Sunday, December 15, 2019

Update on Paul in Cambodia (One Month Later)

Another update (after the article below was written): Great news! Paul was flown out of Cambodia by the British embassy and arrived back in the United Kingdom just in time for Christmas, so he's finally free. It's another long story which I will save for another time. Perhaps I'll get the chance to do an interview with Paul at some point, so that he can tell his story in his own words. If so I will try to record the discussion and post it on Youtube.

It's been more than a month since I wrote a piece explaining the situation with Paul from the UK, a friend I know through Facebook, who got stuck in Cambodia in a tough situation due to a series of unfortunate circumstances. If you don't know the story already you can read my previous article here.

But here's the short version: Paul was traveling from Vietnam to Thailand to work at a hostel and crossed through Cambodia on his way to Thailand. When he arrived at the Cambodia border and tried to enter Thailand, they discovered that someone else had previously visited Thailand using his name and birth date, who also looked like him. This person had overstayed his visa and then been deported, to Germany apparently. The Thai authorities accused Paul of being this other person, fined him $1,000 for the previous overstay, wouldn't allow him to enter Thailand and kicked him back to Cambodia. The amount they fined him was almost all the money he had at the time. He couldn't afford to buy a new Cambodia visa, so instead walked into the country and has now been stuck there for more than two months illegally.
About six weeks ago I made a video asking people to donate to help get him out of there. I'd known about his situation for a month already. But I finally decided to try to help him out once I realized he really was stuck and nobody else had the funds to buy him a plane ticket back home, because his friends and family couldn't spare any money.

The first time I mentioned his predicament in a comment under one of my Youtube videos, people donated about $50. I chipped in another $100 and then sent him $150 through Moneygram to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

A few days later I made a video explaining his situation, which I posted on my Youtube channel, and we raised about $800. (Thanks to everyone who donated, it did help him out, even though things didn't go according to plan.) With the money raised I sent him another $300 through Moneygram to Siem Reap and then bought him a plane ticket from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Los Angeles, California for one week later on November 13th, 2019. This was the best way to actually get him out of the country. And to be clear, I reserved and paid for the plane ticket myself. I didn't send him the money to buy the ticket.

The big question mark was what would happen when he tried to go through customs and leave Cambodia. Unfortunately, that's where he ran into a problem. He arrived for his flight on November 13th and checked in. He sent me photos of his boarding pass:




But when he arrived at the customs desk, the woman was a jerk. I had assumed that whatever he might owe in overstay charges, they would allow him to leave and catch the flight since they would want him out of the country. And this might have been the case with a different customs official. But the lady at the desk said he owed $270 in overstay charges. He only had $100 left from the $300 I'd sent him, which was all the money he had to his name at that point. Since he couldn't pay the full $270, the lady wouldn't allow him to leave the country and board his flight. He had to go back to the hostel where he was staying in Phnom Penh.

I was really disappointed that he wasn't able to catch his flight and get out of this tough situation, but I made it clear that I'd done as much as I was willing to do. There was no money left from what we had raised and I wasn't going to ask for any more donations or pay him anything further out of my own pocket.

I'd purchased insurance for the flight, but considering the circumstances I didn't think I would get a refund. I made a claim for the flight to get the money back, and heard back from them recently that, sure enough, they wouldn't provide a payment for the flight because the reason he was denied boarding wasn't covered under the policy. As I said above, I paid for this flight myself, so it wasn't a situation in which Paul could have gotten any money back for not boarding the flight.

Paul stayed at the hostel in Phnom Penh a little while longer and finally did the only thing he could do at that point, which was to turn himself into the Cambodian immigration authorities. He has also been in touch with the British embassy, who is working on his case. I got an email from the British embassy asking to explain my efforts to help him out and asking if there was any way I could help him further, basically asking if I could buy him a flight out of the country. I explained that I'd already tried that and it hadn't worked, and I wouldn't be buying him another flight.

Paul is now in a detention center somewhere near the Phnom Penh airport, where he has been for a little while, a week or two. He sent me some photos of the conditions there. It doesn't look like a fun place to be. It looks like his bed is just a piece of cloth on a very hard floor:






The situation now is that he is in the process of being deported. He could be there for another couple weeks before he's able to fly out.

Update: Coincidentally, I just ended up talking with Paul in a phone call on Facebook as I was writing this. He has a meeting with the UK embassy tomorrow. The embassy shuts down on December 23rd for Christmas, when the staff goes back to the UK for the holidays and they won't return again until January. So he's hoping to hell they can resolve his case in the next week and get him on a plane out of Cambodia. He said that he's been at the detention center for three weeks now.

This was my first time talking with him face-to-face (I could see him on video) and in my estimation he's definitely a good guy who is telling the truth and just wants to get out of there and get back home. We've exchanged messages several a few times over the past month since he tried to catch the flight, and not once did he ever ask me for more money or anything else.

I realize there are legitimate questions about the circumstances and how he handled things. For example, why did he end up paying the Thai authorities the money they demanded, rather than refusing to pay and going back to Cambodia with $1,000 in his pocket? I don't know the answer to that one. I haven't asked him to explain everything, but perhaps he can explain the full story further in an upcoming video.

Based on what I do know of what happened, I can say that I would have done things differently under the same circumstances. For example, if I had ended up stuck between the Cambodia and Thai borders with no money, unable to enter Thailand and with no money left to buy a visa for Cambodia, I don't think I would have decided to walk into Cambodia without a visa and be in the country illegally. Instead I would have stayed there between the borders, begged for the money ($30) from other travelers and gotten the cash any way I could so that I could buy a visa and enter legitimately. Paul didn't do that for whatever reason. I wasn't there, so I'm not in a position to judge him for doing what he did. Maybe there was some specific reason, or maybe he just didn't think of it. Maybe he was concerned that if he was seen begging for money by the police they would arrest him. It's easy to say "you should have done this or that" in these kinds of circumstances. But things can be quite different when you're the person actually dealing with something like this.

As I explained in the previous article, once he was back in Cambodia he asked friends and family to send him money, but everyone was broke. Apparently his mom sent him $30 somehow. If it were me, first of all, my parents would have been able to come up with the cash to get me out of there. But not everyone has that same luxury. However if I had in fact been in the same situation in which my friends and family were all too broke to help me out, I would have started a campaign making use of email and Facebook. I would have pestered everyone I could, whether I knew them or not, explaining the situation, that I was completely desperate and needed help to buy a plane ticket back home. He asked friends and family, but I don't think he posted about it on Facebook and made as active of an effort as I would have to get the money raised. But I don't know the whole story. Clearly he was trying his best to get some help, because he messaged me about it, when we'd only exchanged a few random messages previously. He initially reached out to me because I'm a traveler, asking for any advice for how he could deal with the situation. He didn't write me asking for money. It was my own choice to help him out in that regard.

So why didn't he turn himself into immigration earlier? I think the answer to that one is pretty clear: he didn't want to end up in the same kind of situation he's in now, which isn't much different from being in jail. And he was probably concerned that he could actually end up in jail, for who knows how long. Turning himself into the authorities was a last resort. I'm sure I would have avoided doing that for as long as I could myself.

Clearly he was trying to figure things out as best as he could based on the resources he had available to him. Maybe he didn't do everything he should have done or wasn't taking the best approach. All I can say is that based on the past two months of interactions with him since he first told me about this situation, I've never gotten the slightest sense that he's some sort of scammer and this is all an effort to extract money with a false story. I have no doubt that his story is real and that all he wants is a plane ticket back home, so he can get on with his life. Hopefully that will happen in the next week. I'll let everyone know how things turn out and if possible I'll make some sort of video with him once he's back home in the UK and post it on my Youtube channel.

3 comments:

Gary Savage said...

I know a lot of these guys/gals watch these YouTube travel videos and want to do the same thing. But why do so many of them travel on a shoe-string budget to such remote places. It's very irresponsible. WhatPaul needs to do is work in a resort or get a job somewhere and save the money up so he doesn't end up in this type of predictiment. Also, Capital One is giving credit cards out to almost anyone....even the homeless with lousy credit scores.why not apply for one and hide it for a rainy day or emergency

Anonymous said...

Amazing, hopefully everything turns out for better and he can finally get out. Also, it is very interesting that he was a victim of fraud it's like how likely is that happening even around our world?

Anonymous said...

Hi Gabriel. Could you please provide an update on this guy?