In transit (beginning)

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?

Luxe and leisure

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.

Done

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.’

Letting go

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.

Practice

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.

Final stretch

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 clever win

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.

Shame

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.

Coming true

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.

Meeting the excellencies

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.