Some Lighter Stuff

A lot of things have been happening here recently. Unfortunately, one difficulty of an interesting life is a lack of time with which to write about it. With that in mind, here are a couple of quick anecdotes to carry you through the week…

(For those of you sending me e-mails this week, I may take longer than usual to reply. Sorry in advance for the delay but I’m hoping to dedicate as much time as possible to analyzing the data from the vegetable transport survey completed last week.)


My Reputation Precedes Me

Two weeks ago, Sideth, one of my co-workers, and I went to the small restaurant a block away from the IDE office for lunch. As we were chatting, waiting for our food, a group of five twenty-something foreigners wandered in. With so many NGOs operating in the neighbourhood, foreigners don’t raise too many eyebrows. A crowd this large, this young, and this obviously not from a single family was a bit unusual though. I must have been staring because Sideth asked, “Do you worry that maybe the other foreigners will see you eat lunch with me and will think you do something wrong…?” Khmer society is pretty strict about unmarried couples.

“No,” I replied, “I just have not seen so many foreigners my age in a long time.”

One of the girls from the group approached our table.

-Excuse me, are you from Canada?
-(Surprised.) Yes…
-Did you by any chance go to the University of Waterloo?
-(Do I know this person?) Yes….
-Were you in Prof. Snyder’s History of Christianity course in Fall 2004?
-(Understanding.) Yes. I was the loudmouth you’re remembering.

I though most of you (especially former classmates) would appreciate that one. Small world eh?

Development Math

Given

Under-Developed Country = Transport animals on major city streets.

South-East Asia = Elephants are transport animals.

Now

Developing Country + South-East Asia = Cambodia

Therefore

Cambodia = Elephants on major city streets.

Elephant on Sisowath Quay, Phnom Penh

Hobnobbing Amongst the Elite

Wednesday through Friday last week, my friend Sonya’s mother, Françoise, was in Phnom Penh participating in a conference of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, an organization promoting cooperation amongst French speaking universities throughout the globe.

The visit was a fun one. On the first day, she brought me maple syrup from home and I took her for lunch at a nice restaurant in town whose profits go to sheltering and educating street youth. On the second day, she invited me along to a reception being held at the Canadian Ambassador’s residence.

I did my best to dress appropriately, tucking in my shirt, wearing hiking boots instead of sandals, and briefly brushing my hair. It was the best I could do. On the way out the door, my neighbour, Sotha, noticed my efforts. “You look pretty,” he commented. “I go to eat dinner with a big person,” I responded. It was the best explanation I could manage in Khmer.

Unfortunately, in Khmer meeting a big person generally implies a government minister or equivalent. Sotha was a little surprised. I back-pedalled. “No, no. My friend from Canada. Her mother come to Phnom Penh. She know big person from Canada. She say to me, please you come to dinner. Will be around forty people there. I don’t know Cambodian big person. These Canadians sort-of big people.” Sotha looked at me strangely, asked when I’d be home, and called over one of his fellow moto drivers to take me where I was going.

I met Sonya’s mother at the Hotel Intercontinental, a five star, Western-style hotel, where she and several of her fellow delegates were staying. As a police escort with sirens blazing led our francophone minibus through the streets of Phnom Penh, I began to think that perhaps my description to Sotha hadn’t been as inaccurate as I’d thought.

The ambassador was waiting to greet all of the delegates at the door. My brief culture shock at the Hotel Intercontinental was as nothing to my shock on entering her home. It looked and felt exactly like a middle class dwelling in Canada. The differences in the construction, decorations, and furnishings were subtle but overwhelming. It took me a few minutes just to orient myself. Sonya’s mother was extremely helpful and made it her mission that evening to help me establish as many contacts as possible, bringing over new people to meet me every few minutes.

I spent the evening brushing up on my schmoozing skills, in conversation with university administrators, ex-pats, and eventually the ambassador herself. She was very friendly, stopping to offer me some good advice about pharmacies in Phnom Penh. I left that evening as I’d entered, surrounded by a police motorcade, richer by one ambassador’s business card, and hopefully having left a good impression of EWB with a variety of university bigwigs.

The Ambassador, Myself, and Sonya's Mother

How Can I Help You?

Tonight I met a woman begging for money along a lamp-lined avenue with her two children. Initially, the lamps aroused my interest more than did the destitute family. They were a rarity, well-built and well-maintained. By contrast, the woman’s face faded into those of the countless other beggars I had already passed today. On second glance though, she seemed a little more shy, a little less likely to ask again, a little ashamed perhaps. She asked softly and I didn’t see in her eyes or her childrens’ the contempt that usually comes from a life of begging amidst an endless swarm of rich white foreigners.

I had just refused two other children with that same look of contempt. Normally, had I been in a market, I would have offered to buy them some food. Walking along the street late at night though, I simply didn’t have the energy for it.

The problems of street youth here are similar to those at home. Living in a poorer country, the only difference is that crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin, have been replaced by glue sniffing. I was thinking about something a friend I met in Sihanoukville had told me. “I never give money to children. It could go to glue or to someone exploiting them. I keep with me the toothbrushes and paste from a dozen hotels. I give these to children who don’t ask. It’s a surprise. It’s something they know is just for them. Every mother and every child for whom I’ve done this has been both incredulous and overjoyed. Sometimes, if I can, I buy them food. I make sure that they decide what they want though.”

It seemed like good advice. I turned, walked towards the woman, and told her in Khmer, “Money, I can’t. Have you all eaten dinner yet?” “No, we haven’t eaten,” was the reply. “I pay,” I offered, “Please come.” I motioned for her to follow to a restaurant across the street.

Stretching my language abilities to the limit, I asked her to tell the cook what she wanted, and asked the cook how much it cost. The woman kept trying to talk to me. It was too difficult. I couldn’t understand a word. I paid for the meal for her and her children. “I have no rice,” she ventured as I began to pocket my change. I handed it to her. “Rice,” I said. Feeling slightly awkward, I smiled, told her she was welcome as she thanked me, and left quickly.

The disappointment in her eyes as I left had been genuine. I’ve come to recognize the other kind. The awkwardness came when I realized too late that though the money I gave her was enough for nearly two kilograms of rice, I had just spent three times that on a single meal. Had I trusted her to manage that money herself, she could have stretched it into several meals for her family. I suspect she had hoped to convince me to let her do so, or at least to use the money more effectively myself. I, on the other hand, felt rushed, confident in my plan, and embarrassed by the language barrier.

It seems to me an apt analogy for some of the pitfalls of development work: A well-intentioned foreigner decides to help. The motives are genuine, a desire to do good, and a desire to feel good about doing it. The approach is pragmatic: Let the recipient decide what they want. Unfortunately, there are always constraints. The use of funds is restricted to choices that the donor feels is appropriate. There are barriers to the recipients offering genuine feedback on what they think of this process. Maybe the donor cannot understand. Maybe he or she assumes he or she knows best. Maybe it’s both. The end result is that some good is accomplished but not nearly as much as what might have been.

What could I have done better? Sadly, not much. I didn’t know this woman and still don’t. She might have a drinking problem. She might be keeping her children from going to school in the hopes that cute faces garner more money. I don’t know what my money would have been supporting. I could have bought rice to feed the whole family for a week and still not have solved their problem. Eventually, I or my money would no longer be there.

To really help her and her children I would need to give them the resources to keep themselves secure. Finding the woman a job as a housekeeper, though paying only fifty cents a day, could help her to support her family. Teaching her children to speak English, a skill that would help them to find work in business, tourism, or government might be another option. Both would have taken far more time and resources than I, with my fitful desire to help, was willing to give. This was not unreasonable on my part. On a larger scale though, it’s what can make development so difficult.

There are a huge number of problems here but also a massive potential to do good. Realising that potential requires that commitment and a willingness to listen exist amongst everyone involved. I don’t know how much I helped that woman and her two children tonight but they certainly helped me. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded just how easy it is to think one is listening to the poor while all the while ignoring what they say. Given my goals here, I can’t think of a more important lesson to learn.

Moving Vegetables Part II

Storing, transporting, and selling produce in tropical heat using Cambodia’s “roads” can be a pretty daunting task. Given the limited tools available here, it’s a given that a substantial amount of food will be lost in the process. In Cambodia, where forty-five percent of children are malnourished and the World Food Program is once again trying to ward off starvation by distributing rice to drought stricken provinces, this is no small matter.

To improve the supply of food and increase incomes in rural areas, one can try to raise more crops or one can try to improve the distribution network. Both options have their positive and negative points. Recently, some groups here have started to take an interest in how crops are packaged and transported for sale after harvest. The Centre d’Études et de Développement Agricole Cambodgien (CEDAC) just completed a year long study. Still, the details can be sketchy. This is especially the case for one of the most perishable types of produce, green leafy vegetables. For the past six weeks I’ve been working on a research study commissioned by AQIP, a division of the Australian Assistance in International Development (AusAID) program. The hope is that by knowing where damage occurs, we can develop a simple affordable solution to the problem.

Our first step was a series of unstructured interviews with farmers, collectors, wholesalers, and retailers operating in the Kien Svay and Saang districts just outside of Phnom Penh. Thanks to Cambodia’s annual cycle of droughts and flooding, farmers in Saang can use their fields for only about five months of the year. Farmers in Kien Svay are luckier. Their fields usually remain unflooded for nine months of the year. On my first day in Saang I met a farmer named Ol-ong. Kimsan, Sunday, and I found her sitting by the side of her field with her children, cutting out the white cores from the lettuce plants she’d just harvested. She had two fields that she harvested about three times each year. Based on what she told me that day, her family income from these was about $1.32USD per person per day. Unfortunately, when we found her that day, insects had recently devoured both her fields. In one stroke of bad luck, $1.32USD became about eighty-eight cents. Her children, helping her husk what was left of her crop, were the first I had found here who didn’t smile back. Ol-Ong, for her part chatted amicably with us, telling us about her livelihood, commenting that next time she would farm long beans instead.

Ol-ong and Her Children

The interviews continued for another week. We learned that in the time a green-leafy vegetable crop is harvested until the time it reaches market, there is a twenty-four hour window. After one day, the crop withers to the point of worthlessness. For this reason, transporting and selling is a twenty-four hour process. Crops are harvested during the daytime, stored at the home of a collector until about 1:00am and then transported to the market to be bought in bulk by retailers and wholesalers. By 6:00am, shops in the market begin to open and produce is sold throughout the following day.

The Night Market at Ta Khmao

Because of this twenty-four hour schedule, we needed a team of surveyors capable of conducting our initial researches both day and night. We had just enough of a budget and connections to get a team of five men assembled quickly, with two days initially scheduled for training. On the first day, the whole team quit.

Veasna, was translating some information for me when one of the surveyors interrupted with a question. “What security do we provide for working at night?” I was completely unprepared. “Hmm… we don’t have any,” I replied, “There’s no budget for that…” Veasna and the surveyors began laughing hysterically. “Three of them just quit,” he told me between chuckling gasps for air. I began giggling too. In Khmer society, it was the only possible response. Veasna fled the scene to seek help from Kimsan. Kimsan arrived, managing about two sentences before he too was laughing hysterically.

“The others, they quit too and I told to them that since they cannot work for us, we cannot pay them for today,” Kimsan told me, slapping me repeatedly on the shoulder to make sure I got the joke. Chuckling with the same hopeless laugh I used to use before an exam for which I hadn’t properly prepared, I asked, “Why did they all just quit?” and “What do we do now?”

“They say they did not know they have to work nights. I tell them because cannot pay, we buy for all of us lunch together.” Excessive awkward giggling aside, the lunch was tasty and happily, by the next week, we had found a survey team composed of three men and two women, willing to work nights, with a very good knowledge of both the Saang and Kien Svay districts. All of them had previous experience consulting for AQIP. Unfortunately, this seemed to mean that rather than quitting on the first day, they found a thousand and one reasons to explain to us why none of our questions, measurement plans, or other items in the survey could work. In many cases, I was grateful for their greater experience and insight. In others, their worries bordered on the ridiculous.

“But how can I measure weight at nighttime, while writing down measurements with one hand and holding a flashlight with the other? I would need three hands!”

“Can you maybe hang the vegetables from the portable scale with one hand and hold the light with the other? Then you could put scale down, pick up the pen and remember the number you just saw.”

During the countless times in which we were told that there was no way to take even the most essential basic weight and temperature measurements for the study, the giggling never stopped. We eventually settled on a simple, let’s try it and see if it’s possible approach. We’ve now completed a little over half the study, and though we’ve had to reduce the number of people to be interviewed, we’ve nevertheless managed through regular meetings and supervisory assistance in the field to collect the most essential data.

Surveyor Samboeun Talks to a Farmer

In the meantime, my experiences with Ol-ong and other farmers have left me skeptical about the relative importance of packaging in addressing the problem. Though from the initial data I’ve seen, rates of spoilage may be close to 20%, most of the people with whom I’ve talked insist that little to no spoilage occurs at any point from harvest to market. Even if we do find a big problem with an easy solution, this raises the question of how do we market it to a group of people who don’t see the need?

Surveyors Khemrin and Chantoeun, and Sunday Talk with Farmers and Collectors

My current feeling is that insects are one of the biggest problems. While interviewing a farmer last week, Kimsan spotted a discarded Thai insecticide box covered in warning symbols. “Use 20cc for 20 litres,” he translated for me. “Still, you can see insects have eaten his crop,” I responded, “Maybe we should ask him about this?” Kimsan chatted with the farmer for a moment before responding, “He say that he use 20cc for 20 litre but still have insect, so instead he take one whole package, 100cc and mix with only 15 litre.”

A nearly sevenfold increase in pesticide use! We both took a step back from the vegetable patch.

“Still it do not work well,” Kimsan added. Judging by this man’s crop and others I’ve seen using similar amounts of similar products, he was right. IDE’s recently started investigating an alternative organic pesticide, a by-product of burning fuelwood, but more on that if and when I have some results to share.

In the meanwhile, thankfully, we’ve embarked on this study without many preconceptions, acknowledging a problem and trying to see if a viable solution is possible from this direction. On the still more positive side, I made certain to include a few very open-ended questions in the questionnaire regarding problems in our respondents’ livelihoods. Though the answers may have nothing to do with packaging or transport, they'll help us to know if we’re going down the wrong path and may even give us a hint as to what the right one is.

My Birthday Cambodian Style

Cambodians don’t celebrate birthdays. From the day they’re born, each of them is already one year old. When New Years comes around at the end of the dry season, everyone becomes one year older. This can lead to some confusion as a two-month old born in February might already be two years old by the end of April. Thanks to the Khmer Rouge’s systematic campaign to wipe out all forms of personal documentation, many Cambodians don’t even know their own birthdates. Mr. Lang, IDE Cambodia’s Administration Manager only had his birth certificate re-issued a few weeks ago. This is not an uncommon occurrence. I have no idea if he knew his date of birth but I gather it’s not uncommon practice to just create one out of thin air.

In recent years, some younger Khmer have apparently started to celebrate birthday parties too. Like Hip-Hop and (unfortunately) Britney Spears, if it’s Western, it’s trendy. I normally don’t do much for my birthday. It’s never seemed that important to me. Still, copying an idea that I had read on Selena’s blog, I invited the whole office out for dinner on my birthday on April 29. (Selena was my predecessor working for EWB in Cambodia. She’s now working for IDE in Sri Lanka. You can find her blog here.) From what she’d written, this looked like an excellent opportunity for some extended cultural exchange and integration outside of the usual work setting.

Almost everyone I invited seemed really enthused, more so than I could have anticipated. I had to turn down about a half-dozen offers of presents and questions about appropriate gifts. They insisted at the least on all chipping together to buy me a cake. Previous stories aside, I didn’t have the heart to explain to them that since it was still Passover, I shouldn’t be eating any baked goods. They were all far too enthusiastic about the cake for me to turn them down.

After some consultation with my coworkers here, we settled on a visit to Samaki restaurant in Prey Leap. Prey Leap is home to a string of restaurants with live music just outside of Phnom Penh. Phnom Penois go there for celebrations or just to unwind, breathing air with a little less grime in it. The meal was a big one. There were over twenty people in attendance. My friends ordered and I sat back and watched a seemingly endless train of food arrive. It was a great opportunity to sample some of the local food, chat, and even meet some co-workers’ families and children.

As the meal wound down to a close, Mike, on behalf of everyone at IDE presented me with a big wreath, the kind I had only seen previously placed as offerings on images of the Buddha, made by stringing together hundreds of small Jasmine flowers. The cake arrived. Only Mike’s family and I knew the words or even more than the first couple of notes of “Happy Birthday” but there was a spirited, and in some cases slightly intoxicated, attempt made. Mike’s children seemed to really enjoy the cake. For everyone else it was a bit of a novelty. We sat and chatted for another hour or so before realizing that it was getting pretty late and we should all be heading home. The time was about 8:30pm. After all, cakes aside, this is still Cambodia.

Phalla Brings the Cake