Sylvia's Journal

I woke up this morning from dreams about Cambodia’s messy past, a result, no doubt, of reading about its complicated history over dinner last night. There are no heroes it appears and too many villains. That this country now looks and feels as it does, peaceful, more developed than some African countries I know, is a miracle. But I gather there is still much that has not been set right and there forces temporarily dormant or still brewing under the surface that can mess up things again.

The dreams contained images from prisons in Cambodia, hospitals in the US and my childhood home and street in Holland; the connective tissue between those images vanished instantly in the glare of my single bulb fluorescent light.

For breakfast I pointed at a line on the breakfast menu that said ‘rice noodle.’ There was no mention of meat of any kind and therefore could have fooled a vegetarian, until it was put in front of me with three giant knuckle joints piled on top of the broth and noodles. I gnawed my bones over the soup as well as I could, trying to pry the small chunks of meat out of the joint and eating around the equally large chunks of fat.

Be, who is of my generation and one of the older people on our team, joined me on my walk to the office for our last day of preparation. It gave me one more opportunity to do some private coaching. Be asks the best questions and keeps me on my toes. As an American Cambodian she is also my cultural interpreter, deeply committed to the rebuilding of her country. She left in 1979 and tells me stories about her return in the 80s and how scary the place was then. Her mission in her retired life is to rebuild what was good about Cambodia before the KR and teach young people the good habits that she feels have been lost. She wants to start a small school on a plot of land she already bought. We practice the Challenge Model on her situation and everyone helps her think through how to get from ‘here’ to ‘there.’

We have government people with us today. This in itself is a victory. The vice-director from the provincial health department has asked to be part of the facilitator team, and so has his MCH director. We also now have on the team the chief health official from the district that we will be working in. All this is a direct result of the two alignment meetings we have held. We have one day to get them up to speed. And so it becomes a very intense morning and afternoon of just-in-time coaching and then trying the session out on ourselves. It is rather counter cultural, this learning while doing and not being perfect but they seem to take it in stride. Each round of practice increases everyone’s understanding and confidence a little bit more. They throw themselves into the exercises with great gusto and there is none of the embarrassment or hesitance that I sometimes observe within myself and my colleagues when we practice on each other back home.

It is an exhausting exercise though. I dash from one threesome to another as they read the notes and prepare their flipcharts. We role play bits and pieces of the session in Khmer and English until I read the body language that tells me that the right Khmer translation has been found and the concept or process understood. Then I draw back, inviting them to practice on one another and give each other feedback and advice on how to make the session better. I guess what keeps me going is to see the enthusiasm with which they absorb and explore the new ideas I am putting in front of them; just as I am reacting to the new dishes and bits of Khmer language people put in front of me here. More and more I believe that the essence of many of the exercises is to provide frames and language in which their own (and tomorrow their participants’) experiences can be poured.