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.

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).

The enormous hotel seems to have hardly any guests left, the place is deserted when I walk down for a few minutes of internetting, and so is the restaurant. I am the only one left from our team; everyone has either returned to Phnom Penh or lives here. The hotel management must have thought it a good time to do some maintenance work. Workmen are busy dismantling or rebuilding pieces of the hotel. It’s noisy.

I tried the egg noodle breakfast this morning. It came with slices of tongue, offal and one lonely shrimp and costs one dollar. Cambodia is a dollar economy. Only fractions of dollars are paid in the local currency, the reil, which exchanges for 4000 to a dollar, everything else is paid with dollars. I calculate that everything is also about one fifth of what it costs in the USA. The single dollar bill is the most common currency around and can buy you quite a bit of fruit, a few moto rides, lots of cookies and candy, a breakfast and two thirds of lunch or dinner.

My Saturday morning has been reserved for sightseeing and Sokleang has generously offered to be my guide and interpreter. We rented a tuk tuk for a foreigner’s price so the driver had a lucky day. First stop was the Man’s Hill (Phnom Prosh). , The legend on how this hill, and the higher one next to it, came into being speaks to women’s deceitfulness and cleverness and men’s honesty and stupidity. The men and women built separate hills in a competition about height that would end at daybreak. The women lit fires which fooled the men into believing it was daybreak and they stopped working. The women won. The moral is that deceitfulness wins and women are good at that while men are honest and dumb (and lose). I think the story was made up by men. In this, as most other parts of the world women rarely win.

We made offerings to the people who were killed by the Khmer Rouge or died in the fields around the hill. Their skulls, some very small, are piled up high in a large lotus flower basin. An old caretaker sits by its side and receives our offerings on their behalf and blesses us. He talks for awhile with Sokleang about how he managed to survive the dark years. I think it involved deceitfulness and cleverness (and so he won). The place is very peaceful now. “It was peaceful then too,” said Sokleang, “because there were no more people, just the birds. The people had all been deported or killed.” From time to time she tells me things about that time. I have a thousand questions that I am afraid to ask. Sometimes she answers one, but rarely spontaneously, without me asking.

Next stop was a mini Angkor Watt sort of temple, dating from the same era but without the wild fig trees. It had been destroyed in the KR time but had been (somewhat) re-assembled and new pagodas and Buddha statues added; the frescos inside the newer buildings that tell stories from the life of Buddha have been repainted after the KR had obscured them in a futile attempt to stamp out communion with the divine. I am sorry I don’t know the stories and Sokleang is of little help as she is a Seventh Day Adventist.

Along the road are small wooden houses on stilts that get smaller as one moves further away from the main road. And then suddenly there are enormous multi-storied houses built by people who made it in the world. The houses stand in the simple surroundings with their gilded gates, shiny tiles, smoked glass picture windows and balconies everywhere. I learn that many of these McMansions are owned by American-Cambodians, people who presumably made it in America. I wonder what ‘making it in America’ means and I doubt that, back in the US, we grant them the kind of status that they enjoy here.

We ended our tour with a few steps on swaying bamboo bridge that is swept away each June when the rains make the river wild. After the rainy season is over and the river calms down, a new bridge is built again, year after year. It is a spectacular piece of architecture, a matchstick wonder from a distance, exactly as the Lonely Planet guide described it.

We parted at the market and I had the rest of the day to myself. I took a mototaxi ride to the British café (Lazy Mekong Daze) on the Mekong River that is a few blocks upstream from Mr. Joe. It is a similar place, smaller and with slightly higher prices, 3 dollar rather than 2.50 for a meal. I splurged on a mango shake which brought the entire meal to 3.50. I walked back along the dusty streets of this sleepy provincial town with its old French colonial architecture. Even the market was sleepy, I suppose because it was siesta time. Lunch time is long here, a two-hour break quite common. Once you see the hammocks strung under all the stilted houses and sometimes by the side of the road you understand why. People take their time to digest their lunch. That too is very French.

A common sight on the street is women in pajamas, not because they got up late but because it is like a local pantsuit. Sometimes they are flannel, the kind I wore as a kid, and sometimes they are made of a silky material. You know they are not used as pajamas because the hair in curls and slippers are missing – actually, they wear slippers too I noticed on the picture I took.

And now it is back to work, after this little intermezzo. We have a little less than 2 days to get everyone ready for the first of the actual leadership workshops, everything we have done so far has been a prelude to this: on Tuesday we will have the participant teams in one room, 13 pairs representing the staff of 13 health centers who will do the work and become ‘managers who lead.’ And the work is to prevent the young people here to take wrong turns on their journey into adulthood and, more importantly, help each other stay on the straight and narrow. It’s pure self-interest of course for today’s adults as these young people will be governing this country and running the economy in some 30 years.

The team is still struggling with enforcing norms. I think I have hit the hard core of power relationships and face saving in this culture. The few occasionally ringing phones are still ignored but to my great surprise a young woman, who is actually not a participant but administrative staff, walked in late and was applauded. I asked one of facilitators why they applauded someone who walked in late; shaming, was the answer, ‘Aha,’ I said. It’s a different logic.

Last night, after a good feedback session in which everyone was learning from everyone else we went in search of a place to eat. We drove over the Japanese bridge again to an enormous and totally empty restaurant with a singer and small band on a stage, playing to a crowd of empty handed waiters. The local staff gets 2 dollars to pay for their evening meal. The menu was slightly over. The emptiness of the restaurant and the cost of the meal made us decide to go elsewhere.

We ended up in Joe’s restaurant, by the river. Joe is from Pennsylvania and is married to a local lady. You can get American fare (hamburgers), British fare (fish and chips) and Asian fare (curries and soups) at the pub/restaurant. Although the food was good and the price reasonable, there were a few rather hostile exchanges between Joe and our Cambodian colleagues that puzzled us and angered them greatly (but, in true Asian fashion they smiled and swallowed the rudeness, until we drew them out later, away from the place of insult). Naomi and I were so surprised about the rudeness that we did not speak out and now I am annoyed with myself for not confronting Mr. Joe. Naomi and I were both ashamed by his behavior. To make up for this Naomi bought our friends an ice cream at the Caltex station and we all decided we would not go back there, even though the food was good and the place nice.

Today we completed the second day of the provincial alignment meeting and I got to watch the team as they tackled some of the more complicated sessions of the leadership program. They are not 100% there but their understanding of the key concepts and tools is growing by leaps and bounds and everyone is totally engaged in learning. Sometimes they are a bit too engaged as they take over from each other in the middle of a session, running away with it, or at least that is what it looks like. Other times they are reluctant to correct their peers and ask me to do it (‘because people will listen to you’).

I am beginning to learn some more words in Khmer, like dreaming, and counting to 5. I am also learning to write the numbers one to five. They are small squiggly symbols, like pictures. I remember them by making up a story of what the picture represents. Number five looks like someone holding a stick over a crouched figure.

The closing ceremony was presided over by a senior official from the provincial government. Naomi and I were invited to say a few words of ‘welcome’ before his closing words. I suppose it was a welcome to the official, since we were at the end of the program. The national anthem was played, as it was in the beginning, and everyone stood up, looking very solemn. I wondered whether it was newly written after the KR period or preceded it. It sounded very hopeful. I copied the CD with five identical tracks of music only and five with words, the repetition to make it easy for hotel staff to play the anthem on their sound system.

I stayed up last night until we had a new president and were finally done with number 43. It was a bit past my bedtime, being half a day ahead of DC, but I wanted to see every minute of this ceremony that seemed like a dream, early on in the primaries, and now had come true. The most poignant scene from the ceremony was seeing Malia take a picture of her dad during his speech. I imagined her 60 years from now speaking to that picture – not the official one, but the one taken up close from where she was sitting.

The whole ceremony was quite fitting with the theme of our day over here that had just ended. The center piece of our alignment meeting had been the creation of a shared vision. I had asked people to imagine something in their mind’s eye that did not exist now that they wanted to create in the future, even if it seemed like a dream. The power of vision was that all forces and energies would align around this image to work towards its realization. What better illustration than our new president.

Leonard told us in our circle up, after everyone was gone, that yesterday’s event had exceeded his expectations. It did not exceed mine but that is mostly because I did not know what to expect, being new to this culture. All through the previous week people had told me how difficult it was to get the Excellencies to talk on an even footing with less exalted people, to get people excited, to speak out, etc. But they did and although we lost a few people, everyone remained engaged throughout the day.

We did not see as much of the High Excellencies as I had hoped (but again, more than people expected). Three Secretaries of State – something like a deputy minister – had been invited and all three came; all of them women. Two opened the event, one left right after the opening ceremony, the other participated in the creation of a shared vision, and the third showed up a little before the end of the day to formally close it. Naomi and I flanked the Excellencies both at the opening and the closing and were therefore, at least briefly and by association Minor Excellencies. We liked the title – it rolled nicely off the tongue.

Despite assurances that everyone at this high level would speak English, the meeting required simultaneous translation. The gentleman who had come to verify terminology with us the day before was in charge of this all by himself and performed heroically, having no one to take turns with. He even apologized for taking a bathroom break.

Facilitating a highly interactive set of exercises with headphone on and microphone in the hand was rather challenging, aside from the difficulty to get people out of their polite shells and speaking up out of (the hierarchical pecking) order. It took awhile to break the ice with everyone looking at me for all answers to all questions, including those that I asked to them, I was after all madam professor. The experience was reminiscent of my facilitation forays into China and Japan.

The meeting was held in the fancy Phnom Penh hotel which conveniently had a spa. Naomi is a good travelling companion because she has a deep interest in spas and massages of any kind. By noontime she had already scoped out the place and brought me the massage menu, dangling an end-of-the-day massage in front of me like a carrot.

Our choices ran from a 12 dollar one hour Thai massage to a 2 hours and 15 minutes Body Enhancement for 42 dollars. We chose the 90-minute and 32-dollar aromatherapy massage. Feeling all good (“leaves you glowing inside”) we checked out the hotel’s many restaurants, and Naomi graciously settled on Japanese because I wanted sashimi and sake and she found something that was acceptable to a vegetarian non drinker. We took a tuk tuk back to our more mundane hotel (sans massage) through deserted streets. At 8:30 most Cambodian are home and many already asleep.

Today we are travelling to Kampong Chams Province. The Cham people are an ethnic group in Southeast Asia who can be found in Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia with a fascinating history that includes much migration from India to Tibet and then south into their current location, with small enclaves still in Tibet and China. Their history has been traced back to about 200 AD. Cham form the core of the Muslim communities in both Cambodia and Vietnam.

Once more I have no idea what to expect. Our hotel in the province costs 10 dollars a night so I don’t think I will be connected to the internet. There is an ADRA office that does have a connection but it may mean that my daily postings will be delayed a bit.

On Thursday the local team will be doing what I did yesterday as it will all be in Khmer and there is no more translation. I watched them yesterday in the small groups and noticed how they were already taking a leadership role. Later this afternoon, on location, they want to practice on each other and their colleagues. And then they will have to be ready. That they will be is part of my vision.

Today we are meeting with the ‘high excellencies’ as senior government staff (or maybe it is people in power) are called here. There is some nervousness about dealing with them, a worry to displease them. Even with my team of highly educated and confident people, there are edges of fear and powerlessness. History has taught people here that men and women in power are arbitrary and finicky I suppose. It is a history that is too recent to forget. Of course by now I am rather anxious to see these high excellencies in the flesh.

Yesterday’s noodle soup breakfast contained pieces of everything that walks and swims: squid, shrimp, ground pork, duck, chicken and liver. It was good. The only problem with this kind of breakfast is that the wet and slippery noodles splatter the broth on my clothes.

Today I am skipping breakfast once more because I am leaving for the meeting hotel before the restaurant opens. Energy bars again.

Yesterday morning Naomi and I arrived during the morning devotional – a daily ADRA routine – and found the staff in conversation with each other in the small library that has been our home during the day. With Khmer or English bibles open in front of them they were comparing Salomon’s prayer, at the opening of the Great Temple in Jerusalem, with the Lord’s prayer. Staff responded to queries in soft spoken Khmer. This is possible because the Americans on the staff are either fluent or at least understand the local language.

I pondered about this as an organizational practice: a contemplative half hour before the start of the work day and talking with each other about matters of the heart and the spirit. I tried to imagine this happening at MSH (impossible, or maybe too late?) and the effect it would have. I have witnessed such a gathering at ADRA headquarters in the US with a much larger group and wonder how the intimacy can remain.

More prayers were requested, this time especially for our upcoming workshops to be successful and for people travelling. I liked that. We can use all the help we can get.

We spent more time going over old material, checking understanding of concepts, practicing on each other in Khmer and adding some new material. The confidence levels are rising which is a good thing because the day of the rookie facilitators’ solo performance is approaching fast.

For lunch we were invited to the country director’s home and while listening to Christmas music enjoyed a simple vegetarian meal under the watchful eye of the Jesus pictures I remember so vividly from elementary school which was a public school under the helm of a Seventh Day Adventist who put his church’s particular religious stamp on my early development, to the great irritation and consternation of my father. But I loved these Jesus pictures and was a lilttle jealous of all the children of my age, in all colors of the rainbow who got to sit on his lap. I also liked the lambs and lions sleeping at his feet. Yesterday;s picture was taking against the background of the construction site of the Great Temple or maybe it was the tower of Babylon, with the children, but no animals.

After lunch the countdown started towards today’s event with all the support staff busying themselves with the logistics. Although I had not intended to be the main facilitator today, in the end we all agreed that it would not be fair to put the team on the spot when there is much at stake and they don’t feel quite ready.

But a few days from now they will be on the stage. Next, on Thursday and Friday, will be a two day meeting in Kampong Chams province with the local ‘high excellencies’. From then on all meetings will be conducted in Khmer. My role will be to coach from the sidelines and give indvidual feedback in private. I simplified all the notes and we assigned sessions to pairs. Everyone is instructed to observe carefully what I do today, take copious notes and start visualizing themselves in front. This means that I have to stick to the notes myself, something that will be a little challenging.

After another yummy afternoon break with yet another new fruit among the abundance of fresh fruits, our expensive professional interpreter arrived to check on translations. The team fired English words at him which he returned, translated into Khmer. We had been a bit worried about this meeting because at first he was very busy establishing his credentials and we did not feel he was listening. But in the end the exchange was fruitful and agreement reached on which words to use for the various concepts. Everyone left in high spirits. We certainly had made huge progress since last Thursday.

Prateek left me a few books and magazines about Cambodia and Phnom Penh. I had barely time to look at them but this morning the magazine fell open on a page that invited me to dry a PP delicacy: balut, which is a fertilized duck egg with fetus. It has a picture that looks exactly as you would imagine such an egg to look like. I learn that it is, of course, a great source of protein and that the eggs come in sizes from small (17 to 18 days old), to medium (19 to 20 days) to large (21-23 days). It appears that most people like to eat the middle aged egg.

The driver showed up nearly 45 minutes too early yesterday morning, so I had to forgo trying a new breakfast. I had an energy bar instead, boring but handy. I take them along on my trip exactly for such emergencies. But when I arrived at the office everything was locked. It was one of those misunderstandings due to language. The driver’s English is better than my Khmer but that is easy and leaves much room for confusion. I was let in through the backdoor and waited for the rest of the team to arrive at the appointed time.

It was surprisingly busy on the road to the office on this Sunday morning at 7:30, as if it was a weekday rush. I asked the driver where all these people were going so early on their day off. “Family,” he said. I don’t think I’d like my family to show up at 7:30 on Sunday morning. I am told that the Khmer people get up early and go to bed early, a habit that remains from centuries of agrarian life.

We practiced some more facilitation in the morning, in Khmer, with me waiting for the group to show through thumbs up, sideways or down whether an explanation was OK or needed to be improved. It seems that slowly we are all converging on one meaning for one word or concept. Instead of a 10 minute explanation for one English word, we are now getting it in a couple of minutes and I take that to be a good sign. We have covered all the basic concepts and terminology and are ready to practice the exercises that go with them. This is how the facilitators are slowly easing to the front of the classroom.

I am discovering that the notes I want them to follow, and which they downloaded from the internet, copied and bound in thick tomes, are not quite what I thought them to be. In my demonstrations, what I say and the printed notes in front of them do not match. The interpreter catches me repeatedly. This creates some worry and confusion and extra work. Everything is taken very literal and I have to watch out what I say because my words are being copied and if I am imprecise, they copy my imprecise words.

Halfway through the morning Naomi, from ADRA headquarters, showed up, having flown in from Bangkok after two weeks in India. She’s been here before many years ago, as a solo traveler, rewarding herself for getting her PhD. She was also here last year seeding this new venture. I am excited about having a breakfast partner, even though she won’t be eating what I eat; she is a vegetarian and doesn’t like spicy food.

The office director and deputy took us out to lunch to the fluttering curtains place where I ate my first Cambodian lunch on Thursday. The place is right out of architectural digest, one of several restaurants created by an American-Thai couple, the Thai wife being the mastermind behind the décor. We had another one of these Southeast Asian dream lunches and I discovered Khmer curry.

In the afternoon there was more practice and I noticed that understanding and confidence is on the rise. We left the group to themselves while we held a meeting with our (my) hosts to clarify roles and expectations. When we returned to the meeting room we found a very engaged group of people doing what looks indeed like the exercise they have to do for real in a week’s time in the province. Of course I don’t understand a word of what they are saying and I rely on Leonard and the interpreter to tell me whether we are on course. It’s a leap of faith since Leonard knows the concepts but is from Indonesia and not a fluid Khmer speaker and the interpreter is Khmer but new to the material.

Naomi had been eating too much Asian food. She wanted pizza. I have had enough Italian for now and pizza is not on my wish list, so we parted ways. I went back to the Japanese restaurant to try the 5 course Kobe beef set which I saw prepared the other night. It costs about one fifth of a government official’s monthly salary I realized when I got the bill and for all that money it was a bit disappointing; more spectacular in preparation and look than in taste: two thin slices of Kobe beef wrapped around a green onion mixture, a small white fish, a few scallops in a buttery soy sauce, a small crayfish, a piece of tofu served under a thin slice of mystery vegetable and over a batch of golden needle mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes), miso soup, a few pieces of purple and yellow pickle, a bowl of fried rice, sweet bean ice cream, a liter of Angkor beer and countless cups of green tea. I abandoned my plans to work some more in the evening because I was too deeply into John Le Carre’s Congo novel (The Mission Song) to put it away.

Today is the last day before we go life in front of an audience of the ‘High Excellences,’ so reverently mentioned multiple times a day; I can’t wait.

Seventh Day Adventists start their Sabbath on Friday at 4 PM and so the day was short. I started it in the middle of the night which made my day very long. I had gotten up at 3 AM unable to sleep any longer and used the time to attend to other matters waiting in my email box until the internet connection was ended by the receptionist who, despite many requests to leave it on all the time, disconnects me each morning at around 4 AM. I then have to wait for someone to wake up and re-connect me.

I tried the chicken noodle breakfast and am determined to try something different each day. I have one more day of something recognizable (beef noodle) and then I am really getting into unknown territory.

I had made up a program for the day and once again we did not follow it. We are still trying to figure out the meaning of words. I kept asking people to explain in Khmer what something meant and then asked the rest to indicate with a thumbs up, down or sideways whether they thought it was good and clear or not. Slowly we are getting to narrow things down – but there were several surprises, as when I asked people to think about an accomplishment they were very proud of for which they had to overcome many obstacles with considerable effort and two young men started talking about a divorce and a love affair. But we are soldiering on.

Leonard, who is the one responsible for getting me here, took me for lunch to his home where he lives with his Philippino wife and his 4 adorable girls (from 3 months to 9 years). His in-laws were visiting and our impromptu lunch appearance created a little bit of a stir but also a wonderful lunch that included Indonesian Gado-Gado (vegetables with spicy peanut sauce), a Philippino dish with ingredients I could not discern, an American dish (spaghetti with frankfurters in tomato sauce), jackfruit and rice. The drink was a homemade invention of yogurt and Sprite on ice. We ate while the rest stood around or was busy with other things.

As part of a Christian minority Leonard left Indonesia because he and his family could not practice their faith. I am not sure of the details of their departure but I think it was not what they had wanted. Having lived in Cambodia for 5 years with a contract ending they wonder what comes next and long to settle somewhere for a long time so the girls can settle down in one school and make lasting friends.

In the afternoon we had only a couple of hours to finish our work for the day. We settled on the agenda for our meeting with the excellencies next Tuesday and divided the work. One more actor in our play is Naomi from ADRA Headquarters who will arrive on Sunday. We will work all day on Sunday and start practicing for a repeat of the Tuesday exercise and the launch of the actual leadership program in one province about 100 km to the northeast, later this week.

Back in the hotel I surrendered to a deep need to rest my eyes for awhile before dinner. I woke up in the middle of the night again. This is beginning to be a bad habit. I forced myself to go back to sleep and made it to 5 AM. Today one of my students from the first MSH/BU Leadership course will give me a guided tour of Phnom Penh in a little motor tuk tuk rented for the day.

Breakfast in the Chinese restaurant was exciting. The choice was eastern or western: noodles or rice (seafood, chicken or beef) or an omelet with toast and jelly. Green tea was automatically served, without asking. With the coupon I had been given at check-in I was entitled to one main dish and a drink. I chose the seafood noodles. It contained glass noodles, bean sprouts, spring onions, small shrimp and pieces of squid that looked like carved ivory beads. On the table was an assortment of condiments. I had to try the tiny pickled chilies but they were a little out of my league, tasty but hardly edible.

Around me I noticed people were served tall glasses with something white at the bottom, like a coca cola float. It took several waiters with limited English to explain that it was coffee. It turned out to be ice coffee with condensed milk at the bottom, requiring a vigorous stir before drinking if you liked it sweet (and none if you didn’t).

A gentleman at the table next to me asked me in broken English whether I spoke French and we continued our conversation in that language. He asked me many questions and then complimented me on my French. When he found out that I was originally from Holland he mumbled the equivalent of “ahhh, Holland, many languages.” I told him it was my first day, first morning and even first breakfast in his country and his eyes twinkled. “Will you be going to visit nice places?” I told him I had some work to do first, but maybe after that.

I asked housekeeping to come and explain the shower contraption to me. They sent a young woman who did not speak English. She carried a remote control and made all the colorful lights go blink and the numbers up to 50. Afterwards I was none the wiser but with slightly hotter water. The various knobs don’t seem to produce the full body massage I had hoped for; the handheld shower will have to do.

I was greeted at the ADRA office by two barefoot young women. It is custom to take your shoes off when you enter a house or an office. I was given a pair of flip flops to wear inside. The young receptionist ushered me into the morning devotional meeting just when everyone was being asked what prayers they would like to offer. The accounting team asked for a good outcome of the audit.

After the meeting I was introduced to the staff who will be involved in running the leadership program. I wrote all the names down, including their pronunciation because otherwise I would never get them right. I am in an entirely alien linguistic environment with no handles to hang words on. My goal is to master at least a few words by the end of the day, such as ‘Thank you,’ and ‘How are you?’ for starters. It will require much effort.

The English language skills of my new team are uneven, from rudimentary to fluent. Luckily one of the facilitators is a retired American-Cambodian volunteer who spends half of her time here and the other in Maryland. I am grateful for her presence as she can also be my cultural interpreter. She is very worried about getting stomach problems and brings her own snacks in a plastic container (on doctor’s orders she tells me). Everyone thinks this is funny. Abundant snacks are served in the morning and afternoon. This includes fresh fruits (pineapple, green mango, lychees, dragon fruit, bananas, tangerines) but also various sorts of sweet rice cakes packed in banana leaves and a packaged pink jelly roll (like a Miss Debbie or Hostess cake). People are eating nonstop but no one is overweight.

For lunch Leonard from Indonesia and Geoff from Australia took me to a lovely place, sitting outdoors under a canopy with white curtains fluttering in the breeze, like you see on advertisements for honeymoon destinations. Not surprisingly the food was wonderful, not just in taste but also in presentation. I understand why people like to live here.

In the afternoon I got a taste of the linguistic gymnastics ahead. I asked the more advanced facilitators to do one of the sessions I expected them to do for real on Tuesday but we get so tangled up in language and translation that I have changed my plans and have them watch me on Tuesday and take copious notes. Everyone let out a sigh of relief when I said this. They had been telling me all along I have to be up front at the Tuesday meeting because the ‘Excellencies’ (this is how they refer to senior government officials) would not pay attention otherwise.

The translation of concepts like inspiring and aligning is challenging, especially if the meaning is not entirely clear. Keo took three bananas and illustrated ‘alignment’ by telling us it meant cutting the ones that stuck out down to the size of the shortest. He had a point but the ‘cutting down’ was not quite what I had in mind. Staying with the fruit theme I took the bowl of tangerines and indicated that if they moved out of alignment they’d all show up in a different corner of the room. So I lined them up and pushed them forward: moving forward in a line. Then someone asked, “Is it unity?” We were getting closer. I replaced some of the tangerines with bananas, papayas, dragon fruit and lychees to show that it was unity of purpose, not sameness or alikeness. After that they told me they understood but could not agree on the Khmer words to use. Getting to understand inspirinig also took a while; for that there appears to be a word. This is going to be a challenge and a half. The day long practice was humbling and served as a very useful diagnostic to all parties involved.

We ended the day at 5 PM. I reluctantly declined a dinner invitation from ADRA’s country director and deputy because I needed to have some time alone to get my head around the things I discovered today and design practices sessions that will work better than the one we tried today.

I took a break from the intense work and reconnoitered the neighborhood of my hotel. I walked several blocks to a supermarket to get myself some tea and coffee. This required navigating uneven sidewalks with unexpected holes in them, sometimes entirely blocked by mopeds or instant restaurants set up with plastic blue chairs and mini self-contained kitchens no larger than a good sized suitcase.

Mopeds are everywhere, zapping around cars and each other like mosquitoes. Trying to cross the street is a most frightening experience. There are very few pedestrians I can follow and learn from – everyone is motorized.

I love supermarkets in other countries. There are aisles entirely dedicated to noodles, Chinese preserves and candy. I found what I needed and took a bicycle cab back to the hotel for a dollar. It was a scary ride because there was quite a lot of traffic on the wrong side of the street and I was sitting in the front part of the contraption.

I had dinner in the Japanese restaurant. As a single woman they didn’t know where to put me. The hostess seated me at one of those large cooking table with a genius chef (a young woman) who did wonders with food in front of my eyes. My table mates were three men who were drinking and eating heavily. I was grateful that they ignored me.

I ordered an overpriced sushi platter and watched in awe as the various courses were prepared for my table mates by the young cook, one complicated dish after another. It was like dinner-theatre. I did not need my book to keep me occupied. I ordered sake which is served as one-size-fits-all. It’s too much for me but after dry Dhaka it tasted good and I drunk it all. As a result the plan to work after dinner fell by the wayside and I went straight to bed, to resume my work in the middle of the night. I don’t think anyone in Boston noticed that my immediate replies to emails meant I was up at an unusual time.

I have no standing with Thai Airways, no access to red carpets and special lines. I am with the rest of the ordinary people, seated in the back of the bus.

There are thousands of other ‘back-of-the-bus’ people surrounding me in the area outside the gates. It feels like a holding pen. Many are young men who are being ferried out of the country, lured to places with work and the promise of money, often in the Arab world. They travel in clusters, staying closely together; many may never have never been outside their small towns or villages. You can read the anxiety from their faces. There are stories, each day, in the newspaper about unscrupulous recruiters and young men just like them who end up in a no man’s land at their destination. The lucky ones get sent back right away; some spent months in a jail to be eventually returned to Bangladesh, having lost whatever sums they paid to get work. If you are poor and illiterate you get screwed – unless you are lucky.

But there are also middle class Bangladeshi families in this crowd, some with American passports who have, I imagine, visited the relatives who stayed behind. They are happy to go home; the kids will go back to their computer games and friends, McDonalds and the order and cleanliness of the US (everything is relative). One family in front of me belongs to this group. The kids are regular American teenagers; they dress and talk like them, part of the global tribe of middle class teenagers, boys and girls alike. Only the mother still wears a sari; she’s the one who is neither here nor there. The father wears a suit and holds all the travel papers in a little sissy bag. He’s the IT professional who made it in the new world. The grandparents stayed behind. They are proud of their son and mystified about what an IT professional does. They have shown off their smart offspring to the neighbors and friends. They have no worries about their old age. There are families like that all around me.

Foreigners are a minority in this departure hall and stick out. One sticks out like a sore thumb: a Chinese business man who sits a few rows away and talks on his cell phone as if he is the only one in this place. His voice is loud and of the in-your-face (ears) kind. He is totally oblivious of how loud he is. I throw him a few glances, a weak and useless hint. He doesn’t read my body language.

The newspaper has an editorial about the road that is closed to women and I learn that the signs have been taken down and the self-appointed women chaser is arrested and his mosque council berated. I’m glad that the publicity worked and outraged others as it did me.

We leave Dhaka late but the nice male flight attendant assures me that I will have plenty of time in Bangkok to make my connection to Cambodia (35 minutes is all you need he tells me – I am glad I have carryon luggage only). A good tailwind comes to the rescue and I ended up having an entire hour. I use it to buy Droste chocolate and a cheap camera since the battery charger of my camera died in Dhaka. I will pretend that the chocolates came all the way from Amsterdam, a gift for my hosts. The ones I had bought in Amsterdam had all been given away in Dhaka.

We are clearly in the China and Japan sphere of influence. The hotel has a Chinese restaurant on the right side of the lobby and a Kobe restaurant on the other side. A confusing shower system comes from Japan. I cannot figure it out. Like so many other Japanese appliances it has lights that flicker and change color but I am clueless about how to take a shower, other than using the handshower that does not seem to be an integral part of the unit but rather an attempt to give us, foreign guests, something that is familiar. The minibar has soybean milk, grass jelly drink, Pulpy C (lychee with jelly and fruit) and Tiger beer. The latter I recognize and am grateful for after the dryness of Dhaka. There are also two large tubs with the ramen noodles and small packages with ‘flavorings’ (variations on salt) that you can pour water over and turn into a meal. That was dinner.

I am now exactly 12 hours ahead of my homeland, which makes it easy to determine what time it is here and there. Next stop is breakfast. I hope it is not French, as the name of the hotel suggests (Le President) but more noodly than that.