James5

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Clare and I went to meeting of the ETAG - Eastern TEAR Action Group - this Saturday for the first time and had an awesome time. ETAG is a TEAR group that meets once a month to discuss, learn, share, advocate, pray, talk and think about development, poverty, justice, etc. It’s a fantastic group of people that I would really recommend you get along to if able.

This month we had TEAR’s East Asian co-ordinator come talk to us about Cambodia. It was a real learning experience for me, one of the points that stuck out was her comment about the re-emergence of a middle class in Cambodia. During the genocide Cambodia lost virtually all it’s middle and upper class people - that means teachers, doctors, lecturers, lawyers, entrepreneurs etc. Without this educated class in place development has been difficult with no qualified teachers to teach the young, or doctors to care for the sick - whole systems have had to be recreated from scratch. Additionally, the political power of the middle class has been sorely lacking in Cambodian politics - which is rife with corruption. It’s taken more then 30 years for the infrastructure and generational development to take place to recreate this middle class. Recently some improvement has been noted, especially in the realm of politics - the government has been shown some signs of caring about what the people think. As the middle class develops it will also provide a tax base for the government to begin having a revenue apart from aid (which accounts for over 50% of Cambodian GNP), this will help the country get back to normal and not be as reliant on outside assistance.

I thought it was fascinating the wide effect the genocide has had 30 years later. I wouldn’t have even thought of the sort of things now hampering development resulting from it - not to mention the physco-cultural impact.

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