Queen for a day

We spent most of the day on the bus going from Phnom Penh to Kampong Thom.  Tomorrow we start visiting the temples of Angkor Wat and we will stay in nearby Siem Reap for the rest of the tour.  In the middle of today's bus trip, however, we rode our bikes thirty five kilometers along a very rural and remote road.  In Vietnam, children would occasionally wave to us and say hello, but today, everyone did.  The children would run to the road and yell hello, hello.  Parents would bring their toddler to the road to wave to us.  A few brave children would stand on the side of the road and put their hands out for us to slap as we rode by.  We waved and said hello back to everyone, and slapped hands even when it was difficult to maneuver while steering with one hand on a sandy or gravel road.

After a while, I felt like Queen Elizabeth and wondered if she gets tired of that little wave she does.  I don't think they see a lot of Westerners here, but it was a bit odd to have people running on both sides of the road to be able to say hello to ME.  Which made me think what I would do if I were the queen ...

If I were the queen with unlimited power to implement my ideas and policies, I still don't know what I would say about the single biggest problem I have seen here:  the choice between prosperity and health.  Your money or your life?  As Jack Benny would say, let me think a minute.

The most surprising thing I have seen in Vietnam and Cambodia is the large number of people who wear face masks, particularly when driving.  They know they are killing the environment and themselves, but what choice do they have?  Today as we were leaving Phnom Penh, we passed workers striking at several clothing factories.  They want a raise to $160 a month (from $80 a month according to the New York Times or $140 a month according to our guide).  Either way, $160 a month is approximately $40 a week or $1 an hour if they worked a 40 hour week, which they don't.  They are also striking to work only five days a week, not five and a half.

The factory owners are Chinese.  If I am the queen, do I lean on them to raise pay to $160 a week?  Or do I demand that they build factories that are safe for the workers, are located away from residential areas, and dispose of wastes properly?  If I do the former, the workers (predominantly young women) will work in unsafe conditions for $1 an hour.  If I do the latter, the Chinese will move their factories to another country and the women will not work at all.

There is no zoning here.  There are no safety standards.  You can't drink the tap water.  The air quality is deteriorating as more vehicles emit more fumes and more factories generate more waste.  In most places there are no sidewalks and garbage all over the place.  Road safety is a non-existent as are road rules (like driving on the right at all times.)  The Mekong is the lifeblood of the area we have spent the last week in and it is also the repository for all of the waste generated by the millions of people who live here.  And the Mekong will change for the worse as countries upriver are damming it for their water needs.

But I digress ...  how can you tell a third world country that it needs to implement first world standards of safety and cleanliness?  The cost would be prohibitive and there is no infrastructure in place anyway.  Who would enforce the standards?  Don't even get me started on corruption and where most of the money goes.  In the real world, if you put in standards, the enforcers would take money to not enforce.  But I am the queen with unlimited power.  Do I put in the standards that slow development but improve the quality of life?  What is quality of life if you don't earn enough to feed yourself?

Here the people are voting with their feet.  It is mandatory in Vietnam to wear a motorcycle helmet and everyone we saw wore one.  It recently became mandatory in Cambodia but few people wear them.  If they get stopped by a policeman, they have to pay him off.  So they wear helmets during the day when police are around and not at night when police do not stop you.  Your money or your life?  That's easy.  We wear a helmet to save our money, not our heads.

The people in Vietnam and Cambodia are struggling not just to survive but to thrive, and the cost is the ubiquitous face mask.

Your money or your life?