Fear and The Business Card

Nobody likes to fail. But from my impressions, it seems Cambodians least of all, to a fault. The old adage goes “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. But in this country, the parallel adage would be “Of course you won’t succeed, so why bother. But if you are fool enough to try and then fail miserably, like we know you will, we will laugh at you and make many jokes at your expense.” (I paraphrase). As you can imagine, this is a powerful deterrent to risk taking around here. This attitude seems especially true in terms of improving one’s own circumstance. And since it’s tough to change without taking risks, a lot of people are going nowhere.


I saw an example of this on Friday. We the roommates went out to dinner by the riverside. Our Khmer waitress was a smiley, chatty girl, with decent English and a strong interest in practicing it on her customers. In the course of conversation, she showed us a business card an NGO customer had recently given her. A job at an NGO offers far better prospects to this young lady than working at a restaurant, especially given the likelihood in this town of waitressing morphing to hostessing and then to that Cambodian point of no return, prostitution. Anyway, our waitress was clearly proud of having been given this business card, as she should have been. It was a huge vote of confidence in her. But there was a rather big problem: She was too afraid to call. Why? We asked. First, she pointed out (in good English) that her English was not good enough to work at an NGO. We assured her that yes indeed it was. Next, she stated she was afraid she could not work at an NGO, because she had never worked at an NGO before. We shot this down too: No experience necessary, we exclaimed! Look at us, we’d never worked at NGOs before either and here we were! She gazed wistfully at the business card for some time, shifting from foot to foot, and said “But maybe...maybe I cannot do it because...” Pause for effect. “Because it might be...difficult!” Ooooohhhh. Difficult. Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? To the western ladies volunteering at NGOs addessing horrible social problems in one of the world’s most unstable, corrupt, and upside-down countries. Difficult. Yes, well, best forget it then, nothing to be done, it won’t work out, thanks for playing. Next!


I think “Difficult” is in fact a solid argument for not doing something, but only as long as you don’t understand how difficult operates. So I tried to explain how difficult works: Yes, it would be challenging at first but only for a day, maybe a week...and then, in all likelihood, it wouldn't be so tough. Might even be easy. But success as a possibility is a hard concept to grasp while in a fear of failure mindset. Alas, I wasn’t getting through--She looked at me suspiciously and gripped the business card more tightly. It was getting late, we’d eaten and drunk everything on the table, including most of the chilli sauce on the chips because the ketchup tasted funky. It was time to go. If only we could give her a big enough push to jump bravely off the Fence of Wishing and Hoping, in one fell swoop, we could change her life and maybe even get our check. Not wanting to leave without movement on the issue, we made an agreement. We asked her to promise that the next time we saw her, she would have at least called this NGO. Smiles and nods. But what are the chances?



When I decided to come to Cambodia, I was told by previous volunteers to lower my expectations to zero in terms of any positive impact I would have. Well, that’s encouraging, I thought, thank you, can’t wait to get started! I couldn’t comprehend how that was possible. How can a person be effective in one country but ineffective in another? Ahh, the naive beauty of Western arrogance. Having arrived, I understand better why it is difficult to create real change, even in small ways. When I encounter this fear of trying and fear of failure, I sense it has deeper roots than I can grasp. And these deeper roots, history, politics, culture, are legitimately frightening (I will not write about them here). As roots do, they hold the Cambodian people firmly in place, but in a limiting rather than supportive way. Oh well, I can only work with what I've got in front of me. So I will keep chipping away at the small terrors as above, trying to understand the mentality of the moment, in the context of a country in a perpetual quiet crisis. I think this effort is worthwhile, because if and when the fear moves on, it leaves in its wake an open road, unobstructed and unimagined. And what’s so crazy is that it can start with a simple phone call.