Every year the streets are filled with amateur and pro efforts to cash in on this growing event. It’s an interesting concept for a largely traditional culture, where arranged marriages are still common, but romance is one of the top selling genres for film, literature, and music. In the capitol city Phnom Penh? I’d estimate holiday efforts exceed that of most developed countries, including the USA. How can you not love a country that loves… love?
Are counter-measures warranted? Certainly the attitude to the holiday feels a bit more like ‘Prom Night‘ than a simple day of affection. Young Cambodians face peer pressure to have a sweetheart, while parents fear that their family’s morality may be sullied. This year in particular the authorities have pledged to keep a close eye on guest houses.
It’s often a challenge for me to parse UK newspapers, unlike USA media many don’t maintain even a pretense of objectivity. Reading the first sentence of this article by The Mirror it would sound dire.
“Poor Sombo has been forced to pound the pavements for 30 years after being captured and tortured by communist rebels.”
The real challenge is that Sombo’s mahout, Sin Sorn, will lose his main source of income. So to retire an elephant, you’ve pretty much got to ‘drop the mahout‘.
It’s easy to sympathize with a symbol like Sombo. Like many Cambodians, she is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge time, and has health injuries originating from that horrible time. Many of my older Cambodian friends suffer from fairly preventable health issues such as bad teeth, high blood pressure, and stress-related illnesses. There is a lack of access to diagnosis, medicine and treatment.
Let’s heal Sambo. And while we’re at it, she can serve as a reminder of a larger concern facing the citizens of a relatively poor country.
Ever since our first ‘Clogger Summit‘ in 2007, Cambodia’s blogging community has been fortunate to receive both enthusiasm and visits from overseas bloggers.
Today at the Digital Media Collective’s ‘Freedom of Expression Forum’ we were joined by what may be our first (indigenous) guest blogger from Afghanistan, Hameed Tasal.
From his hometown of Jalalabad he contributes to the blog ‘JalalaGood‘, in quite fluent English. (There are two other co-authors.) He has been blogging for about one year, and ‘has a lot of stories to share’.
Topics are diverse, due to the writer having several different jobs that take him around Afghanistan, often to rural areas. These explorations often provide material for blog posts.
Below: Hameed discusses about creating a computer lab for children in his home town, to provide education alternatives in a turbulent political landscape.
Why keep kids occupied in class? “The Taliban hires kids for $15 to plant a bomb on the road.”
Internet access in Afghanistan is uncensored (for now) but expensive and largely limited to cities.
Taliban insurgents allow cell phone towers to function only during day time, in many areas.
Like the early days of the internet in Cambodia, access can be costly. Men have public access to the internet, women do not.
Effective conflict resolution is a critical concern in Afghanistan, similar to Cambodia. If a problem is not solved via ‘Jirga’ (assembly of community leaders) criminals may flee to join Taliban for safety (due to pragmatism, not religion). After examining a recent failure of this process, the writer details his own personal experience with a Jirga as well.
Hameed seems quite happy to be exploring Cambodia and meet other bloggers. He will be in Cambodia for another two weeks. During break we chatted about the rapid growth of regional Southeast Asian IT meetings, which he seems quite enthused by. Barcamp Kabul? We shall see.
It was very interesting to see an English-language blog coming from Afghanistan, written by a citizen. From my perspective, it seems that non-native speakers that become bloggers tend to post in English – and have learned it in order to use information technology effectively. This has been the case with Khmer ‘early adopters’ such as Lux Mean and Bun Tharum.
I’ve only ever followed one other Afghan blog, “Pangolin en Afghanistan“, by a French Cartoonist who was creating educational material in Kabul. Like ‘JalalaGood’, it is in equal parts humorous and sad.
That’s all for today; more on the Forum to follow!
(Twitter hash tag: #BlogDMC)
