The bright, thick tropical sun filters yellow through the fading canvas outside Lone Pine Café on Phnom Penh’s busy Pasteur Street. Tuk tuks, motorbikes, and a shocking number of exotic sports cars whir outside.

The proprietor is an old-timer, a former award-winning midtown Manhattan restaurateur who cashed out in the early aughts. He moved here to fade softly into a different sort of concrete jungle. The food business, though, was in his blood, and he couldn’t resist one last venture. Decor is certainly not the appeal of the aging Cali-Mex dive. Patrons flock to rumors of the best margaritas and burritos this side of the Mekong. They stay because the rumors are very true – but also because Lone Pine Café is just the sort of dimly lit watering hole where certain stories can still be whispered at the ragged edge of an authoritarian state.

This particular story starts simply enough. Somewhere in the United Nations’ sprawling Cambodia mission exists a certain “protection officer.” Her core responsibility is to monitor Cambodia’s “rehabilitation” shelters and ultimately decide whether her agency should continue to fund and support them.

All photographs by Roman Koenig, from his series Glimpses of the Slums of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2021–22. Used by permission.

On a site visit with other observers, what she found was not a shelter at all, but a prison. Upon entering, she was hit with the overwhelming odor of trash and human waste. The little light inside was a dingy and ominous gray. Only the oppressive heat of the equatorial sun effectively penetrated the windowless concrete walls. Living quarters were cramped. Food rations were minimal and foul.

The protection officer observed sick and malnourished “patients,” a man lying semi-conscious and unattended (who later died), and a woman going into labor with no medical support. The United Nations holds a strong rhetorical stance on the dignity of vulnerable individuals. Since a UN agency was providing direct funding support to the ministry overseeing the shelter, one might have expected it to respond vigorously to its agent’s witness of gross neglect.

Yet the impact of this site visit – like so many others – was nil. A tidy list of recommendations was provided to the overseeing ministry. Some nonbinding guidance was offered to improve management of the facility, and the list was dutifully accepted, stamped, filed, and ignored by the ministry. Funding continued and no public condemnations were issued about the conditions found at this shelter. Nothing changed.

This facility is a fairly representative example of Cambodia’s government-run shelters. Of the myriad humanitarian and human-rights crises festering within Cambodia’s borders, such places rank among the worst.

According to Sebastian Strangio’s book Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen and Beyond, these shelters are widely used as holding places for undesirables. Drug addicts and street people are rounded up “typically in accelerated fashion prior to visits from foreign dignitaries.” As one municipal government official summed up, if world leaders “see beggars and children on the street, they might speak negatively to and about the government.”

Despite the existence of some reporting on these shelters, their true condition is not widely acknowledged. This represents a defining feature of the aid industry one might call an “engagement imperative.” This imperative is an unspoken set of incentives to prioritize relations between the “partners” (foreign watchdogs, international organizations, NGOs, and the like) and “host government” entities.

The dominant perspective within the Western aid world holds that humanitarian goals are most effectively pursued with the cooperation of local institutions. This is a rational operating assumption. Without a deep level of engagement with the host government, most aid groups would be unable to carry out their programs – programs designed to reach the most vulnerable.

But this imperative to work within the system necessitates significant moral tradeoffs. Reasonable arguments may be made for where the cost of engagement outweighs the benefit, where to draw the line. Beyond such utilitarian analysis, though, the habits formed by repeatedly engaging in such tradeoffs render them difficult to see at all. Fundamentally, an industry that aligns itself with state power (and the money that comes with it) has every reason not to recognize the negative effects of that alignment.

Yet, beyond “the industry” itself as a bogeyman – and notwithstanding the many dedicated individuals working earnestly in this space – Cambodia is rife with sickening stories of aid-worker hypocrisy.

There are the human rights advocates who are meant to be protecting the poor from land grabs but instead play golf with corrupt officials on stolen land; environmental activists with big SUVs in their driveways and rosewood furniture in their homes; NGO leaders ensuring their own comfort and security while sustaining corrupt and predatory elites.

Such stories have the potential to open our eyes to the insufficiency of powerful systems to address human need. We could take them as humbling reminders of individual fallibility and doublethink.

Or we could dismiss these stories and their tellers, labeling as “cynical” that which is merely a matter of historical record.

Or perhaps worse, we could allow the darkness of such stories to instill in us a smug sense of somehow being better or more holy or more altruistic or more pure. That, if only it were “us” calling the shots, everything would be very different.

So let me be clear: this story could just as easily be about me. And indeed it is.

“Sir, your funds are now frozen per guidance from the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control.”

These are never the words you want to hear as you are wrapping up a frantic Target run with your eight-month-old daughter. And, let me assure you, they are certainly not the words your wife wants to hear as she steels herself for the pandemic-enhanced gauntlet of boarding an overseas flight in 2021.

But why?

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), to me, harks back to episodes of Narcos, 24, or The Sopranos – one of many arms in the US government’s fight against drugs, terrorism, organized crime, and the like. Founded in 1950, its mission was largely driven by Cold War geopolitics up to the fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, the ballooning aid industry has become, like OFAC, one more tool for the promotion of liberal democratic ideals and “fair play” capitalism the world over. Freedom, by a certain definition.

To the likes of OFAC, I was one of the good guys. My résumé rang out like a love ballad to progressive idealism: supporting pro-democracy rebel groups and reporting on human rights abuses in northern Myanmar; establishing a “win-win social enterprise” in post-conflict Uganda; and leading “evidence-informed” policy research at a prestigious American university. And now, as China’s shadow loomed over the region, I was out pushing a rule-of-law agenda for a prominent NGO in one of the most corrupt and pro-Beijing countries on the planet.

If those aren’t pro-democracy bonafides, I don’t know what is. So, what in the world did Uncle Sam want with my petty savings accounts? The answer to that question goes back fourteen years, to a small Cambodian village experiencing a very different side of “freedom” and “progress.”

Not much changed for the people of Lor Peang as Cambodia’s civil war died down in the late 1980s. The Soviets moved on and the UN peacekeepers arrived to usher in a new era. Sure, they saw the Land Cruisers come in and heard the foreigners preach to them about democracy. An election was held, and they courageously cast their ballots, despite the risk of doing so. When the party aligned with the old monarchy was named the victor, it seemed to promise stability. But it soon became clear that Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party would not accept the outcome.

Not much changed for Lor Peang in 1996, when a significant portion of the village was reclassified as the Ta Ches Commune Special Economic Zone (SEZ). In theory, SEZs facilitate rapid economic growth through tax incentives to attract foreign investment and spark technological advancement. In Cambodia, they have historically served as vehicles for speculation and land-grabbing by members of the ruling elite. Today, they are increasingly used as havens for organized crime, human exploitation, and elite-driven lawlessness writ large. But still, not much changed in Lor Peang, for a while.

It was November 9, 2007, when the bulldozers rolled into this quiet little village forty miles north of Phnom Penh. Through some bureaucratic magic and likely backroom deals with provincial authorities, KDC International (a company owned by the wife of a cabinet minister) acquired the rights to this SEZ and began “productive economic engagement.” This engagement began and ended with plowing down a number of homes in the village and erecting a fence around the perimeter. Meanwhile, the new owners sat back and waited for real estate prices to rise.

That same year, this power couple began construction on another investment project – my future home.

It was 2020. We were moving to Cambodia in the dead of Covid winter, with a newborn. It’s different looking for an apartment with a baby. The tiny amount of money you save getting a walk-up just doesn’t seem worth it anymore. Every single square inch of space you can afford certainly does. You start thinking about things like security and architectural integrity and how much of the day the pool is shaded. And of course, the normal considerations – proximity to work, area quality, and whether the neighbors are sane.

In Cambodia, to have it all – the proximity, vibe, and space, the like-minded community and fun neighborhood, the yuppie family dreamscape – Romdoul Bopha apartment complex was perfect. All for less than the price of a crummy apartment on the outskirts of DC (but exponentially more than the average price in Phnom Penh).

Romdoul was by no means the most luxurious building in the neighborhood, nor were its occupants the wealthiest. Those distinctions belonged to the children of ranking government officials and their sprawling, leafy villas, along with their endless stream of Ferraris, McLarens, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces. So our home didn’t stand out as flashy, but it attracted a certain clientele: diplomats, successful European “consultant” and “advisor” types, country directors of prominent American NGOs, and even, for a spell, the ranking UN official in Cambodia.

These folks fit our demographic to a tee. Many had young children. Few were on their first deployment – they’d been around the block a couple times. Most, if not all, saw Phnom Penh for what it is: problematic in many ways, but by no means a hardship post in the broader view of the industry. Strangio describes expat life in Phnom Penh as “a sybaritic blur of cheap entertainment, running the gamut from panini bars and yoga classes to hip cafés, social enterprise set-ups, and cocktail happy hours. Rent and domestic help are inexpensive, internet connections are fast, and just about every sort of indulgence is imported from abroad.… A spell in Cambodia is generally a comfortable step on the way to somewhere else, and everybody wants to leave with a gold star on their CV.”

And that about summed up our time in the Kingdom of Wonder. Until it didn’t. Some months later we had more or less settled into our rhythm. We’d found some friends, gotten the hang of my job and hers, and picked out our favorite “hip” café. We took our annual home leave in the spring, and that is when it happened.

One crisp morning, I was deep into a trail run in the oh-so-non-tropical Colorado Front Range. As I rounded a rocky bend that opened up an expansive vista, I realized in a flash: we hadn’t paid our rent! One of the many oddities of our Cambodian life was that our landlords explicitly required all rent to be paid in cash. This would now be impossible as we wouldn’t be back for another few weeks. I pulled out my phone and messaged the property manager, asking her how to proceed. She said it was fine to wait, but I insisted. We wanted to pay now. Eventually, she forwarded wire instructions. I submitted the transfer when I got home and thought nothing of it until the call from my bank about the Office of Foreign Assets Control. A suspicious transfer had apparently put me on the agency’s radar.

I submitted an appeal through my bank and attested to the purpose of the transfer and my lack of knowledge of the situation. I stressed – with extra credibility – what exactly I was doing in Cambodia. I’m one of the good guys. You definitely don’t want to hold on to my money. Those funds are the ones that help me do the good stuff!

And seemingly, it worked. Actually, I’m not sure what happened. No one ever confirmed whether my transaction was in violation of any sort of statute. In any case, within a few weeks, our funds were unlocked. We returned to Cambodia and resumed paying our – potentially illicit – rent in cash. Always in cash.

But it also sparked my curiosity about why our landlords, a married couple, were apparently blacklisted. I knew the husband was the Minister of Mines and Energy. That status certainly hadn’t resulted in a cut to our electricity bill, and I had not given it much further thought.

What I found upon a bit more digging shocked me.

The wife was the head of KDC International – the perpetrator of the Lor Peang land grab. This was one of the most famous land grabs in a country where hundreds of thousands were similarly stripped of their property and a small elite amassed a fortune through state-sanctioned theft. Yet Lor Peang wasn’t the biggest or the most violent or even the one most directly linked to abuses of government power. Rather, it was famous because the displaced people had had the nerve to fight back. Nonviolent protests had attracted some minor attention among (mostly local) human rights groups. A pittance was offered to a few of the displaced villagers, while many more were jailed for their willingness to speak up.

Some reports suggested the wife had also been involved in orphan trafficking – selling children to agencies for adoption by rich parents in the United States and elsewhere. The husband was considered one of the more nepotistic and corrupt ministers in one of the world’s most corrupt governments, his ministry stocked full of his own family members and allies. He had long been suspected of skimming off the top of Cambodia’s labyrinth of natural resource concessions to foreign direct investors. For example, in 2009, an Australian mining company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to various members of his family residing in the United States in exchange for mineral rights. The company was later convicted in the United States for wrongdoing.

According to one long-time Cambodian human rights advocate, my landlord is “easily a top three Cambodia bad guy” amid stiff competition.

My little bit of due diligence hadn’t fully uncovered the reason for the blocked transfer, but it unsettled me profoundly. I felt like something needed to change, and was uncertain what it would imply for my family’s future. I figured I’d informally poll my fellow Romdoulians.

“Do you know about our landlords?”

“Like what about them?”

“Like, who they really are?”

Most of the residents of Romdoul Bopha were aware he was a minister and that “they were probably corrupt.” But it ended there.

“They provide a good service and a safe home for my kids, and they fix the toilet when it clogs. That’s all I know,” said an Aussie diplomat.

As I shared what I learned and dug deeper, the answers I got confounded me. Yet they also felt strangely familiar, and, in a way, reassuring.

“Sometimes, putting money in the pockets of people like that is a necessary evil. It is the cost of trying to do good,” said an NGO advisor.

Accepting such moral ambiguities as “the cost of trying to do good” is a fundamental premise of the sector, not unrelated to the engagement imperative. And, of course, there is wisdom in such an acceptance of one’s inability to achieve some sort of abstract moral purity. Yet this particular “necessary evil” is a pretty bad one. It traces its roots back to the earliest UN peacekeeping days in Cambodia, when ruling party officials started grabbing land and renting it out at a huge premium to aid workers and diplomats. One of the key ways the regime holds power to this day is its control over revenue. And one of the key sources of revenue (then and now) is expat aid-worker rent.

I wondered: Isn’t there a better way? These are exploiters and we are incentivizing their exploitative behavior on a monthly payment schedule.

“That’s just how the market works. We have to live somewhere, right? If we only lived in the homes of noncorrupt people, we’d be on the outskirts in the slums where no one is fighting over land,” mused a German economist.

It is true that the vast majority of public services in Cambodia would collapse if the international community pulled out. If NGOs suddenly refused to engage with the regime or stopped paying their staff enough to procure safe and secure housing, many aid workers would leave and poor Cambodians would suffer. Many would die. That’s an inherent paradox of aid dependency and a cautionary note for those seeking simple solutions.

“I guess, if it doesn’t sit well, you could move out there, but do you really want to do that to your family?” offered a consultant.

Of course I didn’t want to do that. And indeed I did not. I continued to be the faithful do-gooder paying an abusive thief for the right to live on his property while I collected a handsome salary for my efforts to help the victims of his crimes.

I did invest deeply in my job with a major NGO whose purpose in this region is to fight the scourge of forced labor. We worked with Cambodian authorities to rescue victims of trafficking, pursue legal cases against traffickers and slaveholders, and train local law enforcement to identify cases of violent labor abuse. It’s work I deeply believe in and it’s what I had come to do.

Forced labor is pervasive in Cambodia. A common story is of men who are tricked into traveling abroad to work in Thailand’s enormous fishing industry. Once there, where they don’t speak the language or have any meaningful protection under the law, they are among the most vulnerable people in the world.

This exploitation is abetted by a legal system that has had a notoriously difficult time holding perpetrators accountable (especially powerful ones like my landlords). Forced labor also arises from limited economic opportunities and high rates of landlessness among the rural poor.

Landlessness is compounded by the microfinance sector – another do-gooder industry doing harm as lenders peddle loans at usurious interest rates while holding deeds and titles as collateral. Loans mostly go to farmers who have no credible means of paying back their tiny yet existentially threatening debts. They lose their land to the banks or secondary lenders and with it their only meaningful asset or livelihood in what one recent study called an efficient “system of poor-to-rich wealth transfer.” Landless former farmers then have to take bigger risks to make ends meet. Many look abroad. And the cycle continues.

Landlessness also proliferates from, naturally, land grabbing.

And this is the end of the story of Lor Peang, that once-peaceful village, forty miles north of my precious margaritas and safe compound with the pool that gets shade all afternoon. Kicked off their land (by my landlord) and their leaders imprisoned (by the very legal system I was here to help reform), their options were limited. A follow-up survey several years after the land grab confirmed that over 90 percent of Lor Peang’s working-age men had been trafficked into the Thai fishing industry.

The irony of it took my breath away. I was here to fight labor trafficking and I was enabling it to the tune of $1,300 per month plus utilities. I began to confront the reality that I was complicit in more insidious ways as well, propping up a violent system with my involvement in the symbiotic cycles of aid money and global capitalism. And I worried over the difference between my professional responsibility, which began and ended with my terms of reference and three-year contract, and my moral responsibility, which seemed to demand something more.

Whereas Western aid workers frequently struggled and failed when confronted with these moral paradoxes, local allies seemed far more clear-eyed about matters. “If you do nothing, you will still become a victim. It’s just not your turn yet.” These words from Cambodia’s most famous rights activist sum up the worldview of those whose lives and stories and blood are bound up in this place. Such clarity comes at a high cost. Kem Ley was murdered by the ruling party shortly after uttering this defiant statement against silent complicity.

Even in the face of Western paralysis, other Cambodians were courageously stepping into Kem Ley’s shoes. In fact, while I stood by the pool and wrung my hands, another activist was languishing in prison merely for printing the above quote on a T-shirt.

As for me, with conflicting commitments and without a clear sense of how to proceed, I didn’t, and the conversations with my neighbors eventually faded into the background. All expressed some concern, but no one felt they could challenge the status quo. I started to wonder whether perhaps we were all just weak and spent humans, who simply lacked the requisite fight to “confront the system” when it came down to it.

Here again, it turned out I was wrong.

This is the part where my story turns from the merely complex and depressing to the outright bizarre.

It wasn’t long after our chats about our landlords’ human rights abuses died down that a lion moved in next door.

One morning in June 2021, my Twitter feed blew up with a video appearing to show a lion pacing inside a luxury villa. Strange, yes. But stranger still, I recognized the villa adjacent to our complex. It was clear that this video was taken from a Romdoulian’s balcony.

All day, the Romdoul Bopha Mafia (our building’s WhatsApp group) was ablaze with gossip and disbelief about this new addition to the neighborhood. That evening, I walked past the villa and saw it for myself. Peering out over a small fence on the second floor was a very large lion. Parked right outside was the most recognizable car in the country.

In a neighborhood chock-full of flashy sports cars, this one stands out. The Lamborghini Aventador SVJ is in a very small class of hyperexclusive supercars, with a starting list price of over $500,000 and a total of nine hundred units ever built. Having such a vehicle will definitely help one stand out amidst any circle of nouveau riche, bored children of the kleptocratic elite. Yet, as if that exclusivity did not suffice, this one was wrapped in a gaudy pearlized metallic finish.

Almost any Cambodian national could identify the “alleged” owner, a notorious playboy relative of the prime minister, though the words could not be said out loud. Beyond his documented penchant for violence and drug-trafficking and industrial-scale scamming operations, he was a known wildlife and auto aficionado. A member of the royal family also happened to be on the cadastral register of the villa. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. This was likely his lion.

Given how the conversations with my neighbors about our landlords were going, I expected a muted response.

Not so.

Messages poured into the group chat. “That poor animal! It deserves to be in the wild!” “Such brazen lawlessness to allow this to happen!” “What if it kills its owner? Then what?” “What if it escapes? This is not safe for our children!”

Within a day, someone from our building had identified a friend at the largest wildlife rescue NGO in the country and agitated for quick and effective action. By the end of the next day, the lion was gone and state-owned newspapers were reporting that the owner, “a Chinese man,” had been ordered to pay a $30,000 fine. Victory.

But the story didn’t end there. Two days later, the prime minister made a formal announcement stating that the lion was not eating because “it missed the owner.” He was making a sympathetic decision to return it to “the Chinese man” on the condition it was kept in a “proper cage.” The $30,000 fine was also, of course, magnanimously refunded.

Global media outlets picked up the story, mostly parroting the government’s talking points about the supposed owner of the lion with no mention of who owned the villa where it turned up or the conspicuous sports car parked out front. Predictably, they cast the prime minister in a benevolent, if clownish, light.

This story – a case in point of corruption, nepotism, and a broken legal system that serves to oppress and exploit millions while those on top do whatever they want – was merely a meme. (To be fair, it was a pretty good meme.)

Outrage ensued at Romdoul Bopha. Of course, no cage was built, and the lion escaped a few weeks later. The prime minister weighed in on the issue again, stating that if the lion escaped again, it would be taken for good. A few weeks later, it did escape again. Nothing happened and there was no comment from the prime minister this time.

Yet the Romdoulians raged on. This went on for close to three months, and it seemed we had lost.

Then, one day, the lion disappeared and never returned. Just like that, it was over. Although there were probably other factors, our advocacy apparently had some sort of material and lasting impact. This collection of meek technocrats had acted outside the scope of their jobs, stood up to the most powerful person in the country, and, in a very quiet and limited way, won. The neighborhood was safer because of us. The one where we lived and we were affected.

And there we were, elated at the victorious eviction of the lion from our neighbor’s yard as our own landlord used our rent checks to enforce the displacement of villagers forty miles north.

No specks here. Everyone’s got a full-on plank in their eye in this town.

By this point, increasingly disgusted by my inert complicity in larger problems than a lion, I was eager to do something more. It wasn’t much, but I started by co-drafting and putting my name atop a joint statement with some local NGO leaders to sound the alarm on a new wave of human trafficking.

In short, during the economic shocks of the pandemic, tens of thousands of foreign nationals were lured to Cambodia by fraudulent recruitment ads on social media, and then held against their will in militarized compounds. And these compounds weren’t hidden off in the jungle. Rather, they stood in plain sight, situated in repurposed casinos, hotels, and apartment complexes in the center of Cambodia’s largest cities. Public records clearly showed they were owned by powerful members of the ruling party – senators, ministers, advisors to the prime minister, and yeah, the lion guy. One of the most notorious of these operated with impunity directly across the street from the prime minister’s summer home.

Sophisticated criminal networks protected by the ruling elite were forcing imprisoned workers to perpetrate cyberscams against naive rich people across the globe. With workers in the compounds each generating hundreds of dollars a day in revenue, this quickly became a $12 billion per year racket – easily the largest industry in Cambodia.

The situation facing activists working against this industry of state-organized crime was turning hostile. Active surveillance and intimidation against the small number of groups engaged on the issue was mounting rapidly.

International “partners” knew about the situation, but none of the other big foreign NGOs had been willing to sign on to the joint statement, due to a prevailing desire not to rock the boat. In spite of the evidence, the official Cambodian government position was a flat denial of the existence of the criminal industry, a position that went effectively unchallenged. The engagement imperative continued to rule the day.

I felt compelled to step outside these unspoken but clear boundaries and was proud to find my organization willing to stand with me as I signed on the dotted line. I hoped, perhaps idealistically, that we could use our hefty megaphone and my almighty US passport to really stand on the side of the vulnerable.

But even this sort of stand only goes so far. I was struck by how one of my Khmer friends, one of the country’s last independent journalists, saw it: “Jake, we appreciate the gesture of solidarity, but ultimately that is what it amounts to, a gesture. At the end of the day, when they come for you, you just leave. Then you go about your life and we remain.”

It was not a condemnation. He was affirming that I’d done the right thing and perhaps even an unusual thing for someone in my shoes. Such abstract “gestures,” though, hardly amount to true solidarity.

The irony of it took my breath away. I was here to fight labor trafficking and I was enabling it to the tune of $1,300 per month plus utilities.

Nevertheless, the gesture did have a number of short-term effects. It had the intended result of raising the profile of the situation and alleviating some of the acute repression against those working on behalf of victims. It also attracted significant international media interest, including from Al Jazeera, which embraced the corruption angle and explored it in depth with a documentary. Yet, as the film approached release, several of its key sources – people who had become my friends – began receiving death threats and had to quickly exit the country. Shortly thereafter, I was advised to leave as well – just for a few days, till things settled down.

We left milk in the fridge and our cats with a friend. It was just a few days, after all. And once abroad, all I could think about was the team and partners I had left behind, those courageous folks still under constant surveillance and intimidation. I’d agitated for this fight and I longed to be back in it. This felt like the moment to leave mere gestures of solidarity behind, to assume for the first time something like a real risk on behalf of those I had now grown to love. Didn’t I owe them at least that much? Wasn’t this my chance, at last, to really make a difference? Wasn’t this my true imperative to engage?

On the other hand, who was I fooling? I was and am a Western development professional and there were just a few months left on my contract – was I really supposed to risk my life and freedom for that?

Things never did settle down, and in time my friend’s prediction was borne out.

When “they came” for me, it wasn’t so dramatic as it sounds. Just a few well-placed quiet threats and whispers. In all likelihood, mere bluffs. But who can say? And, no, I didn’t “just leave.” Ultimately, my employers judged that they were “unable to gain full confidence in the safety of Jacob’s return to Cambodia,” graciously removing the final decision from my hands.

In the end, all that is immaterial and the same result stands. When they came for me, I left and they remained.

So here I sit, typing away in a hip, third-wave coffee bar in Bangkok – far from the dust and grease of my beloved Lone Pine burritos, farther still from the people I traveled across the world to serve.

Almost overnight and without any real merit or effort, I went from “expat program leader” to “expert advisor.” Now I’m the sort of person who gets quoted in the Economist or VICE World News or the New York Times because I bring gritty field experience to a medium-sized global news item. I’m the guy who gets to do op-eds and podcasts and leverage my “contextual knowledge” and “subject-matter expertise” on panels and in workshops in fancy hotels. Misgivings and indiscretions notwithstanding, I still have a place in this industry of aid. My resistance to the system is merely incorporated into its perpetuation, and my own.

Yet, as my time in Cambodia wound to a close, the situation on the ground was not all grim. A few brave Cambodian human-rights defenders got temporary cover while I took heat for a bit. My friend the quippy local journalist was rightly honored with some prestigious awards that I pray raise the costs of his government “coming for him.” Some forced-labor victims are free today as a result of my brave local team and our partners. Together, we materially increased the cost of doing a very bad business and are at the forefront of a global response. Some exploiters may now be a bit less brazen with their abuses.

My fear, though, is that this too will fade quickly into the thick, hazy Cambodian sun as a new crop of professionals arrive with their own imperatives to engage, seeing only what they want to see. Truly seeing a place is an endeavor that takes a lifetime – and there are few from my world willing to give one.

As for me, sitting here safe, upwardly mobile, and somewhat disillusioned, I am humbled for the millionth time by the distance between my ideals and my actions.

I’m still wearing cheap clothes probably made in sweatshops by the same slaves I crossed the globe to protect. I’m still, frequently, paying more attention to my damned phone with the cobalt battery mined by child laborers in the Congo than I am to my own precious, deliciously cooing little girl. I’m still happily cherishing the security of my stateside private property, my paycheck, my (now unfrozen) bank accounts that promise a life of undeserved comfort amid a suffering world.

My eyes are open. I see these things and I know them. I’m still searching for how to become something different.

I wonder what “becoming something different” might mean for someone like me, who fears stumbling blindly through an incoherent life. I think again about my friend who says, “When they come for you, you may go, but we remain.”

I think of Kem Ley who was shot down and of those who continue to suffer for their unwillingness to remain silent in the face of grave oppression.

I think of another man who once said, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,” (Luke 9:24) and how the key to understanding the paradox is love.

Love cannot exist in philosophical abstractions or contractual arrangements. It cannot exist in powerful institutions or other macro forms of social organization. Rather, love is personal and particular. Love looks like longevity and commitment, and a willingness to sacrifice our desires for the good of another.

This radical act may cost us our comfort, our security, even our lives. Yet, once we begin to open our eyes in love, we cannot help but recognize that the freedom of sight far surpasses any alternative.