Sylvia's Journal

I have crossed a psychological divide. No longer looking up at the hard to reach summit (we’re there), now I am looking down to the return to base camp. This part of the journey includes the passing of the baton and the many long flights it will take to return to my favorite place in the world. A message from Axel tells me that among all the things I have to let go is also the fantasy of flying straight from Bangkok to Amsterdam. I will leave Dubai for Amsterdam just when the direct flight from Bangkok to Amsterdam touches down at Schiphol airport. It’s too complicated to change my return and potentially very costly. I do feel a little abandoned by my headquarters. I put all these feelings on my hand and blow them away. Next chapter.

And so now on the down trip I find myself less interested in immersing myself in the Cambodian experience, there is a pulling back. I have decided to skip tasting the medium size egg fetus. I am also getting tired of sleeping on hard beds, having a shower that leaves my bathroom completely wet (there is no tub, the shower is simply mounted on the wall) and the difficult email access that has me sit on a hard wooden bench early in the morning in the dark between sleeping staff or late at night, in a mosquito-infested lobby for hours. Someone sent me something very large and it is clogging up the works. I left my computer in the lobby for a couple of hours over dinner but nothing of the 23 MB came through. I have to remember to change my download settings to save myself from such grief.

Going downhill is not quite the right metaphor, nothing is going downhill; energy among the local facilitator team is going up and so is their confidence. It’s more like the final mile in a marathon, not that I have run the real thing, but I imagine that this part of my work is what it feels like when a runner enters the home stretch.

Today Be and the provincial director of MCH are running the morning session about personal and organizational mission and vision. It is complex conceptual stuff. They have struggled hard to grasp it themselves and are just a few steps ahead of the people they will be teaching. It’s an act of courage on their part. They are very prepared, and very anxious. How anxious is illustrated by Be’s dream which she recounts over her ‘pang’ (bread) and ‘jam’ breakfast: she dreamed that she was standing in front of the group and everyone stood up and walked out.

When it is her turn to lead the piece about personal vision I recognize the Khmer word for dream (samai) – but this is the good kind of dream, the aspirations we carry in our head. She gets everyone to close their eyes and takes them on an imaginary visit to the future. There is some giggling as this is all very new but Be confidently encourages them to go to this new place in their heads. I think she can do this because she has a big dream herself that we have been exploring, for practice, over the last few days. Nobody walked out.

I keep thinking about the dreamless (or nightmarish) state that many of her generation have been in for so long, especially between 1975 and 1993 – a long period of hopelessness, violence, dread, loss, grief, anger and deep sorrow. Like Afghanistan, this is a place that could use visions of hope that things can change rather than yet another assessment of the problems people have. This is always where I clash with professional planners or experts who start with problem identification. I am thoroughly convinced that it’s a bad starting point for change in a traumatized place as it breeds feelings of discouragement, powerlessness, and victimhood. Be writes down the saying from Proverbs (where there is no vision, people perish). This country knows about this first hand. It took the Vietnamese to drag them out of their nightmare and keep them from perishing entirely.

At the opening session yesterday Um Sithat said that this workshop may feel like a very cheap workshop because there are now powerpoints and there is no LCD projector. People nodded their heads in agreement. Now they are discovering that there are more engaging alternatives to this most common mode of workshopping. Time passes quickly as people talk about their hopes and dreams for the young people of Cambodia.

We say goodbye to Naomi who is off in a taxi to Phnom Penh to depart early on Friday. The rest of us go to the same restaurant where a large bowl of cabbage noodles soup is waiting for Naomi so she doesn’t have to open a can of beans and Pringles. But she’s gone and so we eat it plus all sorts of other dishes, including one with chicken innards I don’t care that much about. Rany asks for a doggy bag because there is much food left over – it is literally for the stray dogs at the District Health Office that she has adopted. Rany is the kind of dog lover who isn’t put off by scruffy beggar dogs like I am. She feeds them and they love her for it.

It’s hot now, and humid; a little hotter each day. After lunch I am tired and something in my stomach is rumbling, probably from Naomi’s cabbage soup. My deepest wish is to lie down and take a nap but we have arrived at a critical junction where the foundations for the centerpiece of the program are laid: each health center team is to select a short term victory (a SMART result) to which they will make a commitment in this program. Each team will be asked to show their accomplishment in 5 months. If they get it right, it will show that something significant will have changed as a result of their leadership and management skills. If they get it wrong we won’t be able to determine whether there was a change or not and our program ends up in the dustbin of the world’s well intentioned capacity building programs, fun, exciting but without any impact on what people actually do.

The exercise is intense with me coaching two levels at the same time: the participant teams and the facilitators who are learning as they go which means that sometimes participants get contradictory advice, leaving everyone confused. We struggle through literal Khmer translations that can mean several things, verb and noun at the same time, blurring the lines between strategy and outcome. There is no one on one translation which makes my task even more challenging. The facilitators are getting tired but they remain keen on ‘getting it.’ Me too and so, once more, we soldier on.

A welcome break offers us small packages of banana leaves with surprises inside. One with a coconut pumpkin mélange, the other with an opaque jello substance with yet another surprise inside, something made from sweet beans. There is also corn on the cob (steamed), tamarind pods and pottrea, a small plum like fruit that tastes like apple.

We end late, too late which means driving back in the dark, not a good idea here. Everyone is exhausted and the 60 kilometers back seem to go on forever. Tomorrow is the last day. We’ll do better.