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From my travels in Cambodia I can say there are many opportunities for overseas Khmers wishing to return to do business in their homeland. Cambodia is a rapidly developing country whose economy is growing at an astonishing rate of over 10% annually. You need only spend a few weeks there to get a sense of the many voids that must be filled to meet the demands of Cambodia’s growing economy.

Although problems like poverty and corruption are still quite pervasive, there is no mistaking that the country is undergoing an exciting positive transformation, in concert with the economic boom taking place throughout Asia. Overseas Cambodians, should they decide to take part in the rebuilding, have an advantage in that they had lived and studied in more developed countries and are thus able to spot opportunities that someone who had lived his or her entire life in Cambodia might miss.

For instance, I have an online business and use the internet quite extensively whenever I’m in Cambodia. The internet in Cambodia is slow, expensive and unreliable by American standards. Although home internet access costs are falling, most Khmers still get their access at the many internet cafes that charge 1,500 to 2,000 riels an hour (about US$0.35 to $0.50/hr). Although these internet cafes are quite adequate for casual internet uses like e-mail and casual web surfing, it’s not convenient to sit five or six hours straight in one place in a hot crowded internet cafe open to a busy noisy Phnom Penh street outside.

A few years ago at such a cafe, while waiting over half an hour for a thousand emails to download (yes, I get thousands of e-mails a day, 99.5% of them spam), I thought to myself how nice it would be to work in a more comfortable, air-conditioned place that had the amenities of a Starbucks coffee shop back home in Houston. I figured that if I had to spend an hour just to download my emails, I might as well do it in a “cafe” that actually served coffee.

Well, when I returned to Cambodia on another working vacation last November, I was pleasantly surprised to find not one or two, but at least half a dozen such establishments. These fancy coffee shops, which offer free wireless internet access (through your own laptop), had all the amenities of a Starbucks, including comfortable sofas and cushioned chairs, a variety of coffee drinks and fruit shakes, courteous service, and a pleasant atmosphere, plus a few extras that you won’t find in any Starbucks, such as hot restaurant-quality Khmer dishes like ku thiev, beef loc lac and fried rice.

The idea of opening a fancy coffee shop in Phnom Penh is one that I’ve had for years but never considered seriously. Now, I see that several people had beaten me to it. Although I don’t know who were behind those operations, I figure that they must have come from the outside or were local Khmer entrepreneurs who had traveled abroad and had visited trendy coffee shops in other countries.

Even if I didn’t play any part in the realization of the idea, I was happy to see that other people shared the same idea and took the initiative to make it happen. Although these coffee shops won’t directly put food in the mouths of the poor hungry street children, they at least provide jobs to some young Cambodians who might otherwise resort to less dignified ways to survive.

Whenever Cambodians from overseas go back to do business in Cambodia, we create job opportunities and help our people help themselves. As importantly, we bring back the much needed expertise and know-how to help our country grow and develop. Extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, it’s a win-win situation for everyone– for the business owner, the employees, and Cambodia as a whole.

That’s not to say that all business ventures by outsiders are good for our homeland. Cambodia is perhaps better off without people, Khmer or non-Khmer, who go into our country with the intention of making a lot of money in a short time and leaving with their fortunes. Even if they manage to create a few jobs in the process, they’d do it in a way that contributes to the already serious abuse and exploitation in our country. In the long run, they will have taken away far more than they give. It’s just like stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

For instance, one of my favorite activities in Cambodia is getting a good massage after a long day of work. You can get a really good massage there for around $5 an hour. While receiving a massage, I’d ask the massager was how money he or she was earning from the session, so I’d know how much to tip them.

One day I decided to try a massage place near Wat Phnom that I had never visited before. As the session started I asked the usual the question. The massager told me that her boss pays her $50 a month but does not give his employees a cut of the hourly fees. She complained that workers at other places were receiving the same monthly salary but were also getting a dollar or two for every customer they served.

I asked her why she didn’t just quit her job and go work at a different place. She responded me that she had trying to for months but had not found an opening anywhere else, yet. I told her midway through the session that while she was doing an excellent job, I would not be coming back to her place because I just didn’t want to support any business that treats its employees that way.

I later learned that the establishment was owned by an old white American guy who was married to a 20-year-old local Khmer woman. Although I wasn’t too thrilled about old white guys coming to Cambodia to hook up with Khmer girls young enough to be their grand daughters, being in Cambodia for a while you get used to those kinds of things. What made me upset, though, was that he was from America, a country that prides itself on such things as human rights and equality– he should know better than to treat his employees that way.

I think as Khmer expatriots returning to do business in our country, we should hold ourselves to much higher standards. While Cambodia’s current development offers enormous opportunities for expats with the know-how and expertise from the outside, there are also a lot of opportunities for abuse and exploitation. Just because we could profit by exploiting others who are far less fortunate than we and could get away with it, it does not mean we should do it. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to make a lot of money, we need not compromise the dignity of others, and thereby our own honor and dignity, to realize our material ambitions.

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With all the negativism about Cambodia, many overseas Cambodians may not realize that there is a huge urban development project to build an entirely new town within Phnom Penh.

The $2 billion dollar project, undertaken jointly by Cambodia and South Korea, is located in North Phnom Phnom near Pochentong Airport and covers 119 hectares of land. It is constructed in 6 phases and is expected to be completed by 2018.

This advanced urban complex will have residential, commercial, and public facilities, including 4- to 6-lane paved roads, water supply, reliable sewage and electrical systems, and high-speed telecommunications infrastructure.

More information about CamKo City: www.worldcitycambodia.com

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