Justice in Cambodia– and for my family???

This evening, our family’s emotions ran very high. The situation looked very tense at the end. I missed out the most tense part because I was still at school, doing my mid-term test. But I tried to finish it first no matter what since I was too eager to arrive home late. I yearned to come home just early enough when the legal argument with my family and the other side happened.

In 2000, a handful of villagers kneeled their way to my mom, just for her permission to let their water pipes run through our family’s pond. After some time of begging and pestering my mother, they succeeded in receiving my mom’s permission and compensated my mom at around $200. That was when their vegetable farms were so flooded that they couldn’t grow any more vegetables. My mom allowed seeing that we were all farmers. Flood was our worst enemy. So, she gave in to their begging and of course, though some of those villagers were at some point at a throaty situation with my mom before. She said she didn’t want to destroy the business of other poor people just because of a bunch of very selfish hypocrites. It turns out that almost 8 years, that bunch of people filed a lawsuit against my mom, although 5 years ago, my mom asked them to repipe as their water pipes were aging and fragile. I remember that they refused to touch anything about that (their businesses were prospering) and ignored my mom’s request. 2008 gave them a few big rains and of course their vegetable farms were again flooded. That was no fault of us or my mom. This time, my mom wouldn’t let the sleeping dogs lie. She said no to their repiping. But since those people got their way to the district government with some thousand dollars, they won the argument. Yesterday, they even pressured my mom to sign a letter to allow them to pump water out of their farms. My mother unknowingly singed, which she later regretted. All right, they won because they cheated. The period of pumping wasn’t mentioned in the letter. Because my mom has bad eyes, she couldn’t read the conditions in the letter very clearly. Just today they collected their relatives to swim through my pond and acted like there’s nothing happening around them. They didn’t respect to whom this pond belonged to.

My mom was almost bursting out crying today. But I wish she didn’t. I wanted her to show her strength to them that we didn’t want to be corrupt to win the charges. Those people did contribute to the corruption in the country. Yes, we might be stupid-silly people many people or neighbours say. We could have spent a few hundred dollars to get an official to run the complaint— we could have done much better— but so what? We could have still become corrupt. Obviously, mom didn’t want to be infamous for winning by corruption because she knew that money was hard to earn and by spending it for not worthy cause like that, we’d rather lose. And, now one of the officials was citing us to file another counter-complaint to them. But actually, I just feel that we don’t lose anything. The other side want to run their pipes on our pond forever (when their farm is flooded)… The governor was acting on their behalf– it was clearly unfair– he even threatened to bring along a truck of military police the next day. Oh dear.. what a country it is! Misuse of power and croonies are so common.

I’ve been left wordless because all I want to say, I’d rather keep in my mind, rather than say it out. I want to say it to that governor’s face– “Who do u think you are, to make other people fool around with my property?” All I know now is to calm my family and myself down– we want to be kind to people but we dont’ want to allow ungrateful people to please their way without gratitude.