Unbelievable!!!

This morning I felt a real need to write about our experience because it was so ridiculous I had to share it. Try to visualize as you read because I am sure my words can only give you a partial picture of how this played out. In our room on campus we have a speaker on the wall. I never noticed it before, nothing has ever come out of it before, but this morning it spoke.
If you have seen the movie "Grease" then you might remember the little jingle they play on the zylophone when they make announcements in the morning. The same jingle woke me up at 5:30 and it was followed by a Khmer voice rattling something unidentifiable. Then another jingle. Then another announcement, then another jingle, then another announcement.
Fully awake I texted our teammate who speaks Khmer to ask if there was a fire or something. Surely they wouldn't make such a long announcement so early if it was not of the utmost importance. He said they announced to please turn the water off when you are done showering. Hmmmm. No fire.
The announcement would have been bad enough, it woke me up well before my alarm clock and it persisted far longer than it needed to, but to top it off the person on the other end of the speaker decided to play Khmer radio for the next 40 minutes. Forty minutes of Khmer music at 5:30 in the morning, with no possible way to shut it off. I got increasingly more angry and I finally got up to take a cold shower. It is mornings like this that make you feel like you are living some kind of candid camera.
It also makes me a little sad. The Cambodian people may have hated it, but no one would try to do something about it. They don't have a concept of their privacy being violated. They have had such a culture of doing what they are told and being unable to change anything that they accept whatever may happen, bad or good. In some ways it is more healthy that they can let things roll off their back, but it has also proven to be detrimental to them. For example, in our talks with college students, we have not found one who even cares what happens in the tribunal to convict the leaders of the Pol Pot Regime. They are completely ambivalent to it. I find that to be quite tragic.