WELLS — The volunteer spirit that Americans call upon to deal with large and small community concerns is a foreign notion in some parts of the world.

For Cindy Lahar, professor of psychology and sociology at York County Community College, attitudes about community reponsibilities in Cambodia provide an interesting contrast to the U.S. – one that she will study close hand starting in January.

Cambodia is a country in transition. Its population is made up of younger generations because much of a generation perished during the dictatorship of Pol Pot. Education is generally inaccessible because living conditions are so poor people must concentrate on survival instead of schooling.

When individual survival is the main component of a culture, the act of contributing time and effort on behalf of others takes on a form that is unfamiliar to American eyes. Lahar will spend six months researching how the Khmer people work for and with their neighbors.

She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to go to Cambodia to study the cultural motivations of volunteerism, and to train university teachers in research methods. “We really want to explore how their motivation might work,” she said.

Her first look into how volunteerism is approached in different cultures came when she translated research studies for a group in Japan. The idea of examining the culture and motivations in Cambodia wasn’t a random choice. Lahar visited the country as a tourist while teaching at Miyazaki International College, a small university in Japan, between 1998 and 2002. She was reluctant to go at first, but found the culture and the Khmer, the ethnic Cambodian people, an experience in personal learning as well as professional development.

Cultures in Southeast Asia are much more community-centered than America, according to Lahar. When she was teaching in Japan, she said, some students in a class cheated on an assignment, and when they were caught the whole class was ashamed. In America when students cheat, each carries any shame individually, she said.

When it comes to volunteering, Lahar said most community support comes from the local temples instead of from individuals who feel compelled to help the community. Cambodia definitely has a need for volunteerism, she said, but community efforts just don’t appear in a form that she was used to seeing.

“It was such an important lesson to me not to walk in with my glasses on,” she said. “Not to see things from my American perspective.”

Cambodia is in an economic situation that seems similar to America in the early 1900s, when the society was entering the industrial age and mills were a staple of production and living. Lahar said that Cambodia is still recovering from the devastation wreaked by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Building the necessary infrastructure and trying to find a stable position in the global economy is the society’s biggest concern, and fitting education and into the mix is a challenge. People are enrolled in the local schools, but there is a lack of educators to teach them.

“It’s such an interesting situation when you don’t have the people to teach them and they’re trying to get everyone into the education system,” she said.

The salary for an instructor is the U.S. equivalent of $20 a month at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, where Lahar will teach under the Fulbright Scholarship. She was offered a permanent position at the university, but couldn’t afford the pay cut.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Lahar will get the chance to help the country she has come to think of as a second home, and do some important research in a developing environment. She will give regular reports about her research to a number of different groups studying the motivations behind volunteerism, and hopes to develop insight into how to build culturally appropriate volunteer programs.

She also expects to be surprised by her continued cross-cultural experience, and bring those lessons back to her students at the college.

“You can never be completely prepared for some of the cross cultural learning that takes place,” she said.