I met Bora on my first day in Cambodia. He looks like the prototype young associate you'd see in financial districts the world over: slightly built and smartly dressed, with short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, an easy smile and earnest, eager eyes. His work schedule would make any young investment banker jealous; he's only in the office 20 percent of the time, spending the remaining 80 percent in the field with clients.
Bora's boss, Vichetr Uon (pronounced "vee-chet"), was born in 1979, a time of great strife in the former Khmer Empire. A young man by Western standards, Vichetr's considered old in Cambodia, where as many as three million people of his father's era were murdered by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, eviscerating an entire generation of intellectuals and leaders whose ideas threatened its existence. Vichetr's father was one of the victims.
Bora and Vichetr live and work in Kampong Speu, an outpost an hour outside Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. It's a quick drive out National Highway Four, past the textile factories where Old Navy t-shirts are made for pennies, where rules of the road are merely suggestions, and scooters zip by carrying entire families of four. On one bike.
That's where you see the real Cambodia, tucked away from the main road. A vast maze of dirt roads delivers you to the villages, where 80 percent of the nation's population lives in a kind of squalor tough to comprehend for a Westerner like me. Dirty green ponds supply drinking water; skinny white cows mill about next to the ramshackle huts the families call home, staring longingly at the mangoes and rice and whatever else is for dinner that day. And then there are the kids. Everywhere kids. Five of them for every adult. Data here are murky, but somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the population is under the age of 22, a sobering reminder of the Khmer Rouge's genocide.
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This is where Bora spends 80 percent of his time. He works for Vichetr's Sao Sary Foundation (SSF), doing the kind of work this country desperately needs. Together, they spend their days drilling wells in villages and installing water filters in huts, bringing families clean drinking water for the first time. They rescue kids from families who can't afford them and put them in school instead; saving them from being sold as forced laborers or tragic suppliers of the world's oldest profession. Vichetr educates villagers on basic concepts like saving for tomorrow - literally tomorrow, the day after today - to lessen the crippling grip loan sharks have on the village population.
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| Vichetr teaching villagers about basic budgeting |
And all of this comes for a price. If the villagers don't maintain their wells and filters, they lose them. Vichetr realizes that merely handing out things for free won't kill the fatalism that pervades in Cambodian society. He knows the path forward involves education, helping people create new habits that could turn around a culture whose people can't help but feel like the losers of a global game of wealth and security. Both Vichetr and Bora have an impressive work ethic, and each admits to crying sometimes when villagers don't hold up their end of the bargain, allowing their filters to fall into disrepair.
But that doesn't deter them. It just means the work is nowhere near complete.
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| Bora and a BioSand filter |
GO to Kampong Speu
Last Sunday, I met up in Phnom Penh with a delegation from Groundwork Opportunities, a San Francisco-based nonprofit with a simple, ambitious mission: to end extreme poverty. Founded and run by Bart Skorupa and Jenny O'Connor, GO scours the developing world for social entrepreneurs just like Vichetr: locals who are working in their homelands to combat poverty. Their model is relatively simple. Find people who are doing good work but need money and material support, and pair them with champions in the West who help provide those things. Unlike some NGOs who fly in and out without much follow-up, GO focuses on the data, making sure to track the results of every dollar donated, and guarantees that all donations make it to the field. Overhead is handled separately. A couple of times a year, Jenny and Bart bring groups to meet their partners on the ground and see the work they're doing. There's no special qualification to join the trip ("just an open heart and an open mind," Bart told me when I met him for lunch earlier this year), and while several members of our 13-person team had already done something tangible to support GO's work, I merely tagged along to see what it was all about.
And this is how I spent the week. Watching guys in t-shirts and bare feet install wells in villages while skeptical kids looked on. Helping build and install BioSand filters, miraculous little cement boxes that kill the bacteria in well water, bringing for the first time drinking water to huts that previously had to lug buckets of water from dirty ponds and boil it to make it safe. I stayed at a guest house started by SSF, where girls rescued from a future as sex workers are taught the hospitality business. I taught an English class in a village outside Siem Reap, at a school started by a Cambodian named Vey Lav in 2006; it's supported by Western donors and fees Vey ("way") earns from his tour guide business. I ate lunches in villages prepared with care by host families, eating unpeeled bananas and mangoes, chicken that was mostly bone, and ants. Yeah. Ants.
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| WATER! |
And maybe I destroyed a perfectly good rough silk shirt, a highly traditional fabric in these parts. But that's a story for another time.
Elma School, Siem Reap
Vey is an entertainer; frankly, it'd be more efficient if - like the Joker - his mouth constantly formed a smile, because that's what he's doing most of the time. He hadn't even met our whole group before he was climbing a palm tree and bringing us its juice to drink. He wrapped a scarf around his head for a photo op, then perched dark shades on the face of a 60-year old village woman for a photo of her own. One day, when we all grabbed lunch on the long bus ride to his hometown of Siem Reap, we'd barely gotten our food when he grabbed his plate and thrust it in the face of a total stranger, lest they miss the chance to smell the fish he ordered.
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| Vey being Vey |
Vey studied English literature in University - his favorite book and movie are both Love Story, "Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal, so lovely" - and that's where he got the idea to teach English to the kids of his hometown. His school doesn't look like much: just two small cement buildings, three classrooms, a library, and a courtyard where the kids play soccer and volleyball. But here the staff teaches English to 288 students out of donated books with donated pencils, markers, and white boards. Say what you will about cultural imperialism, but learning English, in today's world, means one essential thing: opportunity.
The kids here are the same as kids anywhere. Quick to pick up new concepts. Always ready to laugh. Much better than me at paper, rock, scissors. Huge fans of Angry Birds, even though there's no chance they've ever held a smart phone, let alone played the game. Pure, innocent, ready to be molded; generally well behaved, afraid to make mistakes in front of their friends. You know, kids.
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| Class, repeat after me: "Hello, my name is Kevin" |
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| Kids, presumably not named Kevin |
A few years ago, I did a six-week course with Junior Achievement in San Francisco, teaching second graders at a school in Chinatown the basic economic concepts "want" and "need." We'd show them pictures of things they could buy and ask them to identify which it was. Water? Need. Playstation 3? Want. Cheeseburger? Want/need, and so on. Standing in front of the kids at Elma School, kids who farm half the day and go to school the other half, who opt to spend an additional hour at Elma so they can learn English, who live with their families in huts the size of my living room and count toilets and t-shirts among their extravagances, who aspire to be tour guides and teachers and anything but beggars and sex workers, I was reminded of that lesson I gave about wants and needs. Only this time the kids were teaching me.
Cambodia's Future
Vichetr, Bora, and Vey are the Sergey Brins and Steve Jobs' of Cambodia, the bold visionaries who see a problem and dare to try and solve it. They're Indiana Jones in that cave searching for the Holy Grail, stepping blindly into the great divide, having faith there's a hidden rock or something there to land on, knowing that falling into the crevice is better than turning around and walking away.
Sometimes, when he's not laughing, transitioning into a British accent to crack a joke, or spontaneously climbing a tree, Vey's demeanor changes, his voice gets lower, his eyes fix on a spot in the distance instead of darting around to make sure he sees everything in the room. He starts to talk about Cambodia, about the political challenges of de facto single-party rule, of stagnating nepotism and history books that scrape away entire sections of Khmer's plight. "Sometimes I lose hope for today's kids," he told me one night. "They'll never know what happened here. History is told by the winner and we didn't win."
I know I've only been here a week. I didn't know anything about Cambodia a week ago, and I still don't know much now. I know nothing about the leadership vacuum created by Pol Pot's genocide, or the cultural forces that kept this country poor while much of the world got rich. I know nothing about the post-Khmer Rouge agreements that Vey thinks ceded too much power to Vietnam, potentially shielding kids from a history they should learn so there's no chance it gets repeated. And I've seen only a tiny glimpse of their problems.
But I do know this. There is hope for these kids. I'm not naive; I know the incremental nature of change means we're generations away from a fully-developed Cambodia. But Bora and Vichetr and Vey grew up here. They're products of the very system that, in their more defeated moments, each can sometimes doubt. And they're taking it upon themselves to change it, one step at a time.
I have a few ideas on how to help, and Bart and Jenny have identified several projects that need support. When I get home in the fall, I'm probably going to ask you to give us a hand. Stay tuned for details.
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| Aim high |
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| Building filters |
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| Delicious ants |
In Thailand now. Scuba school all week.
Until next time…
