One year as a VSO and the End of an Era...

Firstly I would like to apologise for the length of time it has taken me to get this out – the last two months had been crazy busy. Starting two new jobs and fitting in a fleeting trip to the UK and Vietnam it has been very busy!

So I have now officially finished with VSO and have left my position as Advisor with CDA. It has been a tough year but it has also been rewarding and has also offered me the chance to meet many wonderful (and not so wonderful)people and see many things that I would not usually be able to do in “normal day” to day life (whatever that is).

I would particularly like to mention the CDA staff who although at times were damn right frustrating tried to make me feel welcome- even if they didn’t always achieve that! I also made some good friends in Samrong many of whom I will not see again – from other NGO staff to the guy who sold bread who one day declared – “bong mut knyom” we are friends and from that day buying bread had to involve a five minute chat and repeated invitations to eat rice with him (err just bought bread!)

Of course the year wouldn’t have been the same without my house mate Emma who put up not only with my rants on community forestry etc but also my messiness and apparent constant ability to break glasses (stone floors and powercuts are gonna get the blame!). I was also really lucky with the other VSO volunteers that I was posted out with and despite what I thought the other VSOs have formed an important network of friends.

As many of you know I have decided to extend my stay in Cambodia with a different organisation. I will have a new blog not associated with my VSO work.

Both I and CDA have come a long way in a year and I wasn’t really sure how best to write a summary of my time there so I have finished up with a few top moments and lessons learnt etc but I will just update a bit on my last few weeks.

Business Training:

So after a bit of a wrangle with CDA/ Oxfam about how best to do this I gave training to some of the staff on how to conduct business training to the “business groups” that had been established. We only had enough resources to give three days training in total and so we decided to concentrate on business planning. By having a clear business plan the CBO’s would therefore have a great start – we would also give them training on basic record keeping and management so that they could stick to the plan.

I enjoyed training the staff on how to do this and we also had some student volunteers from Kampong Cham University and that made things a lot more fun. The training took longer than it would in the field as I had to make sure that not only were the staff happy with all the material and the training methods but also that they were confident to answer a range of questions around the topics covered. I enjoy running workshops and training as you can see people learning and engaging with a topic - maybe I would have enjoyed teaching!

Afterwards I followed this training up with “mentoring” in the field – which basically meant travelling with the team and monitoring their first two training sessions. Although at first there were a lot of nervous glances towards me and Sambou the confidence of the field staff continued to grow and by the end they were doing really well. The groups loved the fact that I was there and rather bizarrely there were even calls for me to dance in one village – I agreed that I would come back when the group had made a thousand dollar profit from their business plan and the small grant supported by Oxfam. They laughed a lot. It is a shame that I cannot be there to see the businesses grow and to offer advice but the training should stand them in good stead. Obviously you can’t teach someone all the theories and tools needed to run a successful business in one day but CDA should hopefully be able to offer some help and advice along the way. I will be very interested to see how they do and of course not all the businesses will be successful but I some of the ideas and levels of planning I heard were very good so I will look forward to hearing how it all goes from the CDA staff.

Leaving Party

CDA threw me a great party when it was time for me and Sambou to leave. There was great food (cooked by the students), beer and the obligatory loud speakers and projected Khmer videos. Beforehand I was a bit worried it would be a bit of a dour affair as our last get together had been a bit of a damp squib – but this was on a whole different level. As well as the CDA staff the local VSOs and a few friends from local NGOs came by. It was really fun and after the food and a fair bit of beer it was time for the khmer style dancing around two chairs. Lots of fun – it was strange that that was my last night and was the last time that I saw everybody but it was definitely a nice way to end although my memories at the end are certainly a bit blurred! Check out some of the photos on my flickr.

EC Land Management Proposal

So I heard yesterday that our Land Management proposal with the provincial governor and a few other NGO’s (ZOA, BFD and CIDO) has been provisionally approved. CDA will be doing the community forestry component and I had great pleasure in helping with this though of course Bernie from ZOA should get a lot of praise for being the driving force.

This is a three year project and includes the protection of three more forest areas in OMC as well as PLUP and CLUP being practiced. I am very happy with this and feel that CDA are in a great position to continue to work in CBNRM in OMC despite what the finances looked like 14 months ago!

Overview of the year:

At times I must admit to have felt like I was going absolutely nowhere and that I was fighting a losing battle, I must also admit that there were times I was working really hard and that I felt completely underappreciated. However during the annual partnership review and over my last few weeks there I saw that I was appreciated and it was a really good feeling that the organisation not only felt that they had moved on but that they recognised that I had played a bigger part than just editing for English.
I guess in any job you have to ask yourself if you are if you are doing well but I think the internal pressure is very high when you have flown to the other side of the world and left a previous existence to be a volunteer – sometimes it’s hard to remember that people have families and commitments that as an international volunteer you just don’t have when you get home.

Looking back on my time there are a few things that really stick out: I made a lot of mistakes particularly early on and there were some mistakes that I never got out of the habit of doing. Things are always a lot more complicated than they first appear. If development and natural resource management were easy then I guess there wouldn’t be so many people trying to do it and do it well.

Small organisations are not always treated as well as they should be by international NGOs. I know I have harped on about this in the past but there is a lot of talk about partnership and working with local organisations and too often it seems like it is a donor – recipient relationship. The capacities of local NGOs are not always at the same level as an INGO but they are not always given the support that they need.

One of the things that I will always be happy with though is the amount of funding that we manage to establish during my time at CDA. When I arrived we had only Oxfam that runs out next year (as did VSO when I left) and occasional funding from what is now Pact. We have added Action Aid, UNDP, Forum Syd, NPA and now the EC – It is now up to CDA to deliver on those and I hope that these INGOs continue to support and help build the capacity of CDA – which is only just beginning to realise its potential.

Things I have learnt on a personal level:

I sometimes need to be less task orientated and take the time to chat with people etc – I did get better at this at work but only a little better! In my culture when you are at work you should be working and anyone who has worked with me in the past knows that I’m pretty good at that!

I learnt so much about development and NRM as intertwined issues - I cannot even begin to get in to it – the complexities of many of the issues are just so unbelievable. During my academic career and particularly during my Masters in Environmental Sustainability I have been convinced in the theory behind a holistic approach but to see the need for it so clearly will really stick with me.

On a professional level the fact that I was a VSO volunteer and well connected with INGO’s/ government departments in Samrong meant I got involved in decision making and invited to meetings that I would never have been invited to in the UK. This has been good experience. I have also had to learn pretty quickly how to do certain things that were never in my job description – such as facilitating proposal writing an education strategy document! (that got approved – boom ting!)

I’ve learnt that I deal with living in rural areas better than a lot people – it was completely different to when I was in South Africa as I didn’t have the constant companionship and it was also completely different to when I lived in Peru. In Peru we had no internet, no phones but we had the rainforest and a million wonders at our doorstep, Samrong was a million miles away from that. No wildlife – too hot or too much of a landmine risk to walk anywhere I thought it was going to be harder than it was. I have always enjoyed reading thanks to my Mum and I think that helps, I am also the kind of person that doesn’t mind my own company (I guess someone had to) and that was lucky as there was occasions where it felt like everybody had left Samrong for the wkd.


Global Education Project ?

Part of the reason for doing this blog was to raise awareness on the sort of issues that VSO aim to combat and the reasons for doing it. I have not been as prolific as I would like on these issues but I hope that the for those of you who have read this (Mum) it has given you some insight in to the sort of issues facing rural Cambodians as well as those facing the organisations who are trying to help individuals to overcome these issues.

I am trying not to sound preachy but so many things in our world are only acceptable because they are hidden from us or we don’t know or can’t understand them. 40% of Cambodians living on less than a dollar a day – just take a minute to think about that as a statistic.

The importance of good management of natural resources as well as more “development” type activities is so important in Cambodia. As most of you reading this will know that I have stayed in Cambodia and are working for another of VSOs partner organisations.

CDA and VSO are both great organisations who do very important work and I am proud to have been associated with them for a year.

Over and Out.

3 Weeks to go!

So this is my penultimate blog on life as a VSO volunteer – I can’t believe how quickly a year has flown by.

CDA has been a big challenge for me but I believe we have made some steps forward. I have not been able to push through all the changes that I’d imagined upon my arrival but in retrospect I don’t think that it was ever truly realistic that I could turn around so many ingrained attitudes, particularly working in a language that I remain very limited in.

However it is very pleasing to see some of the things that CDA are now doing (including our new projects) and the ability to talk about new concepts including a business based approach, sustainable resource use and an integrated development approach to CF areas (albeit not in that language!).

I will do a bit of an overall review when I finish next month when I can take a step back and think about the last year. One thing I’m sure of however is that if I carry on working for NGO’s post Cambodia I will definitely be in a better position to work with local NGO’s and my experience of implementing projects and seeing things from a local NGO perspective has been invaluable as I believe the relationship could be better in so many cases – that’s not just from CDAs perspective but a lot of other NGO’s we work/ socialise with.

So I have not really spoken about the activities of CDA for a while and so let me just briefly go over a few things that we have been up to recently.

Odds and Ends:

I have been helping put together a longer term proposal to set up a child sponsorship program with Action Aid – I have not been heavily involved in this but Action Aid have sent about three different formats through requesting different types of data, plans etc. Bo has looked like a bear with a sore head whenever they have been in touch so I have had to try and explain the increasing complicated formats and questions.

We have started a new research project under our NPA funding in to the impact of Economic Land Concessions on local peoples livelihoods. This is a really big issue and one of the countries “hot topics” and whilst I helped with the initial proposal I have also been advising on the best techniques to use.

We have also started a new project with Forum Syd – between this project and the NPA project the loss of Oxfam money next year will not be as disastrous as had been predicted when I first got here! I have facilitated the design of this project and I am happy with the training and help that Forum Syd atre giving to CDA – I am very hopeful for the partnership (although they do keep taking the staff I want to work with away!!) We have also been working with ZOA and some of the other NGOs on an EC Land Management proposal.

Business Training

As I’ve mentioned before one of the main thing that I have been trying to work with CDA is to try and encourage some more entrepreneurship in our CF communities (of course in an environmentally responsible and sustainable way).

We have managed to convince Oxfam to release some more funds (that’s about the equivalent of getting blood from a stone) to help kickstart some groups as we have only being working with individuals so far. To help the communities we are currently setting up “small business groups” (the name is catchier in Khmer) and we plan to give small business training to these groups. This intervention by Oxfam has actually confused things slightly and I have worked hard to stop CDA just blindly accepting what Oxfam say and to negotiate activities so that they fit with our work and strategic plan – otherwise what’s the point in having them!!??

This issue again partly stems from wider issues. Cambodias recent history is tragic at best and people are used to authoritarian rule – civil society has a long way to go and people are very wary of chains of command. Therefore as a little NGO I have had to show CDA how to try and persuasively put together a case if a donor is being unreasonable – I would like to add I have not always been successful.

Before CDA can do this however I have to train the CDA staff to be able to do this!
We are half way through this process I have done the training but we need to do some follow up next week to ensure it’s made it to the long term memory and then I will go and observe/ be on hand to help the staff for their first forays in to the training. I really enjoy giving training and I make sure my training sessions are very VSO always participatory as I believe people are always going to remember things when they have participated in coming up with the ideas themselves. Unfortunately this does not always sit with how Cambodians expect to be “taught” – all the teaching at school and university is parrot form and I often think that the staff would be happier if I sat them down and put on a boring powerpoint with lots of long words and a “you will go to the village and lecture them on this”.

One of the staff was particularly hard work – the problem is he will be responsible for the most villages and I think I won him over in the end. His bullishness and frequency of complaints and trying to turn everything in to a joke stems from the fact that he is insecure and doesn’t think that he can do whatever I say – however simple I make it.

The truth is you can’t teach someone to run a business (even a small one) in three days but in taking them through the process of planning a business and showing them some simple record keeping I think the business will be given a greater chance of success – it’s a shame I wont be here to watch the businesses grow but I just have to hope that the training that I have done will stand the CDA staff in good stead. With all the work that I have done with them I at least know that they appreciate the basics.

Whatever I do in the future I doubt I will be directly giving business training to communities but it is a good learning experience to be involved in this. I deeply believe in the importance of business and livelihood improvement as a way of ensuring sustainable resource use. However as with anything the practicalities of the implementation of this are difficult. It is reassuring that a year after battling with these I still believe in what I am doing as strongly as ever.

I guess that is why I am actually going to be staying in Cambodia for another 6 months – however this will not be with VSO. More about that next time...

Clean Samrong Day

Waste Management is a problem in many countries and in Cambodia this is no exception. Wherever you go in OMC you find piles of waste that no one takes ownership of. The problem of a build up of rubbish in the market area was particularly obvious with piles of rubbish that had been there apparently festering for about five years. Some users approached NGO workers to see what they could do and so they came to me and we decided to help the community do something about it.

Oddar Meanchey has an Development Association/ NGO network (DA/NGO) and at one of these meetings this was discussed. A meeting was set up to further discuss the problems and what interventions were realistic in the long and short term. Two representatives from Malteser (Juli and Thee) and me formed a small committee which were to take the project further.
It was a long journey to the actual day with lots of meetings with government officials to try and engage them and meetings with other NGO’s, market stall holders, the waste management company etc. However eventually we managed to get a market committee established and a date set. Although it took a while the government eventually supported the day and even decided to expand the original idea from a clean Samrong Market – to a clean Samrong Day with other areas identified and cleaned by different stakeholders – including Monks and schoolchildren!

We also raised funds from NGOs working in the area and wrote a proposal to Greenway for the rest of the funds needed for the day. To try and ensure sustainability we also gave training to the newly formed market committee and some key stakeholders on several things including health and hygiene (Sa Vong from CHHRA was awesome) community organising and how to run a campaign day (yours truly). We also designed and arranged posters, t-shirts and bought Samrong Markets very first public bins!

The Day

The day was a real success with all the stakeholders attending the ceremony and joining in the initial cleaning of the Market. The ceremony highlighted the important work done by all of the partners and plans for the future. The ceremony also was used as an opportunity to further promote the link between hygiene and health. Speeches were made by Government and NGO representatives and were attended by stall owners, users, schools, Monks and NGO workers.

Speech by the Mr Thom Nol from the Municipal Government

Participants during the opening ceremony of the Action Day

After the opening Ceremony there was a morning of cleaning for all volunteers. Cleaning equipment and bags were provided. The rubbish bags were left at set collection points where they were collected by either the hired truck or the truck provided by the waste disposal company.

Participants sweep the Market for rubbish.

All the stakeholders were involved in the picking up of the litter and there was a real sense of community involvement, everyone from the Deputy Governor to the stall owners were involved. It was hard work but people were openly discussing that they didn’t realise how dirty the market was in places.

People load some of the more difficult rubbish on to the truck.


Market stall owners and the paid employees also returned in the afternoon to try and get rid of the more difficult piles of rubbish (see below).

One of the piles of rubbish that had “grown” around the market

The day finished at around 5.30 with the Market considerably cleaner and the new bins in place. The educational material wasn’t all in place but the remaining was put up around the market the next day.


It was so good to see everyone so motivated and the market is a lot nicer place to do your shopping now – people do use the bins but a lot of people do still drop rubbish and the service is just not there to keep it pristine. However I have seen people taking more care of their areas and even saw a women chastise someone for not using the bin – though that may be because they saw me coming! I will get back to some developments with CDA soon – I only have two months left with CDA and I am keen to get a few things finished before I leave! Write again soon!

Some more musings..

The amount that some rural communities rely on the forest is amazing – one village we went in to managed to list 27 Non-Timber Forest Products (anything they collect that isn’t timber). Whilst working in environmental microfinance projects we often describe the forest as a natural bank that people rely on in times of need (chopping down a tree because your daughter is ill and you need to pay hospital fees as an example) however it would be equally as fitting to call it the local shop (Co-op or Spa or even a Londis if you will). These products have a vast array of uses and not least importantly as a nutritious addition to all that rice! However there is more opportunity in the forest than is currently being utilised...

Micro-enterprise:

So a part of my job here is supposed to be to help my organisation facilitate a bit of micro-enterprise in these communities. Entrepeneurship is something that I find very interesting and trying to encourage this in an environmentally responsible way is a challenge – there is not the same entrepreneurial spirit here as in some countries. (I have just started reading a great book called The White Tiger that also talks about Entrepeneurship in India – a fiction but so far it’s very good).

One of my colleagues told me a story that they were discussing with one group of villagers how time consuming producing rice noodles is and how after they have been made you make even less money than if you had sold this as rice. When they looked at this closer and saw it to be true the response was – “but then no one would have rice noodles so we must continue”. I like fresh rice noodles so who am I to complain? This attitude is difficult when explaing a market based approach to development, lol.

Staff and CF members quiz a stallholder in our recent Market Study

Recently we took some of our staff and representatives from our CF communities on a Market Study. This meant travelling to different market centres around OMC and neighbouring areas – seeing the price of different products and what was available. We concentrated on the value of processing as most of our CF members are selling raw materials. The Market Study also helped us to complete Value Chains for important NTFPs so that a more in-depth feasibility study can be conducted with CF members later.

The trip went really well and everyone seemed to be brimming with business ideas and with a sense that things would be possible. There are hurdles to overcome when doing this however and a lack of processing skills and the remoteness of the communities are not insignificant.

We will be giving basic business training over the coming months and we are getting the CFs to identify how they would like to move forward and we may be able to offer small grants for training etc. We have identified some key areas that we work in where with training communities will be able to access markets and have the right NTFPs available within their forest areas. The next steps should be very interesting – the important thing from a “capacity building” point of view is not only the technical skills of how to undertake these processes and give business training (yep I am going to be responsible for that!) but also understanding the importance of proper research the team has seen how some of our initial ideas just wont work in some places. I hope this will lead to improved best practice in the future – not just undertaking activities because the donor wanted some “livelihood activities” etc. Anyway I have rambled on long enough – in my next blog I will talk about our clean Samrong action day that was a great success but leaves us with some more work to do...

A bit more on Community Forestry

Last month CDA had a signing ceremony where the government officially recognised the rights of 9 of our communities to manage their forests. This was a big step for the communities and it was the first time that this agreement had taken place with the help of an NGO and not solely the Forestry Administration (FA) Cantonment in Cambodia. This completed step 6 of community forestry law in Cambodia – with two steps remaining. This has since snowballed with quite a few being granted in Cambodia– which is absolutely fantastic.

Some of the NGO workers/Stakeholders

Whilst this is a great achievement the process is far from finished with two steps remaining (see next paragraph) and the FA Cantonment is also relatively low level of government and there is always the problem that someone higher up in the food chain will decide to get involved. Recently however we did receive a signed document from Hun Sen (Cambodias “strongman” primeminister) for the military to stay out of some of the CF areas they have become increasingly fond of – I think it’s fair to say that the CFMCs were pretty chuffed when we went to the FA office to pick them up.

So the remaining steps –

Step 7 – believe it or not is to create a management plan. It would make sense for the government to have agreed a management plan with the community before they said they could look after it. On the flip side I suppose it doesn’t make sense for the CF communities and the FA to sink resources in until an agreement is in place. Creating a management plan will be a arduous process – they need to conduct an audit of the forests first and this has taken communities three months in Siem Reap province and the CF areas there are approximately 5 to 10 times smaller than the areas here and they have more CF members. It is going to be interesting times. Step 8 then involves 5 years of Monitoring and Evaluation by the FA. The CF members are going to have to be very careful during this time as it does not appear that pressure on the land from external forces is going to diminish anytime so I cannot see the competing pressures for land diminishing in the near future. Civil society and advocacy is growing stronger in Cambodia but they are a long way off ensuring no dodgy dealings! But – then again who am I to say anything when the MPs who are responsible for safeguarding my taxes in the “developed” country that I live in have been caught fiddling!

Another potential problem is any changes to the law or a change of strategy from Government will still leave the CF areas vulnerable. Apparently CFO are currently trying to establish more steps so that the livelihoods of community foresters are also taken in to consideration. I am torn when I hear this because although in theory a great idea but the more steps there are the harder it is for communities to pass the test and if it puts the communities.

Handing over of the agreements

Nine months in I still have really mixed feelings about CF – it has massive potential and some of the communities seem to be really motivated – however it is not an easy process and the competing pressures make it very difficult for the communities to stay motivated. The process will get even more complicated as CDA try to facilitate a process whereby the forests are sustainably managed and to the benefit of the whole community. This is a process that we have started working on a bit more since I came to work for CDA and I will talk about that a bit more in my next blog (sooner this time I promise).

9 CF areas

In summary the recognition of the CF areas is an important step and it’s a good time to recognise this achievement but also that the work has only just begun. As I have a masters in it I also feel it’s time I should write a bit about the sustainability of our projects but also within the development context as it is a word that is banded about a lot by NGOs here but achieving sustainable change in an ever changing country (world?) is a very different proposition. But more of that for another day....

HAPPY KHMER NEW YEAR!!

So my organisation break up for Khmer New Year tomorrow - so I have 10 days off (including wkds). This is a bit of a treat and my parents have come to visit so am really looking forward to taking a break. I enjoy the work up here and I even learned to appreciate living in Samrong a bit - a break is always good!

This week everything is slowing down to absolute snails pace - a lot of people have finnished work already and there is a real holiday feel about the place (although our field staff have just got back from a good stint of fieldwork - good job So Cheat et al). In the daytime Samroang seems even quieter than usual and at night you can hear the parties going on. Work is very laid back and there is even more sitting around and general chatting than normal. In my review I think that they were saying that I should join in more in this as normally I only sit for a few minutes (generally the first 20 minutes and then the same again mid-morning) but there is only so much time I can follow in Khmer so I have been trying to join in in this general sitting around and to be fair I have picked up on a few things that I may have been oblivious to otherwise. In VSO training we cover the importance of joining in with your colleagues and I always sit down and chat for a bit and do a lot of smiling when I can't follow the conversation but as work has got busier the temptation to try and just get on with it is very tempting - but, not very culturally sensitive! I often have to try and go against my natural instinct in how to deal with a situation here and try and look at things from a Cambodian perspective - I'm getting better at this but there is significant room for improvement.

Picking up my parents over the weekend was very strange - Bangkok was closer to my London life than Samroang and seeing my parents in the setting was very strange. They then came to Samroang and I hope they enjoyed it even though the weather was bad - Dad seemed to like driving a Moto anyway!!

A few more thoughts...

This week has flown by again despite a couple of quiet days – though they were good for catching up with some paper work and spending some time with the staff. I also had my placement review this week which went fine. Everyone knew the plan for the next 6 months as we had already redone this recently due to all our delays etc so I think VSO were reasonably impressed.

An interesting comment went as follows (roughly translated from Khmer) “Going out to the villages with James is really good as we always get a really good attendance at the meetings – everyone wants to see the white man with the beard” . So even if we don’t achieve anything during my time hear my poor excuse for a ‘beard’ pulls in a crowd.

(me)

Anyway so here are a few things that have been on my mind:

Partnership

VSO works by placing volunteers in organisations that it partners with – it is a needs based organisation and volunteers are found for placements and not the other way around. I have noticed since my time in Cambodia that there are very different ways that organisations ‘partner’. I certainly know that we have worked with people that CDA staff refer to as ‘the donor’ whereas having read ‘the donors’ literature they describe CDA as partners!
Whilst the VSO model cannot possibly be for every organisation I think that “partnerships” with local NGO’s can certainly be strengthened, well that is my experience with CDA. Oxfam seem to have recently realised this and have spent some more time working with my organisation but there appears to have been so much more opportunity for shared learning between the partners of this EC project (including VSO) and that is a great shame that this hasn’t happened more.
Another thing that any good development project also does is make sure that any results are sustainable when the implementing agency has gone – so unfortunately the CFs are not quite there yet. CDA will also evolve too and we are looking for that next pot of money to continue the work but it is tough and any proposal needs to be tailored.

(some PRA)

Finances

One of the problems with being small is that you are constantly looking at where the next pot of money is going to come from (not just small NGO’s of course, but larger ones have departments for this and well you and me have job-sites!). This is something that CDA are having to come to terms with, given that there long term benefactors OXFAM GB look like they wont have the funds to fund them post 2010.


Inevitably a lot of the time of the director and subsequently myself is looking in to new potential funders, projects etc. I have found that I really like helping write proposals. I like the problem analysis aspects and the geek in me quite likes the test of “passing the exam and hitting the right buttons”.


I obviously only hear it from one side but getting money from Oxfam appears to be like getting blood from a stone – even our supposed regular payments are often late (apparently once 3 months late) which for an international NGO is plain ludicrous. The recent suggestion from them that we use our field budget for a signing ceremony was also strange- CDAs response that they could go and sleep for three months if we did, that was quite good I thought.


Of course there are always reasons for these problems but when we have to seriously limit our activities and everything is taking so long – I have serious doubts whether we will complete our fancy new plan as there always seems to be something. Khmers seem to always want to please you too and quite often I get the impression that they are telling me what I want to hear – even when I repeatedly quiz them on this. A good example of this was Khmer New Year – I was told one thing about the time people would be taking off and then when we were talking about it informally I found out a lot of the staff will be gone for nearly a month!!


But we will try and at least CDA are taking livelihood components of their contract seriously and trying to do them well.

(a community forester takes a drink from one of the streams in a CF area)

6 months in


So I have been in Cambodia for over 6 months now and it seems like a good time to have a bit of an evaluation of achievements and try and make some realistic plans for the rest of my contract with CDA . We did this as a team but I also need to spend a bit of time thinking about what I can realistically achieve. I have been busy recently but the imminent Khmer New Year and my parents coming over for a holiday will be a good time to reflect.


I am disappointed over my Khmer ability and despite being able to get by I do want to work harder on this as some of my most rewarding moments have been whilst speaking the lingo.
I guess it’s also time to start thinking about what to do next – I have no idea and have so many conflicting emotions that I am really not sure what I will do – this will not surprise anyone who knows me well.

A bit of an update

It has been an embarrassingly long time since my last blog so I’m sorry if this is a long one – but a lot has happened in the past couple of months.

I feel well and truly established as CDAs “Barang” and although I have “what the hell am I doing here days/weeks” and there are so enough frustrations here to test my patience is daily. However, there have been some really worthwhile moments and I do now think that CDA staff and the organisation are changing some of their practices and doing some good things that they would definitely not be attempting if I wasn’t here and the absolute minimum of an hour a day that they spend laughing at me a day must make people feel good, right?

I feel as though we are beginning to make some progress on the “livelihood front” which is great and really exciting. However, my whole organisation has seen the accreditation of our Community Forestry (CF) areas as the goal for so long and it is hard for them to look beyond this. This is not to underestimate the importance of the CF agreement, it is vital for the long term future and sustainability of the initiatives. However livelihood activities have been seen as something to do on the side – or as the project is coming to an end, when in reality it is fundamental to the long term success of community forestry and poverty reduction. If the communities cannot learn to use the forest in a profitable and sustainable way then the community forestry will fail eventually (sooner rather than later). This is something that we are starting to help with although I obviously don’t expect that this is something that will be “sorted” in my time here but we hope to set some solid foundations and make some small sustainable (yeah yeah) changes.

Trying to shift the focus of the organisation is a major challenge, particularly as there is still someway to go till the CF areas are fully accredited despite the groundbreaking result when the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) signed the CT areas.( Hopefully there wont be many objections and we can have the signing ceremony soon!) There is the real temptation for them to rush the current livelihood component as they are looking towards the end of the Oxfam contract and they want to get as far with the agreements as possible, also working on CF agreements is “what they do”. Part of my job is to emphasise the importance of this livelihood component (and provide them with the technical training), which is something that I passionately believe in so I hope that this is beginning to rub off!

So due to my poor efforts at blog writing I have basically written a couple of blog entries in one but will post these in two sections, the first covers planning and my experiences (or lack of) this in Cambodia.

PLANNING

Planning is something that I am trying to get CDA to invest more time, the problem is a lot of the fieldwork is reactionary, I’ve lost count of the times I was supposed to be working with someone and they have disappeared off to one of our areas. Although this is sometimes needed it needs to be accompanied by good medium to long term planning. We do have plans in place that are generally drawn up at a proposal stage but there has been very limited updating of these, even when running behind schedule.

My problem with getting CDA to commit to any type of planning is not something that is unique to my experience in Cambodia and the decision to do things last minute is something that I and other volunteers struggle with. Decisions to do things seem to happen almost the evening before and although this seems to be accentuated by the fact that my Khmer is atrocious it never seems out of the ordinary that a meeting has been changed.

Playing the development game...

Another problem that CDA has to deal with when planning is its size, CDA is a small NGO – we normally have between about 8-14 staff (plus me) on the books at any one time and some of these are “volunteers” who are essentially non-permanent staff who only get paid to come to work when we are busy. His is compounded by the pull of bigger NGO’s in Siem Reap (let’s be honest, who wouldn’t be tempted? Although I doubt that the need for a regular cheese supply would be their main reason for contemplating a move to Siem Reap).

CDA are also at the whim of the international agencies and this has been highlighted in a couple of ways recently with our financing being held up for a month (admittedly due to some inconsistencies in our accounts that needed clearing up). This was a really hard time, trying to keep peoples spirits up when they hadn’t been paid and had no money to go to the villages and continue our work. A hard time for staff with families.

A month’s work was then given to CDA by CFI which basically occupied our field staff for a whole month- I have serious doubts over the sustainability of some of the work and the approach to it. I know CDA didn’t have to take it is difficult to say no when you are trying to build a partnership. We have since been busy with various visitors for evaluation/ proposal writing, due to the size of our organisation this always seems to stop virtually everything for a few days. This has been good in one way because we have had some good ideas and input but on the other hand we are behind where we wanted to be in terms of building on the livelihood component for our community forestry projects. I have also been really busy and have barely had time to catch my breath which has made a change from a lot of my beginning time in sleepy Samrong!

One of the reasons that I decided to volunteer with VSO was because it offers a unique opportunity to work at a real “grass roots” level – to encounter firsthand and use my skills to help an organisation deal with the real problems in my niche of development/ environment work – if I do end up working in this area in the future I hope that this will enable me to make decisions that make life easier for small NGOs such as CDA. I will talk further about the need for partnership in my next blog, which will, I assure you come a lot lot quicker.

On a lighter note I paid about 40p for a haircut yesterday and I have to say you get what you pay for, most young Cambodians have good hair but something, not for the first, or last, time seems to have been lost in translation.

If you want to see some photos of Samrong please check out:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesincambodia/