Borin's Blog

Every time I cross border between Cambodia and Thailand I have new complaint about fraud, corruption, and bad services the Cambodian provide to the tourism. You can talk about reform a hundred year, if thing on the ground doesn’t improve, you’re still poor. So here’s the story:

• Departure: Arriving at the Poi Pet Border at 12.30pm. My new passport is biometric, so I don’t have to fill the departure and arrival form. But, the door to the immigration computer was locked, because officer is busy having lunch. I waited 15 minutes for the lazy officer to arrive. He begun by asking for 100 bath each. He said it will be used to pay for electricity. What kind of government office require the officer to collect fund to pay for the electricity them self? I replied that I won’t pay a single bath. The officer is silent, but let us go. Next there are people telling us that we need to copy our passport, other wise the Thai immigration won’t let us into Thailand. The copy is 5bath for a passport, to my surprise the Thai immigration police do not require any copy of the passport. If they need to copy traveler’s passport they must have a copier them self.
• Arrival: Arriving at the border my friend need to apply for visa entering Cambodia. Even though the sign said the visa is 20$, they asked for 1000 bath for the visa. Threatening the tourist that they must go back to Thailand if they don’t pay 1000 bath. We managed to pay only $20. But with the frowned face of the police, it is scary in a land of lawlessness like this.

In the end we managed to get a car back to Phnom Penh, only to hear endless complaint from the taxi driver about many of the scary thing at the Border. If you have bad or good experience please share with us.

Tags: Border, Cambodia, Corruption, fraud, immigration, khao san road, khmer, Poi Pet, Thailand, Visa

Some fact about Cambodia’s media:

• TELEVISION: 9 (including 2 TV relay stations with French and Vietnamese broadcasts); excludes 18 regional relay stations (2006). (CIA Fact Book)
• RADIO: AM 2, FM 17, shortwave NA (2003). (CIA Fact Book)
• Hundred of Newspaper and Magazine. Include those who registered but not published.

Now the problem is are they balanced, do they report truth? do they serve the society as media suppose to?

The reason I bring this topic up is, it’s funny every time I watch Khmer TV. The news as they called is not really news.

Tags: Cambodia, Media, news, Politic

Installing WordPress on your own hosting account could be tricky, if you have little knowledge of php, and MySQL. But, if you’re lucky enough to have a hosting account that has Fantastico installing WordPress takes just a few clicks.

Another benefit of using Fantastico is the upgrading of WordPress to the latest version is very easy. Just click upgrade from the Fantastico control panel, everything is taken care of.

With Fantastico, not only WordPress, but there are many popular PHP script available for free range from Content Management System to simple Form Processor. So if you’re host provider do not offer Fantastico, it’s time to ask for!

Tags: Automatic, Fantastico, Installation, MySQL, PHP, wordpress

Here is some facts one Phnom Penh Post:

• TPO estimates that 30 percent of Cambodians suffer from mental health issues, which include anything from depression and alcoholism to forms of psychosis.
• The National Institute of Mental Health in the US has estimated that 51 percent of Cambodians suffer from mood-related disorders, compared with an estimated 9.5 percent in the West.
• Ministry of Health, estimated that about 60 percent of Cambodians who were alive during the Khmer Rouge regime are living with a mental illness.

So:

• How is it if 3 in every 10 people you know are mentally ill?
• Half of your friends suffer mood related disorder, how is it?
• Your relative who live during the Khmer Rouge, 6 in every 10 of them is mentally ill, that may include your parent, your uncle aunt, and grand parent.

Worry some facts, What are we going to do about it?

Tags: anxiety, Cambodia, depression, health, mental, mood, stress, TPO, trauma

It is fact, there is no country in the world that is immune from the corruption. Also, it is fact, some countries are corrupted than the others. According to Transparency International, 2007, Cambodia has Corruption Perception Index of 2.0, where 10 is the highly clean and 0 is highly corrupted.

Corruption is every where, even in the developed countries.

This statement is one of the argument supporting the government. 

I hope to open a discussion about this statement. Please discuss and comment.

Tags: accountability, Cambodia, Corruption, culture, international, Social & Culture, transparency