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/