It makes you think

The tragic crush at this year's water festival made Cambodia headline news across the world. Just days ago at the time of writing, the terrible events are still too raw to understand.

For volunteers, being in a developing country when a disaster strikes is desperately sad, but can also give us focus. Surely such an event, and how people respond to it, tells us something important about the country we're trying to help - and how we should go about helping?

The scene of the crush is on my morning running route in Phnom Penh, and a couple of days later it was still lined with people. I paused to stand among the crowd, trying to gauge the atmosphere. The thought of hundreds of innocent young people so horribly crushed moved me to tears. But from the crowd there was no weeping or wailing. I just couldn't work out what people were thinking - I've worked here for over a year, yet I felt as foreign as ever.

I looked across at the bars and restaurants lining the riverfront. It's easy to forget this is a relatively poor country. Some even call this 'VSO Lite' - a far easier option than the hardship of sharing your skills in a really poor country or a properly rural placement. Material luxuries are easy to find. Houses for volunteers are large and comfortable. Tourists outnumber aid workers in places like Angkor. Isolation is minimal - even from my village, one of the most remote placements, I can (just about) make it to the capital in a day.

But it's not as simple as that! Despite the increasingly glossy surface, there are still very real challenges here for volunteers.

To start with, the Khmer language can be perplexing, with its hieroglyphic alphabet of 33 consonants and no less than 21 vowels. And this is just one aspect of what can seem huge cultural barriers to change - unseen hierarchies, inbuilt fatalism, unfathomable body language, infuriating passivity, unspoken judgments.

I personally found it far easier to volunteer in a very poor but openly ambitious country in Africa than in this part of Asia, where the poverty may be less extreme but the barriers to overcoming it appear even more complicated.

Returning to the crowd viewing the scene of the tragedy, my emotions turned to anger that such a outrage had not been prevented. This was a disaster waiting to happen, in a country which has an institutionalised disregard for safety. If even a tragedy like this doesn't spur people to demand change, how will things ever get better here? Yet there wasn't the slightest hint of rage from the crowd, who seemed more concerned with appeasing the imagined ghosts of the departed than holding to account the real failures of the authorities.

My time at the riverfront left me none the wiser about the tragic events a few days before or how to respond to them. But it did help me to reflect that perhaps the biggest obstacle to me improving lives is the one I experienced there - a culture and way of thinking here which is totally different from anything I have previously experienced.

Will any good will come of the tragic recent events in Cambodia? I truly hope so. In the meantime, as a volunteer it certainly forced me to reflect hard on why I'm here - and on the very real challenges I face if I am to help make this a better place.