Noticings.

Rachel and I had a short discussion the other day about the eastern and western views on poverty after I had been noticing the line between the poor and the rich is so strange.

In America there is a clear line between the upper/middle classes and the poor. We push our poor communities together and out of sight. Why? Because in America, when we see poverty, we feel like we have some moral obligation to help. And when we don’t, we feel guilty. So the image of poverty is hidden within its own communities so that it can be more easily ignored. If we don’t see it, we don’t have to worry about it. But in Cambodia, there is such a paradoxical division of the immensely poor masses and the excessively rich classes. Parked next to a motodope driver who literally sleeps on his bike at night, is a Lexus. A train, that runs through the poorest slums (where the children’s pics were taken) ran last week hosting a party for Cambodian's elite, sipping champagne as the ride not 6 yards away from hundreds of homes lining the train tracks. All of which are being evicted so that the government can build new property, sending families of seven or eight if not more to unimaginably even smaller homes.

Its strange for instance how in one day you go from this:

Rachel and I visiting some outskirts of Phnom Penh

Rows and rows of these single room "apartments" where we visited a worker for a great business Baskets of Cambodia who is pregnant and recovering from an accident where a gas container exploded in her room, killing the person next to her.

To this:

Elements, a night club in the middle of nowhere

We went for a party and fashion show. One of Rachel's dresses was in the show.

Wait. New York? LA? Cambodia...? Cambodia.