Kids do the monkey dance at Wat Nokor

One of my good friends in Cambodia is Vandong the monk, a young, amazingly charismatic man who started an organization to help the most vulnerable people in his hometown of Kampong Seam.

Just a couple of years ago, BSDA was run on nothing but the strength of Vandong's goodwill and the free time of a couple of other monk volunteers. Now, thanks to his cult of personality, the organization has an office, a computer lab, English classes, two buildings for the children, a full stage for the kids' dancing performances, a car, a tuk-tuk, money for programs, and more volunteers.

Vandong is a go-getter. He sees something that needs doing and he finds a way. It's not always methodical, and not always perfect, but he works tirelessly and has an uncanny knack for drawing others to his cause. Vandong and I met soon after I came to Cambodia when he was leading a ceremonial New Year blessing of our office. The outgoing volunteers warned me that Vandong would find a way to "suck me in" to help with BSDA's programs, and they were right. There was just no refusing Vandong. I don't know if was the bright orange robe, or his dazzling smile that was more mesmerizing, but whatever it was, it drew me back to the BSDA offices week after week to help read over donor reports, write new grants, and lend Vandong a sympathetic ear.

When people came to Kampong Cham looking for volunteer opportunities, I sent them over to Vandong. Les Frenchies did a presentation for Vandong's staff about the medical effects of drugs for their drug rehabilitation program and my couchsurfer extraordinaire helped train the English teachers on making lesson plans.

BSDA runs a variety of programs, including life skills like sewing, mushroom growing and pig raising, drug rehabilitation programs, drug-use prevention, and some scholarships. But by far my favorite program is the program to teach Khmer music and dance to orphans and vulnerable children. The kids are practice with a professional teacher and perform for the community and occasionally for tourists. In the process, they gain confidence, self-esteem, and a foothold into the broader community.

Another Vid: Kids Learning History and Fixing Ruins

A new kind of computer for rural Cambodian schools

This is a video I originally produced in Khmer for one of our projects, just translated into English.

This year, the ESCUP project in Cambodia installed the first solar-powered thin client lab in a Cambodian high school. Thin client labs are cheaper to set-up than a traditional lab, reduce energy use by 88%, and are easier to upgrade and maintain.

Jess as Producer

Just signed a new contract this week to product three short videos for an international NGO. I put together a little movie as an experiment and it turns out that some folks in this NGO liked what I had done and decided to hire me to make more over the next month or so. I feel a bit like an impostor given that I have no previous experience with video editing, shooting... production, but I'm going to do my best and see where that takes me.

Things have been rough at the local NGO. The project I was working on was abruptly cancelled, leaving much of our staff (including myself, the expensive consultant) in limbo for the past couple of months. Without burdening this (small but elite) audience with boring details, the project's death was a basically the perfect case-study of all the things that can go wrong in development (project-based funding meaning salary insecurity for local staff; petty corruption; international NGOs making ridiculous requests and bullying local NGOs).

Thankfully, yesterday we got two pieces of really good news which have lightened up the atmosphere in the office considerably and mean that I'll probably be able to continue this video gig until I leave. Pretty spiffy.

Flak Jacket

I haven't written very much about work stuff, perhaps because I've still been trying to process everything myself and get a handle on the best way to describe it all, but I guess here's as good a time as any to make a go of it.

So here I am, working with a local education NGO here in Kampong Cham. The organization's origins go back to April 1996, when USAID decided to halt funding for their Cambodia Assistance to Primary Education Project because of the political climate in Cambodia. A group of local staff from Kampong Cham province decided that it was unacceptable to suddenly drop aid and technical assistance to schools, and continued their efforts with their own personal resources. Eventually, with support from the local and national partners, the project was reborn into the organization it is today.

As I've described before, we're your typical alphabet soup of projects funded by a myriad of donors from all over the place. We try to organize ourselves into sections and consolidate projects into longer term programs as much as possible. I work in the Girls' Education Initiative (gei) section which currently includes two main programs: our Girls Secondary School Scholarship Program which includes a bunch of different activities including vocational training and "life skills" classes like computers, cooking, and hair-cutting, and the REACH project.

I was mostly hired to advise the REACH team, specifically to help them with research design and analysis, designing the new activities based on our research, and writing reports and proposals. I also act as advisor to the gei section in general, which currently means I'm sorting out a projected budget for the next 3 years, writing proposals to try to secure the money, and writing reports to current donors.

Unfortunately, day-to-day I feel like I'm buried in a mountain of bureaucracy. I thought I would be able to help this local NGO and learn a lot about development and I think I was right, but not in the way that I expected. Honestly, I'm most useful as a flak jacket to protect my team from the demands of donors so they can go ahead and get the actual work done. I guess someone needs to do it, but it's not especially fulfilling. I'm trying as much as possible not to just do the work, but instead help the team learn skills themselves so that they can function more independently of an advisor in the future, but it's tough to find the time and the patience. It's a constant battle between just doing things myself because it's faster and simpler, and trying to cajole the team into doing it themselves. So far, I'm teaching a weekly advanced English writing class (sparsely attended) and mentoring our team leader Rumdourl and temporary Program Manager, Rith, but it's slow going.



I guess I live for trips out to the field which remind me of the children and communities that all this paperwork is meant to help. This past week, I went out to visit three groups of girls who received a small loan from our NGO to start a business after completed our vocational training programs in sewing / beautician skills. It was super to see what they had achieved in only a little over 2 months. One group of 5 girls was making over $150/week sewing clothes for people in their village, at least twice as much as they could make individually in the rice fields.

To mark the difference the loan actually made, we also visited some individual students who hadn't received any credit assistance after finishing their training; 3 of 4 were out in the fields working, their sewing machines covered and unattended. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we can make the program much bigger ourselves since our main focus is education and we don't have the expertise nor the manpower nor the donor connections... so I'm going to try to look for a local microfinance partner who we can pass the groups off to instead.

I'm starting to see how education development can be a difficult field, given that the results are so vague... We assume that students who have more education are better off, but it's not always the immediate reality. In the long term, there's no doubt that a better educated populace is good for political stability and necessary for economic development, and it's certainly worthy to give children at least the option of a quality education if they want it, but like the example of the vocational training/microfinance link, it seems like education may be necessary to a point, but is woefully insufficient without other programs.

Anyway, enough for now. Missing home lots, but still doing well.

Cooling off

Today, the weather seems to be finally changing and there's a gorgeous breeze blowing through the office, cooling sweaty brows and tempers alike. After a number of heated moments in the past few days, it seems like things are finally calming down. If I will learn anything from my time here, I hope it will be patience and grace despite frustration because without these qualities, I won't survive another month.

This past week has been my most difficult by far in terms of my work here in Cambodia. Some of my worst nightmares of the donor community have come alive in ugly detail this week, and the sudden flare of my own displeasure with our partner, added to the unrelated issues brewing on our project team seems to resulted in the proverbial pot boiling over. Take a fundamentally flawed system, add miscommunication and language barriers, egos and reputation, throw in a little bit of incompetence and my own impatience, and you've got the recipe for a serious headache.

To be crystal clear, though there has been a small issue on the project team I'm advising, the major issues I'm taking about have to do with the folks who are funding my main project. Anyway, I don't have much time to write right now, but my seething sense of righteousness seriously needed a vent. I will describe the meeting and its aftermath in excruciating detail soon.

Thankful for choices

WARNING: Reading any further may expose you to cliche & Jess-style angst. Watch out.

So I suppose it would be strange if it were otherwise, but in the past few weeks I've really noticed how being here makes me thankful 100x over each day for things I used to take for granted: to have an amazing education, to travel, to have brilliant friends who do amazing things, to be financially independent, to feel like I have the same opportunities as a woman as I would as a man, and to live somewhere where it's considered culturally acceptable (in our circles at least) to live with a significant other before marriage.

Recently, I've felt embarrassed about all the choices that I have available to me. More specifically it's difficult to explain to people here that I had the security and financial means that allowed me to choose to give up a comfortable (relatively well-paying) job and life to travel and do something simply because it moved me... because I was interested in learning about something and somewhere new... because I wanted to be challenged... because I thought I might be useful here... because I had an itch to travel.

This isn't something that people here totally get. Though people at the office are a bit more accustomed to foreigners coming to work (mostly volunteers), more often than not other folks want to know right off the bat: "why are you here?" To many, my title, "Technical Advisor," means "high-paid" and "important," and so many assume that I'm here for the money and it's commonplace for someone to ask how much I make. Foreign advisors make magnitudes more than their local counterparts, so relatively speaking, this job makes me a rich woman. From my perspective, of course, this job makes me no such thing. I haven't quite settled on an explanation that can satisfy.

Anyway, I have more thoughts but I'll spare you all for now.