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.