t understand all his Khmer but he seems to have found it in the street. It had my name on it but how he found out who I was and how to contact me, I still don’t know!

I will never be able to understand Cambodian drivers’ fixation with driving with one wheel over the dividing line on streets. Here my tuk-tuk driver has his left wheel hooked over the line. Notice two vehicles ahead, the car driver has his right wheel over the same line.

Look at this mass of overhead wires on a Phnom Penh street. This is rather unreal even by Cambodian standards!

In a land where there are no building codes–or if there are codes, they are ignored, it can’t be too surprising to find an umbrella seemingly affixed to the front of a building ten or twelve feet above ground. Did it blow up there and get stuck? Did someone secure it in that position? Is so, why? Who knows!

As long as no part of your load is touching the ground, you’re good to go! But not everything that gets loaded on to a moto stays there. This man had his packages secured with packing tape but something gave way and he ended up in the intersection reloading his motorcycle.

Only 3.5% of Cambodian businesses are registered with the government. 88% of all workers are part of the non-formal economy. This picture shows what the non-formal economy looks like on a typical Phnom Penh street. The government tries to change that because non-formal workers are not protected by labor laws and do not contribute to social security systems.

The Cambodian government likes to talk about moving the kingdom from the least-developed country category to the moderately developed. They can point to all the high-rise buildings and expensive foreign cars and terrible traffic. But at street level, some things stay the same.

Here are three icons of the large majority of Cambodians who don’t live in high-rise condos:
• the young boy selling lotus pods to earn money for the family
• the roast geese for a special family celebration, and
• a moto food-delivery man.