Pride & Prejudice

The newest addition to my neighborhood is a mini-mansion, not so different from a house I would see stateside--the traditional Khmer house on stilts across the road instantly juxtaposed with this mammoth of modernity, cradled between rice paddies and dirt roads, gutted deep by rain and tractors. The outer gate of the house sporting a series of Buddhist wheels, circling its existence back to the Cambodian context.
The other houses and businesses in construction have nothing on this palace, but they still show progress and development, what Cambodia has craved for and needed for so many years--this country surviving through colonialism, dictatorships, genocide, conflict, war, deception. The average Cambodian sporting multiple facebooks, each one sporting a different name, a different ‘me’, allowing those able and privileged enough to afford access to the net a sort of self-development--an agency to construct their identity digitally, owning several online properties with their edited, whitened faces establishing their rule and their space.
The selfie phenomenon thriving in Cambodia. Those who partake brandishing their iPhone, worth more than gold, cradling it in their hand to take and flaunt their ‘sty,’ an abridged word for style--a linguistic quirk of Khmer the ending consonant swallowed producing subtle differences in words difficult for my foreign ears to distinguish. (bot bok bak baik bat)
The streets now lined with yellow lines, seldomly yielded, the government imposed rules in conflict with the organically established rules of the junabot, the countryside. National highwaysin production, roads being widened--both carving away at the traditional Cambodian roadside society: markets, houses, businesses, schools all trailing along the main veins of the country.
The power lines webbing across ancient rice paddies up mountains and powering cellphone and radio towers. Each year more and more villages join the masses of Cambodian society with access to stable, hopefully reasonably priced electricity. Schools are mostly still without, some houses using it so sparingly--but in my village lights, camera, action baby! I can hear a loudspeaker’s bass every night, reverberating across the village’s streets, the dogs barking at its echoes: ghosts with their electric buzzing.
I decided to call this pride and prejudice not because I've read the book but because these are all things of which Cambodians should be proud of. Their country moving somewhere else, investing in its infrastructure, creating new opportunities for its citizens. The prejudice on my part and many others--avoiding power lines in pictures opting for a more ‘natural’ view. I should be ashamed of this willful betrayal of Cambodia. Who am I to erase their work, their progress? Who are we to judge construction as a nuisance? How can we justify the profuse litter and waste as nothing but a sign of disposable income?

There's a lot to come for Cambodia and I might have gotten here at it’s sweet spot, it's transformation.