Phnom Penh streets

I’ve been back in Phnom Penh for just five days, hanging out with bloggers Brittany Sims and Caron Margarete, and already I’ve had many unique—sometimes frustrating—experiences.

Saturday night in a local nightclub, I witnessed firsthand how possessive men out here can be with women. While trying to make friendly conversation with a friend-of-a-friend, I guess I must have violated some unspoken rule or sufficiently intimidated this guy into thinking I was competition. After clinking glasses with me and acting all buddy-buddy, out of nowhere, he assured me that the three young ladies he came with belonged to him and I should back off—when I hadn’t even spoken a word to them! Later, on the dance floor, I was merrily acting a fool, dancing by myself, and one of the girls—along with another male friend—joined me. There was no touching, not even any flirting going on—I was very aware how hostile this crowd was and we were having a respectful Sunday school dance here. But I watched as this Cambodian asshole later came over to pull her off the floor and then smack her right in the face because she’d danced with me.

I’ve spent a good amount of time with some new friends I’ve made from Nigeria and Ghana. A couple of them are soccer players on the Cambodian team even, and these are the kind of guys who go in a club and drop lots of money on bottle service and know how to have a good time—fantastic, friendly guys who know everyone. But I’ve passed right through security and then seen them be denied entry because of the color of their skin. Instead, we found a nearby outdoor seating area and had our own party on the sidewalk—just good, clean fun—as military-style security guards suspiciously eyed them, fondling their Kalishnikovs and all the while ignoring all the prostitutes, and the opium and cocaine pushers that fill the streets. Talk about having your priorities backwards.

I’ve sat in the comfortable, three-story, waterfront Foreign Correspondent’s Club while children sit hungry across the street with no shirts on their backs and no beds to go home to. I’ve written about the extreme poverty and the aftereffects of unimaginable genocide here before. Cambodia is one of the poorest and most corrupt places in the world; the sexism, racism, and other socio-economic trends are tough to swallow.

Last week, back in Bangkok, I went twice to visit my friend Ryan in the Immigration Detention Center. Strangely, even though Thailand attracts probably the largest number of political refugees and asylum-seekers from all across Asia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, the government doesn’t recognize official UN refugee status, and so Ryan and his family had to turn themselves in and spend five nights in prison before they’d be allowed to fly out of the country to be relocated to the United States. Ryan and his father were separated from his mother for 23 hours out of the day—only allowed to see each other and visitors from 11am–noon on the weekdays. They were kept in small cells no bigger than a small studio apartment, sometimes with up to a hundred prisoners; fed rotten chicken and rice soup through the small crack under the bars. You can smell the open-air toilets from 40 feet away as we visit—shouting over all the other prisoners and visitors between two fences, separated by a span of about five feet. He says they’d thrown a senile leper in the cell, who’d ran around like a madman, yelling and vomiting all over until he passed out and died before their eyes. They are treated like animals, not people.

Sometimes parts of Southeast Asia feel like the wild west in the very worst of ways, and I feel powerless to do anything about the injustices I see because I’m an outsider here and the problems are very deep and convoluted. If you’re a conscious traveler at all, it will test you to your limits at times, but it will also open your eyes with strange new experiences and teach you a lot about the world—whether you like what you learn or not.

The world is a clusterf#@%! So what can we do about it?

Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my direction—spending too much time on Facebook and Twitter, contributing to every project under the sun without feeling like I’m really adding to the legacy I want to leave, worrying about money, tweaking my online businesses in the most insignificant of ways, going out and dancing the night away—while people face all this suffering. A lot of young people want to help make the world a better place, but we don’t know where to start, and we often feel like it’s completely beyond the scope of our abilities.

But don’t fall victim to that line of thinking. Start where you are now. Support the things you care about. Don’t lose the desire to do something you’re truly passionate about and make a difference in your lifetime.

I recently tried a test: I used this blog as a platform to see if I could help a friend in need. I wrote about my good friend Ryan Lei, who’d fled religious persecution in China four years ago, lived as an illegal immigrant in Bangkok for four years (even with official refugee status from the UNHCR), and has now finally been relocated to Los Angeles. You guys responded with a great show of support, and I was able to connect him with at least seven or eight friendly new contacts in the LA area. (Thank you!) Through Facebook, he raised enough money through friends to pay the immigration fine and get a start on teaching his parents to speak English. These are small steps—but in little pieces we can help change people’s lives for the better.

I also recently had the pleasure to help plan Thailand’s first TEDx event two weekends ago in Bangkok. For anyone unfamiliar with the 25-year-old conference, it’s a pillar in the technology, entertainment, and design community and brings together innovative thinkers, researchers, and changemakers from all pursuits to share ideas on how to build a better world. TEDx BKK turned out to be an incredible day-long conference, with over 200 eager attendees from around the world.

TEDxBKK crew & speakers

We featured incredible speakers including former Bangkok governor Apirak Kosayodhin, dive journalist Chris Mitchell, performing artist Ronley Teper, actor James With, and many more. But my favorite topics were those given by Brooke Estin, who spoke about her experience at Kiva and ChangeFusion working on microlending and social innovation; Daniela Ruby Papi, who works with PEPY in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and talked about responsible giving and sustainable community development as opposed to charity; Prae “Fluke” Sunantaraks, who suffers from Retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a progressive vision loss disease, and works with visually impaired children in Bangkok; and Bruce Poon Tip, founder of Gap Adventures, who discussed responsible adventure travel and giving back to local communities. (You can expect a valiant return in 2011!)

To return to my Personal Mission Statement, I strive to constantly seek personal growth through continued learning and new experiences (travel, entrepreneurship, and other assorted weird adventures); to increase my sphere of influence by building quality, lasting relationships, and leveraging creative synergy with like-minded folks; and in the end, I hope to use the business I build and the influence I have to leave a positive impact on the world.

I will continue to promote worthy causes when I come across them; I will continue to use my online presence as a test platform to help friends and those in need; I will continue to involve myself in conferences and fundraising mixers that bring together creative, thinking people; I will continue to collaborate on inspiring campaigns with influential folks; and I will do my best to build and expand a business that helps remarkable people build awesome online projects that change the world. I’m not anywhere near where I want to be yet; but if I can make a difference in the quality of the lives of those around me and instigate innovative thinking about the world’s problems, then I will have succeeded.

You don’t have to wait until you have the money, influence, prestige, or any of that to make a difference. Don’t wait until retirement. Don’t wait until you’re wealthy. Start now.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you were fortunate to be born in the “developed” world. We have our own problems, but most of us are in the top 5%, we’ve received an incredible education, and have been given a lot of advantages in this life. How will you put those things to use? Don’t settle for passive consumerism. Don’t veg out on the couch and ignore the world outside.

What direction are you going? How will you make the most of the life you’ve been given?

P.S.: To be clear, Cambodia can also be a very stunning place, with many friendly, wonderful people. I owe special thanks for the inspiration of this article to Brittany Sims, who reminded me where I’m supposed to be going.

Feature photo by Allie Caulfield