Cambodia
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Cambodia |
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At roughly 64 1/4 people per square kilometer, Cambodia is not all that crowded, especially when you compare it with Bangladesh, which has closer to 1000. With a population of approx. 14 million, however, it is certainly not small! |
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| Put yourself in their shoes:
~Your big brother is in tenth grade. He, unlike the huge majority of kids his age, is in school. Only a little over nine out of every hundred 10th graders go to school on average. Think about it; if you had 500 kids line up, only about 47 of them would be attending school! Out of that 47, roughly 8 of them will go on to post-secondary school.
~Out of that same 500, 475 are Theravada Buddhist.
~Your country was terrorized by a group called the Khmer Rouge, up until 1975. As of 2008, that was only 33 years ago. The group surrendered on April 17, 1975. One of the more conservative estimates of the deaths brought about by the radical group is bad enough, at 1.7 million!
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~An estimated half of the people you see on the street are under twenty years of age. That means that in the next ten plus years your country will be dealing with more workers in the formal sector than they have faced.
~You live in Phnom Penh, one of the main cities in Cambodia. Phnom Penh boasts more than 1,000,000 people.
~Like most of the families that you know, you have a family of five.
~According to a 2003 survey, 67% of your neighbors in Phnom Penh work in the labor force.
~In 2002, one in four people in your city live under the poverty line. That means the lady who smiled at you last week, the man who drives a taxi, along with a night job, to feed his wife and newborn baby, the boy sitting next to you in class-they could be that unlucky one.
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Your country is getting its act together, though. The clothing industry, in particular, is skyrocketing Cambodia's economy. Last year alone, it grew by 8%. It may not sound like much, but that's huge. Your country has recently started lots of new industries, like a national airline. Cambodia has also significantly expanded it's tourism industry. Cambodia, like so many other countries, has a bright future if this keeps up. |
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