Phnom Penh is a capital city of Cambodia and there are 1 of 10 Cambodians lives in Phnom Penh, with its frantic traffic, glitzy discotheques, restaurants, extravagant corruption-fed luxury and urban slum squalor. The rest are scattered across two dozen other provinces, some in small provincial capitals and most in tiny villages and settlements pinpricked among the rice paddies and forests of rural Cambodia. The countryside produces the great bulk of Cambodia's wealth, in the form of illegally felled and smuggled timber, gems scratched from the earth by massive Thai sifting machines and mud-covered workers alike, rice planted and harvested by lines of peasants doubled over at their task, and fish netted from the ever-dwindling Tonle Sap and its tributaries. One of the many explanations for the triumph of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 is that the peasants in the countryside were easy converts to an agrarian movement that promised to take away the ill-gotten gains of the urban exploiters. When the city folk were forced to the rice fields by the Khmer Rouge, these "new people" fell in droves under the backbreaking labor that the peasants were accustomed to.
24 years later, little has changed. The provincial towns have some of the signs of Phnom Penh's relative prosperity, but the countryside shows little sign that daily life has changed at all. In some ways it has progressed, if a few motorbikes and the ubiquitous karaoke video shops count as progress. In other ways, the countryside appears to have been left derelict; irrigation systems are broken or silted up, bridges are collapsed and replaced by single planks, and roads are reduced to bumpy, broken paths. In the video shops the peasants watch soap operas depicting wealthy urban Khmers at play, and in the off-harvest season some of them travel to Phnom Penh to work as moto-taxi or cyclo drivers, seeing first-hand the bright lights, the Mercedes-Benzes, and the excesses of a severely unbalanced society.
