Sylvia's Journal

Room-less I scout around the hotel lobby for a plug so that I don’t have to use up precious battery time for the long trip home that starts in an hour. I checked out of my room at noon time after doing all my reports and emptying my mailbox so that I can start with a clean electronic desk when I get home.

Prateek came to pick me up for a last Cambodian curry lunch and a last tour of Phnom Penh which included a visit to the mall to replace the socks that got lost in the free laundry at the 12 dollar a night hotel. This mall is the hotspot for Cambodian teenagers; they hang out, date, go roller skating and eat American fast food on top of a noisy six-story building. If you make it past the throbbing crowds of teenagers you actually have a very nice view of the city and its river.

To balance the new with the old we also visit the hill that has given the city its name, with its temples, shrines and statues and countless places that can hold bills, incense sticks and other offerings that keep this place and its visitors in good shape. There are monkeys on the hill that escape into the city and walk across the various cables that crisscross above the streets as if they are in the jungle. I have never seen urban monkeys. Only the tourists pay attention to them.

At the airport I buy one of the many books I now want to read about this country, a biography of the bad guy (Brother Number One) by David Chandler. I had not expected the variety of books about the dark period at the well-stocked airport bookstore. Many of them are first person stories but these are not what I am interested in. I select the biography because I am curious about the personal history and how it intersected with what was happening on the world scene. I read about one fifth of the book on the short hop to Bangkok.

Emirates is at the uninteresting concourse where I have a long wait, sans lounge access, seeing both AF and KLM depart long before my flight, going straight where I want to go. But first I have to go to Dubai, my 6th visit in 3 months. I am already tired, feeling sweaty and grimy as if at the end of various long transits but I have only just started my long journey home. I keep my fingers crossed for an empty flight – why would anyone want to go to Dubai in the middle of the night?

I have a gravlax croissant and coffee for lunch in the small area in the Phnom Penh hotel lobby that is cordoned off for tea and pastries – as if to pay homage to Axel’s ancestors. But it is also to give in to a desire for coffee, even bad Nescafe, after having been coffee-less for 10 days and living on an entirely Cambodian diet. I like variety and the sandwich plate in the showcase seemed to offer just that.

I have returned to luxury, to a hotel that costs 5 times as much as my luxury room in the province and it is luxury indeed: no mosquitoes and geckos on the wall, a real bathroom with a full bath, internet and a mini bar (extra charge of course) – and down one floor all sorts of massages to choose from plus a bunch of restaurants. I think I’ll go for Japanese tonight.

We had our final meeting with the team in the provincial capital in which we celebrated once more the significant accomplishments of the last two weeks and gave ourselves another round of applause. I handed out my usual small symbolic gifts and received two real gifts in return, one for myself and one for Axel. Then Leonard focused the team on what will need to be accomplished in the next 6 weeks.

Back in Phnom Penh we met at the fortified USAID embassy in the center of the city to brief our funders on the accomplishments of the last two weeks and make promises for the next 5 months and then it was time for a second round of goodbyes. There are no plans for me to come back here as I am not in any budget but I wouldn’t mind another visit to this country, and, as Leonard reminds me, I haven’t tried the fetus-in-egg yet (plus a few other insects).

I rewarded myself with a massage by Nika at the Seeing Hands place. For the price of six dollars she gave me an hour long massage, exclaiming ‘Oh!’ each time she found another set of knotted muscles. Nika is 33 and has been blind since she got measles at the age of 1. The Mary Knolls Sisters send her to Japan to learn massage and English; as a result she speaks English with a Japanese accent. Stacked against the wall of her small room are several tomes about massage in Braille; a Braille version of the poem ‘The Gift’ is tacked on the wall – not framed of course. She massages me expertly even with one hand when she answers her cell phone.

The tuk tuk driver brings me back to the hotel and points at the Raffles Royal Hotel that we pass on the way. “The very special person room costs 2000 dollars,” he says. I wonder what this means to someone for whom 100 dollars is probably a fortune.

And now a leisurely evening in luxury – sushi, sake and a long warm bath.

Leaving my computer at the reception desk to let it download emails at snail’s pace, I ate by myself last night since my team mates all had other plans. The restaurant was awash in noise: a bunch of totally unrestrained young children running around and screaming at the top of their lungs, a loud family party that was spread out over three tables with much drinking and falling and braking of bottles and a TV that was set at high volume showing a Chinese drama, whimpering women, bad men and all; a dining experience with much distraction.

The young men who is the night attendant on my floor in the hotel is studying a mimeographed paper called ‘Leadership and Communication,’ in English. I flipped through it. It’s theory that comes from the US. I’d love to sit and chat with him about what he is learning but the period in which we are both in the hotel and awake is very limited. Many of the young people on our team are also studying in the weekend, after work hours. There is a tremendous commitment to improving oneself through study.

For the last time we pile into the car for the 60 km drive to Chamkaleu, three people in front and four in the back of the pickup truck. We arrive with mopeds streaming in from all sides and once again we start exactly on time. The discipline here about arriving and ending on the appointed time is striking; it helps that this is a society of early risers and there is little traffic this far out in the province.

Nara from the provincial health department opens the day with a morning reflection about what we did yesterday. This is where not understanding a word is a handicap. I am trying to get the facilitators to adopt this practice of reflecting regularly but it is still very new and the responses from participants superficial (question: what did you learn? Answer: leadership!). I explain that the role of the facilitators is to make explicit what is implicit, to have people notice how their feelings and moods are affected by design and methods; to help them articulate vague and unexpressed feelings of engagement into actionable lessons about how alignment around a shared vision can mobilize otherwise inert and passive people.

I struggle behind the scenes to get the translations of the results that each health center has committed to produce in the next five months. We are looking at flipcharts with script that is already undecipherable for me, made more incomprehensible by words crossed out or added. Even for the best English speakers this is not easy; a word by word translation leaves me with multiple meanings. I seek a kind of precision that is hard to get, even in English, as I try to wean people from imprecise abstract language that is copied from highly conceptual documents and has little meaning to people who do very concrete work.

I can see the pieces falling into place for the facilitators when I notice that one has improvised a session that is not in the notes and should have been, logically connecting one session to the next. From time to time I check on translations especially when the group is suddenly energized. I have learned in the past that such surges are sometimes caused by the (real or perceived) expectation of goodies coming in from the NGO or donors. People spent much energy on making of lists of things they want to have (and be given). The idea is to stimulate people’s creativity and encourage them to look for the resources that are already there with people’s energy among the most precious and least well managed of them all.

The last session before the break is Covey’s circle of influence. This is interesting because it is so very American in its key assumption: the only thing you can control in life is your own behavior, attitudes and, in principle, your thoughts. This society knows a thing or two about control and so, not surprisingly, the central belief is challenged and needs some digestion. Bunthoeun leads the discussion with great verve and a booming voice that reverberates so loudly through the sound system that I take refuge outside the classroom. He was told earlier that he scares the more timid women and needs to speak more softly to the females. I am told he is trying after he gets feedback from his peers.

For lunch we go back to the same restaurant which has more wonderful soups, vegetables and fish ready for us but also many flies. It is hot again and some of the food is too and so my face gets red. They are worried that something is wrong with me and I explain it’s my northern skin, unused to heat of any kind but nothing to worry about.

There are a few features about eating here that I like at lot, one is the large beer mug filled with hot water from which you retrieve your eating implements, forks, spoons and chopsticks. The other is the young women that walk around with large bowls filled with rice and spoon more on your plate as soon as you finish. People eat huge quantities of rice – it’s always the centerpiece of the meal.

The afternoon starts with an ice breaker, as each afternoon has, accompanied by much laughing. The provincial chief has arrived to be with us in the afternoon. The session he was going to facilitate has come and gone without him. I am curious what will happen next, since we had announced earlier that he is on the facilitation team. He jumps in at the end of the session about sphere of influence and gives an example that has to do with drinking. It’s a message about being a role model and controlling one’s own behavior and not succumbing to group pressure – a rather unusual message in this part of the world I gather, but received with applause from the group.

In the meantime Leonard is busy preparing our presentation to USAID tomorrow afternoon and so we have to recreate the vision in English, from pictures and Khmer words. I create a new mind map. It has the same content but is organized a little tighter in four categories: staff, services, environment and sustainable results. We carefully pick words that can be found in the picture and resonate with our funder.

In the meantime Rany is doing an exercise about listening that is always an instant success in Africa and needs very little explanation. Here it’s different. Rany needs to demonstrate the exercise twice and explain it in great detail. I am puzzled by the difference and explore with Leonard, in the back of the room, the patterns he sees in Cambodia that he already told me about two years ago in Nepal. Some concepts and tools are picked up much faster here than in Africa while others require considerable effort. People ask questions or make comments that surprise me and that no one has ever asked before (‘what if you don’t want to listen’? Or, ‘people are used to being interrupted by cell phones, what’s the big deal’?)

But in terms of energy I have found my match in this country, or at least with this group of facilitators. They have boundless energy, like I do and they are doing much of the work I usually do, freeing me up to write long entries in my blog and reflecting on what I am seeing happening here.

We end the first workshop and my task here with formal speeches and then the 60 km drive back again. We ‘debrief’ over dinner that includes singing and incomprehensible dancing, in an open air restaurant with bugs everywhere and geckos feasting as much as we do. Everyone is happy, proud, relieved and exhausted. Although I still don’t understand a word of what people are saying I am happy and proud too and enjoy watching these people I have gotten very close to these last two weeks, thinking ‘this is what people ask for when they say they want to live in peace and happiness.’

In the parking lot of the hotel is a camper with stickers from various Latin American countries, and France. It is inhabited by a French family, consisting of a dentist, his wife and their two children in their early teens. They are on a four-year around the world tour, homeschooling the kids and exposing them, quite literally, to the world. After their dinner in the restaurant they retreat into their camper which is surrounded by a crowd of locals who stand or sit on their haunches around the vehicle. You can see them wondering in their mind what this is all about. I am given a business card with the family’s website. We talk in French. He apologizes for being a little behind in his postings. That makes at least two of us writing about our adventures in Cambodia. They’re leaving for Vietnam tomorrow.

We’re off early to get to Chumkaliu on time. The restaurant isn’t even open and I wait between the sleeping bodies of the receptionists and guards, lying on stretchers around me. I use the time to fill up my inbox, which takes awhile. The breakfast we ordered isn’t ready at 6:15 AM as promised and we have it packed up because we have to leave. Leonard drives us, claxonning loudly through clusters of motorbikes, kids walking and biking to school and dogs.

When we arrive many people are already there. Half of them have already been exposed to what we are going to teach them in one of the three events we have done so far – some, including the big chief from the province have now been part of the introductory session three times. For the facilitation team it is their fourth time.

We go through the usual opening protocol which I now know by heart: the highest chief is called to take his seat at the front table – applause accompanies him. The table is decked out with a baby blue satin skirt and pink rosettes at the corners, a flower arrangement next to the microphone in front of him. Then Naomi’s name is called (Dr. Naomi) and she moves in position, applause again, and then it’s my turn, applause. Naomi is asked each time to say a few words before the official opening by the chief. The microphone has an echo that reverberates around the small room. It reminds me of the chocolate salesperson at the Topsfield Fair who uses his microphone to gather a crowd. I fail to convince my team to put the microphone away since it they have convinced themselves that they cannot be heard in the back. I suggest they check rather than assume but after four tries I give up. And then, suddenly, they stop using the microphone, after I stop pushing. Something about yielding.

I am getting a bit distracted about my flight back to Boston because I discovered, rather late, that I am routed from Bangkok via Dubai to Amsterdam while there is a direct flight out of Bangkok to Amsterdam that will save me half a day and a two hour wait in the middle of the night in Dubai. It’s a little detail I missed in the hurried last-minute travel arrangement before I left Boston on January 9. In the meantime I learn from the head office that the travel agency that issued the ticket has gone out of business and my request is not an emergency. I decide to send an email SOS to Axel to see what he can do – it’s in his own interest as he would get me back half a day earlier and slightly less exhausted.

For lunch we go to a local restaurant; lunch was already ordered and shows up instantly: spicy beef that makes our eyes water and ginger-fried fish. Naomi has brought a can of vegetarian beans (including a can opener) and a can of Pringles which she offers to everyone. I pass and indulge in the dishes put in front of us. There is much joking about the junk food but some try.

After lunch we start with the Cambodian version of Simon Says; here it is Angel Says. There is much laughing. The enthusiasm, anywhere in the world, for such games tells me that adult don’t get to play silly games as much as they would like. For some reason in workshops it is OK to do this.

The rest of the day proceeds exactly according to plan. I am letting go, shedding tasks one by one. They are being picked up by Leonard and the team; the freedom this creates makes me yawn and I realize how tired I am. I run the feedback session for the last time and hand the baton over to Leonard and urge everyone to take notes throughout the day and do what I have been doing till now. This leads to a conversation about status and how to get feedback to people who are higher in status. The positive feedback is easy but the suggestions for improvement are a little bit trickier. I ask the senior staff if they can make requests for getting feedback. They say they want it. I suspect it will remain difficult.

We drive the 60 kilometers back, us in the ADRA pick up and several of the facilitators on their motor bikes – it takes them over an hour each way.

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.

With the team members who are from this area we drove early in the morning to Chamkaleu Operational District where the workshop will be held. It is a 45 minute ride, at relatively high speed, along the way back to Phnom Penh and then veering off to the west. It is Sunday and the roads are quiet. On the way we stop at a market to get pins and tape to hang up the workshop banner (I discover that this is what is meant by ‘setting up the room’). It’s an odd collection of wire clips, children’s hooks in the shape of elephants and double sided sticky foam tape.

When we arrive no one is there, the place is locked up. Sokleang makes a few phone calls and we sit down at a picnic table in the shade to wait. Um Sithat unrolls a large banana leave that has sticky rice, beans and pork inside it. A strip of the banana leaf is used as a knife to slice the log, like a jelly roll. The impromptu meal is completed with the small tangerines that are ubiquitous here and apples. It’s a rather filling meal in between breakfast and lunch and I only eat a small piece – it’s a creative variation on Latin America’s staple of beans and rice.

People arrive on motor bikes and the place is unlocked. It is the office of the Operational District’s Heath Office. Inside is a large open space with small cubicles on the side for administrative staff. We have the conference room in the back where double desks are set up with a collection of chairs clearly scraped together from everywhere. It’s rather tight and it will be hard to move around, but I’ve seen worse.
Everyone gets busy hanging up the large banner that has been printed for the occasion So far, each event has had its own banner. I wonder what happens to all the used banners since they are rather specific to one occasion. Maybe they get sewn into handbags or they become refugee tents – the material is rather sturdy plastic, a bit more refined than a blue tarp.

I look for the women’s toilet and cannot determine which is for men and which for women. I suppose I can check and go in, since the men’s toilets (here and everywhere in the developing world) tend to stink of piss while the women’s toilets tend to be a little cleaner (women wash their hands more often and flush toilet more often than men – this from empirical research). I ask Sokleang and she shows me the difference in the script. Both toilets are labeled ‘room for’ so the first few letters are the same. Only the last 2 are different and I memorize the difference by noticing that the letters for women are the same as for men plus some extra flourishes and curlicues. Instead of women being made out of men as our Christian creation story tells us, here women are men plus something more. I like that.

Once the banner is put up there is nothing else to do; we had planned to work here but there is no electricity. It is turned off on Sundays. MSH could learn something from this. It’s a very effective way to keep people from working on their day off. And so we drive back. When we pass rubber plantations I ask for a stop and an explanation. I have never seen rubber being tapped and it is very different than I thought. It comes out white and then becomes black when it hardens. The tapping is a variation on maple sugaring, but even more low tech and ingenious.

Back on the road everyone is getting into the game of finding local Cambodian scenes that illustrate the practices of managing and leading. Sokleang and I already collected 5 of the eight that we need and now we have some more help. We decided that organizing is best captured by the organized vegetable gardens being watered. It takes a bit of scouting around to find the right place because we are too late for the early morning watering and too early for the one in the afternoon. Then there is the implementing statue; the town has a brightly painted one. And finally, on the way to the hotel to drop me off for lunch Buntheoun notices a statue shooting an arrow, “focusing!” he exclaims and we stop for yet another picture. All we need now is a scene that represents planning and another for monitoring and evaluating; we have some ideas for those.

Back at the hotel I find the restaurant closed and the town is ever sleepier than yesterday, except for the fire crackers going off everywhere since it is New Year’s Eve on the Chinese calendar. I am referred to the restaurant on the main drag where we ate the first night and where you can get a naked goat cut off at the knees. I go for something simpler, soy chicken and fried spinach – it looks recognizable and appealing on the picture. I notice that the omnipresent shrine is quite elaborate today with an entire roasted pig, including a knife stuck in its back, an offering for the New Year I suppose.

On the way back to the hotel I pass by half open shops with entire families either sitting on top of a table or on the ground, around countless dishes, or, where lunch is over, stretched out on the ground or loungers, relaxing. At the hotel entrance the young receptionist is sitting with two friends, blowing up condoms. He manages to explode one and it sounds just like a fire cracker – lots of giggling when I indicate that I know it is not a balloon, but I also notice that it should not have exploded at the size it did.

During my siesta I prefer to watch a Cambodian movie rather than the bizarre CNN documentary on luxury goods producers and how they suffer from the recession. The Cambodian (and sometimes Chinese) movies appear to be made according to a standard script: love stories in which the women squeak, whimper and cry and the men thunder, fight and maim, all in the most wonderful costumes. The voice of the women is always the same and seems independent from the actress who opens her mouth. You don’t have to understand the language to get the plot.

When the lunch break is over I take a mototaxi to the ADRA office and we work through the first day program and divide roles. Some of the facilitation notes turn out too confusing and I take whole sections out and simplify others after trying to explain for too long, a signal that things are too complicated still. I am fed more exotic fruits I have never seen or heard of (sapodilla, and something even the dictionary didn’t know), one even more delicious than the next. I ask if Cambodia may have been the Garden of Eden in the distant past.

After receiving instructions on how to get back to my hotel (2nd cross road right, fourth left) I walk and discover after awhile that Smraach has been following me. I invite him to walk next to me instead and we continue our walk together. We practice each other’s languages; Smraach’s English is very limited and he does not participate in our English conversations even though he sits through all of them as a member of the team. He teaches me how to say that I don’t speak the Khmer language (and I teach him how to say the same for English) and then we count the cross streets in Khmer and part, he right, I left, on cross street number bram-muy (6) which is literally five-one, not nr.4 as I was told.

I buy a coconut from a little girl who handles the machete like an expert. She is of an age that would not be trusted with such a sharp implement in my world but here she is not only cutting coconuts but also renting her cell phone to various customers, taking the money like a died-in-the-wool sales lady, all very adult. I think she is at most 10. The coconut has much more juice it in than I expected and I carry it back to my room for a snack to see me into the new year (and keep me occupied while staying awake through the firecrackers).