Media Missionary Focus

A Speed Trap By Any Other Name

Lisa had a fun driving experience the other day.

She was going down the main business street in town and came to a traffic light. Traffic lights are where all the police hang out. Typically they will wave a motorcycle over for no real reason and then demand money for payment of a fine for some infraction. Sometimes the person really did do something wrong, but sometimes they didn’t. Whatever money is given is split up between the policemen present, and doesn’t actually go to any government department.

Well, this particular day, li9sa came up to the light as it was green and traffic was going along, but just as she entered the intersection the light changed to red. Please notice carefully what I said, and what I didn’t say. I made no mention of yellow in there; it changed from green straight to red. This is the latest game the police have taken up. They set the light to change directly from green to red so people don’t have time to stop, and then they pull you over for running a red light.

So as Lisa enters the intersection the light changes to red, she doesn’t have time to stop, and a line of policeman quickly block her way and pull her over.

No question about it, this is very annoying. But sometimes you just pay up and get it over with. Now for me, I tend to talk my way out off it, but Lisa usually can’t do it, partly because her Khmer isn’t as good as mine, partly because she isn’t as assertive, but mostly because she is a woman. But on this particular day, paying up and moving on isn’t so easy.

A few days before I had noticed that our drivers licenses were about to expire, so I gave both of our licenses to our office staff to renew. Basically it involves paying $40 and bringing in new ID pictures, but it takes about a week or two. So Lisa was still without her license.

The police were pretty happy to find she didn’t have a license, and figuring they had hit the jackpot they told her she would have to pay $30 (an outrageously high amount). Although she tried to explain, Lisa’s language skills weren’t up to the task and she found herself at a bit of an impasse. So she called our office on our cell phone and had them explain it to the police.

Our office secretary’s father is a somewhat high ranking government official, so she spent a few minutes yelling at the police, after witch the police dropped their demands to just $6 to “buy Coke” for the police officers (funny how even the pretense of a legitimate fine kind of falls away when someone stands up to them). Lisa took over from there. She knew this was still too high a “fine” for what had happened, and she offered to give him about 50 cents for a Coke. The officer pointed out that there were six of them, so Lisa agreed to $3.

All in all it was another day in Cambodia and just par for the course.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 8:36 PM