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/