I'm a sucker!!

I entered Cambodia with this idea that there was NO WAY that I would give any money to begging kids or buy anything off the kids selling stuff on the street. I had decided that, since there was a good possibility that the kids had been forced by some adult to go begging and would probably not reap the rewards of their hard labour, it was better not to encourage the trend. It also meant that they were missing school (provided that they could afford to go) and staying up well past what should be their bedtime. I thought it would be better to make a donation to some NGO geared towards helping poor kids.

But seriously, there is only so much "Lady, Lady, you buy from me! I give you special price! Ten postcards for one dollar! See - one, two, three, four..." that a person can take! Around every temple or tourist attraction there is a hoard of kids with their dusty feet and their big eyes pleading for you to buy their postcards, bracelets or photocopied books. And there's so many ways they can get to you!

The other day I stopped at the foot of the stairs to a temple near Battambang and was immediately surrounded by three girls of around 10 who started chatting to me about where I was from. When we started to climb up to the temple, they all started coming too. I thought that this was pretty cute - I had obviously made such an impression on these girls that they wanted to climb all the way to the temple with me on a 30 degree+ day!

It was only when we got to the second flight of stairs that we became suspicious - shortly thereafter we realised that by letting them all come up with us we were inadvertently hiring three "tour guides" and we would be bound to give them all some kind of payment once they guided us to the top of the staircase and pointed to the temple. (If we refused to pay we would have had to look at their faces which would have been much, much worse). So we had to send them down.

When we finally got to the top of the staircase, a chubby little toddler came running over (prompted by Granny lying in the shade) yelling "Hello, hello!" and gave me a flower. Well, with Granny keeping an eye on me from a distance and this little girl looking up at me beseechingly, what was I going to do??? And all this was after we had paid a miniature tour guide at the previous tourist attraction for pointing us down to some caves that we were having difficulty finding!!!! - N.