Do not believe words that don’t come from the original source.
These are the words in the Tohoku earthquake program that I saw the other day. They were very impressive, and persuasive, and became imprinted in my mind. Of course, these are serious words for people who still suffer from invisible radioactivity and damage caused by groundless rumors after becoming victims of a disastrous earthquake, but at the same time, it can be said that it is understandable for all things in information dissemination. All matters of today’s world can be seen through tools such as the Internet or SNS, but there are still many questions about how far the truth could be. Even now, just a small part of information has been recognized as a whole, such as China and Japan have become confused in movies, and “are landmines in Cambodia all right?”
These words also apply here in Cambodia. For example, there are seminars held in Japan to promote new businesses and investments. Half of the information is only adding up, and in many cases they haven’t taken into account the risks and environment or infrastructure development. As a result, we have seen many people forced to give up in the middle of their dream through early withdrawal or business contraction because of the gap after coming to the locality. A bad fellow, is a fraud? Well, there are many who encourage investment and are aware of fraud! I have unashamedly told people that “I earnestly felt I want to do something to give Cambodians a better life and work after seeing their current situation and diligence”. Some people feel impressed with this after hearing about it. While I have also seen many idiots who are actually just aiming for cheap labor and prices, and there are an unending number of people who were deceived. For restaurants too, there are cases where people open their stores by just swallowing consultants’ words without studying the local situation, thinking it can be a hit to open a Japanese restaurant because numbers of Japanese have increased, or people would eat there if they serve the food considered to be delicious in Japan- even if it’s expensive. They get into trouble by words that are not based on the reality on the ground.
For people of this country, which is still in mid-development, the present or recent things are more important than a big dream: they do not want such a pie in the sky. Some people say that they could not create their own futures because they have had unfortunate events. We cannot deny it, but can take it as reasonable. Always live on the scene, and then there may be some points we can learn from! If we change the language, we must act and think a lot about the difference between things we can do and things we want to do. Whether we can or not, it’s important we figure it out by ourselves.