A Few Things about Cambodian Culture I Can't Wrap my Mind Around

We are trying to adjust to the culture here as best as possible, and I think we do a pretty good job. There are just those ideas or mindsets of the people here that no matter how hard we try we can never truly think like them. Here are a few examples:

1) There is no such thing as customer service. If the waiter makes a mistake and brings you something other than what you ordered they will find a way to tell say you did order the thing they brought you and the waiter is never wrong. One night we were out to dinner with some friends. Gideon was trying to kill a fly and he accidentally broke a glass. Our friends joked with us you know you are going to have to pay for that. When the waiter came out with the bill he told us, 4 dollars plus 1 dollar to pay for the glass. They just don't understand that if you treat your customers nice and polite you will get them to come back more and then you will make more money. We haven't been back to that restaurant since.

2) 95 % of Cambodians are Buddhist. With Buddhism there is a great emphasis on karma. You get what you deserve. If something bad happens to you it is because of something you have done in the past, and maybe not in this lifetime but in your previous lives that you cannot even remember anything about. So with this idea people can cheat you out of money and it is not wrong of them to do so. It is the way of life, and you go on with out any hatred in your heart towards those people because you are probably to blame for this misfortune in your life. An example of this is when our landlords were building our apartment. In Cambodia the construction workers live at the house while they are building it. They come from the Provinces and bring their families with them. Part of what you pay to get the house built goes towards food for them and their families. Sotheary and Onn, our landlords, had set aside the money needed to pay the workers until the apartments would be finished. The workers kept asking for the money in advance. Sotheary and Onn gave it to them and they next day all the workers had left and gone back to their Province with out finishing the work. Sotheary said there was around 3,000 dollars worth of work left to do. They had to hire someone else to finish. When Sotheare was telling me this story I was shocked, but she told it to me in a calm voice with out getting mad or frustrated. At the end of her story she said, "Oh forgive them." For her she can easily forgive them, because that is what she is used to. That is what she expects from people. She expects people to cheat her. I guess its partially from her Buddhist upbringing and partially because it is the norm; that is the way life is here.