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Emblems of Today's Squalor

In contrast, on my last evening in Cambodia, I took a boat ride through Chong Khneas, a floating fishing village. This loose collection of more than 700 families of fishermen and a complete support community live on boats and travel Tonlé Sap Lake following the fish and the rainy season. To reach the floating village we drove through the town of Siem Reap and several smaller villages. The further from Siem Reap we traveled, the more primitive living conditions became. Homes went from cinder-block and concrete structures to wooden houses to one-room bamboo shacks supported on spindly bamboo poles to protect them from flooding. I would have been afraid to roll over in my sleep in these houses, much less raise a family or ride out a monsoon in one. Electricity was nonexistent, and the only running water was the stream we were following to the lake.

 The only nod to the 21st century was televisions, running on car batteries and prominently displayed in the glassless windows.
The floating village consisted of hundreds of boats, some no bigger than 20 feet by 6 feet. Entire families lived on each boat. Cages suspended underneath the boat served as impromptu fish farms. The back of the boat held a primitive outhouse. Children bathed in the lake while old women cleaned fish or cooked noodles in water dipped from the same source. The lake served not only a source of food and of cooking and drinking water, but as a bathtub and septic system as well. Here the ubiquitous televisions, and the outboard motors used to power the fishing boats onto the lake each evening, were the only lifestyle changes in the last 200 years.

The floating village and the bamboo shacks were light years below the standard of living enjoyed by the Cambodians who designed and lived in the temple complex at Angor Wat 900 years ago. All of those past splendors seem lost today.

The Lessons of Forgetfulness

What caused such an advanced civilization to revert to a shadow of its former self? And what lesson can we learn from this study in contrasts? To paraphrase George Santayana's famous line, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to forget it." Somehow the people of that floating village have forgotten the grandeur of Cambodia's past. They have lost touch with the creativity and spirit that made Angkor Wat possible. Instead of moving forward, they either stayed the same or moved backwards — and perhaps that amounts to the same thing. Once we cease to learn, build, create and stretch, we not only stop gaining or growing, we allow the rest of the world to pass us by. This is the equivalent of moving backwards.

We must ask ourselves each day, "Am I moving forward or simply standing still?" In our lives and at our work we all know people who refuse to change with the times. To our computer-savvy children watching us struggle to retrieve our email, we may look like slow-moving dinosaurs. We cannot afford the luxury of standing still. To do so allows the world to move past us. More importantly from a business standpoint, it allows our competition to move easily past us.

Do you risk becoming a relic of the past or a dinosaur whose fate is extinction? If you have any amount of doubt coursing through your veins, commit today to education, growth and constant improvement, both personal and professional. And know that if up until now you've been a bit lax, you're never too old or too young to make this commitment to yourself. The lesson I learned in Cambodia is that I want to be the one who builds monuments for the future — not the one who wonders how the monuments of the past were built.

Author Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD is the founder and president of Vickie Milazzo Institute, a legal nurse consultant training and certification company. She is the author of Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want

Can Angkor be saved? 

BENEATH the aircraft's wing at sunset, the broad marshy moat dotted with white egrets, the three rectangles of covered galleries, the terraces and the five high, sculpted towers of Angkor Wat are all tinged pink. We are privileged to be flying over the best-known temple of the unique complex of monuments that is Angkor--in old Khmer, the name means "the city" or "the capital". 

Here, on a plain 200 square kilometres in extent in north-eastern Cambodia, between the Kulen plateau and the Tonle Sap ("Great Lake"), a dozen Khmer rulers of the ninth to the twelfth centuries built seven capitals containing many temples. Some are hidden in the jungle, where they are even more inaccessible because of the presence of the Khmer Rouge, who after holding power from 1975 to 1978 and killing upwards of a million Cambodians, took refuge in this region near the Thai border. The temples are all that now remains of the ancient capitals, for only the gods had the right to stone or brick buildings. The palaces and dwellings were built of wood, and they have since disappeared without trace.

Reconciling Tourism and Conservation

Nature, not human wrath, has destroyed these marvellously rich monuments. The heat and humidity of the tropical climate encouraged the unbridled growth of kapok and "strangler fig" trees, popularly associated with rains because their roots destroy monuments.

Today the principal temples have been freed of the vegetation that held them in its grip. Only the Ta Prohm temple has deliberately been left in the midst of the thickets in which the French missionary Charles Bouillevaux and, later, the naturalist Henri Mouhot found it in the mid-nineteenth century. Since 1898, the year in which the French Far Eastern School (the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, or EFEO) was founded, a steady stream of archaeologists have worked on the site. They patiently cleared away the undergrowth, dismantled and then reassembled the monuments, and in 1908 created the "Conservation d'Angkor" to which the most threatened statues were taken.

According to Bernard Philippe Groslier of the EFEO, a former curator of the site, "There is hardly anything in the world comparable to the Angkor complex in terms of the number, size and perfection of its buildings." But this masterpiece is in grave danger, and in 1989 the four main Cambodian political parties asked UNESCO to assume the coordination of international activities for the preservation of the monuments of Angkor. In December 1992 Angkor was placed on the World Heritage List.

In view of the scale of the conservation problems involved, UNESCO'S World Heritage Committee placed a number of conditions on Angkor's inclusion on the List, insisting that a legal framework for conservation work and a management plan should be drawn up, and that an authority should be established with the resources to manage the entire Angkor area. UNESCO'S first task was to help the government to set up a Cambodian Authority for the Protection of the National Heritage, which was formally approved in February 1993. UNESCO has also worked with the Cambodian government and a group of international experts on a Zoning and Environmental Management Plan (ZEMP) for the authorities, donors and local people as well as visitors. This comprehensive document takes into account Angkor's assets as well as the dangers threatening the site.

The archaeological treasures are particularly at risk from lichens, microscopic algae and bacteria

that proliferate in the guano of the many bats living in the ruins. The ZEMP also cites the destructive effects of monsoon rains, the vegetation, and variations in the underground aquifer that influence the stability of the buildings. Other factors include uncontrolled agricultural development after deforestation, the influx of thousands of tourists and the construction of hotels to replace existing facilities that are not up to international standards.