(I wrote this piece about two weeks ago while in Cambodia but hadn’t gotten around to posting yet….)

Today I was in a taxi with seven Cambodian men. Usually a taxi sells out at eight people: four in the back, two in the front passenger seat, and one more paying customer sharing the seat with the driver. Fortunately, today our driver was seat-mate-less, so I could be less worried about us crashing.

I could have paid just a few more dollars and gotten the whole front seat or even a whole car, as I had the day before when heading to another town. It’s easy to do that – and easy to justify it in the name of comfort, productivity, or minimal cost. But this was a ride to work that our team would take regularly, and I often had internal struggles about this: just because I could “easily” take a less packed car and make the choice to spend more of my own money to do that when others might not be able to/choose to, did it make it “right” when I did? I could justify it to myself either way. I would sometimes pay more and take a more comfortable option – and then feel guilty – or try to make up my own rules for myself as to when choosing “comfort”, when it might look to others like I was wasting money, was ok. It’s hard to police yourself within your own ethics and goals sometimes.

So there I was, the only female in the car. They gave me a little more space in the back, though of course all of the eyes were on me and the questions: How old are you? Are you married? Where are you from? How long have you lived in Cambodia? Why did you ever leave America to come to Cambodia?

I could feel my brain starting to hurt and my wall starting to go up. Rather than smiling, I started to stare out the window as I answered, hoping the repetitive questions, which I had gotten so accustomed to when living here, would subside.

One of the passengers also wanted to practice his English (which he learned on a course in Siem Reap in 1996, he proudly told me). It was a good chance for him to practice, and I was a captive audience, so on he went. His daughter is in 7^th grade. She goes to school in Kralanh, the main town in the area where PEPY works. But since PEPY doesn’t work in Kralanh and only in the countryside, he wishes his daughter could go to the countryside to learn (ironic). Would I teach her?

I had to explain that a) I am not a teacher and that all our teaching staff are Khmer, so his hopes of the American accent he wanted his daughter to have were probably not going to come from PEPY and b) that I don’t actually live here anymore anyway. When I told them all I was now living in the UK, they all nodded and concurred that that seemed more reasonable of a choice. I tried to explain that it is cold and rainy there and that if we were measuring on a scale of reasonableness, it would seem bloody unreasonable that anyone would choose to set up a nation or home in such a chilly & wet place in a world where Cambodia or other warm locations was an option. But that didn’t seem to sink in – and I didn’t feel like getting into a discussion around the pros and cons of what they deemed “development”. Plus, one of them had just sent his sister off the month before to Canada on one of those “buy a bride” type schemes. She didn’t know the man, but he was Khmer-Canadian and had come over and picked her out as his wife. She was lucky, he told me. She gets to move to Canada, he said, looking both proud and jealous.

I went back to starting out the window and picturing this young Khmer girl off in hopes of a wonderful life. I hope she IS lucky, I thought, and that her husband is nice and treats her well and that she doesn’t get frostbite and that life isn’t harder for her there than it is here. I decided to let the dream of these wonderful foreign countries live this time and not share my thoughts about how family structures have eroded in these so called “developed” countries they dream of sending their kids to, or how we could learn a lot from rural Cambodian society where spending even a few dollars on a bigger seat seemed wasteful, and instead I looked back out the window. I am sure Montreal is treating her well. And she is indeed learning French as she had dreamed. And that her brother sitting next to me would get to visit some day. And that in doing so, when he returned, he’d also see the beauty in his own country with new eyes.

In business school you are surrounded by people who believe in the power of markets. There are people in my class who are passionate about freeing markets, about scaling enterprises, and about generating profits. Yet some of those SAME people are advocates of giving things away in development work. I have had countless discussions with people who see “aid” as the only way to help “the poor”, and debate with me about why that aid needs to give things away.

I am in Cambodia for a few weeks meeting with our team at PEPY (more for my good than theirs, as I missed them and couldn’t stand being away too long!). Standford University’s MBA program just came through on a learning trip and met with our team at PEPY Tours and I joined for the day as I always enjoy meeting with students, especially groups like this looking to discuss social enterprise. This time, I got into yet another discussion over dinner with an MBA student who was holding the position that if you don’t give things away, you can’t reach all of the people who need it now.

One of her arguments was that “since people don’t have things now, the distribution channels clearly don’t exist to get them what they need.” The problem is, aid is much worse at creating distribution channels, especially long term ones, and any that do exist will be destroyed by giving that same product away. When will our MBA programs start teaching that business is “your country” is based on the same principals as business in “their country”? Imagine if you started your next software company or organic farm or hedge fund, and someone started giving away the exact same goods or services for free to provide aid to the people of America (which, as we all know from our debt levels, we might well need). I bet those MBA’s would be less excited about giving things away if it was their business that was at stake.

Take eggs in Rwanda. This is a fabulous two minute video highlighting an example of a distribution system being destroyed by aid:

I have been away from Cambodia for only 4 months and all of a sudden there are hundreds of small kids bikes with back racks all over the rural country side. I have seen so many aid organization’s bike projects over the years designing “the best new bike for ‘the poor’” and here is a basic small Chinese-made bike which is nearly perfect for the needs and finally reaching these so called “poor”. And why are they everywhere? Not because someone gave them away. I should know, as PEPY used to have a small bike scholarship program in the area before – probably harming markets and surely delaying the purchase of bikes like these. Fortunately we stuck around long enough to learn that we needed to be investing time in people rather than giving away bikes. These small bikes I see today are not available now because of aid but because someone is making money off of selling them and therefor has found a way to make sure that they are available far and wide… and I bet that person didn’t even need an MBA to figure that out.

I was just reminded about a friend, with whom I used to work, who wakes up every morning* and turns to whomever first crosses his path and says:

“Good morning! It’s a great day to be alive!”

And, if you wake up near him at a campsite for a few days in a row you soon realize that, indeed, it always is.

When people ask me why I chose to work in Cambodia, I almost always say “Why not?”  And when they give me a look that implies that they really do want to hear a longer reason, I usually ramble on a bit about change, and how it is palpable in Cambodia: forward, backward, and side-ward, but always some-ward. For a stagnant-a-phobe, Cambodia is a great place to be. It’s in motion and being in a place in motion means you can feed off of and into the momentum around you. I imagine working on the Thai/Burma border, with adults who have spent their ENTIRE lives in refugee camps, or in the consistent undulation of the Gaza disputes could be harder. In Cambodia, progress might sometimes seem slow or misdirected, but at least it does always feel like it is moving.

If you ask me on a verbose day (which is probably about a good 360 of the year), I might also tell you about a quote someone said to me on my first visit to Cambodia in 2002. “It’s a great time to be alive in Cambodia,” was part of her answer about why she loved her job. Alive… and time. Post 1979, after the Khmer Rouge had attempted to turn back time and when nearly a quarter of the population had died or were about to from starvation or ongoing fighting, Cambodia today seems like heaven. How does corruption effect you? “Well, it’s better than before,” she says. So indeed, it IS a great time to be alive in Cambodia, and it shows.

So perhaps that is part of why I chose to stay in Cambodia. And perhaps that is something I got out of living there, and out of Tim’s daily mantra. Today IS a great day to be alive. Now let’s go prove it

This is a guest blog post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project. Before I left Cambodia, Allie took over the TEDxPhnomPenh license and recently organized a team to execute Cambodia’s second TEDx event. Below she describes our motives for starting this event in the first place, how doing something “for the local people” only works if it is “with”, and how the juxtaposition of expat and local development workers can lead to interesting personal insights.

I am sad that I missed this second TEDxPhnomPenh event, but I’m proud of the team that put it together and I love learning about the impact it is continuing to make. Read on to learn about Allie’s journey through this process!

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From the start, TEDxPhnomPenh was about bringing the TED brand – ideas worth spreading – to Cambodia, where we thought young people were hungry for the opportunity to share, question, challenge, explore and create. Our version of TEDx was centered around young Cambodians and what the event might mean to them.

Executing the event the first time, we had a room full of 120 people who experienced 12 amazing TEDxTalks. The audience, we estimate, was 70 – 75% Khmer.

We just recently organized the second TEDx in Cambodia. This time we wanted to expand the brand, and include more people in the TEDxPP experience. So we got busy planning a second event – a simulcast event – and set up a team to execute that, while the team for the live event stayed busy coaching speakers, counting tickets, and dressing up the space so it was camera ready.

Two weeks before the event, the MC, Vanna Sann asked me to lunch. Everyone loved having Vanna as the MC. He is well-spoken, articulate, clever and totally in tune with the event and what we were trying to do.

He had seen the ticketing spreadsheets; the entries showed over 75% Western attendees. We had set up a system that required people to electronically submit for a ticket. We thought the system would run itself, as long as we promoted via Khmer media channels. With all of the rest of the planning going on, I had not been carefully monitoring the results.

What I had not expected was that the young Khmer population at whom we were targeting the event would not be as quick to register as their Western counterparts.  Vanna was brutally honest: “I’m not doing this so that I can look out onto that audience and see a bunch of Western faces.”

Sitting at the lunch table, it felt like he was taking my internal conflicts about who I want to be in Cambodia versus who I am comfortable being, and throwing them back. It is easy to be a foreigner working in development in Phnom Penh; it’s a lot harder to push past the immediate comforts of lovely restaurants, great bars, and a lively social life – to create something enduring in a culture that I am still learning about.

I got back to the office, turned a sheet of paper over, and scribbled on the back:

Collaboration & Openness
Empowering People/Providing Opportunities
Creativity
Innovation

Seeing those words in print changed something. Over the next two weeks, we went into the database and reworked the ticketing, bringing us to 60% Khmer attendance by the time the event came around. We lost one MC, but gained another: Thul Rithy. Charismatic, funny, clever and sarcastic: he was amazing. Now he will go on to continue to lead KhmerTalks, which he founded as a way to spread the TED experience in Khmer. KhmerTalks returns to Phnom Penh on February 25^th. His participation in both events brings the ‘ideas worth spreading’ movement forward significantly.

In the end, the event went off without any major glitches. The stage that day hosted 14 talks including speakers came from America, Australia, Cambodia, India, New Zealand, Spain and Singapore.

One of my favorites was Khiev Kosal. Convicted of attempted murder at age 16, he grew up in a prison system in the US that somehow allowed him to find his voice. After being deported to Cambodia upon release, he now shares his poetry via spoken word. As he got off the stage, one of our technicians was in tears. They embraced for a long time; as others crowded around to congratulate him on what had been an enormously commanding 18 minutes, they held close – complete strangers – both sharing something powerful with the other.

I knew leading TEDxPhnomPenh would challenge me. I didn’t expect the challenge to be so personal. Am I changed? I think so. I find myself looking at the hiring process at Pari differently, asking different questions to potential clients, staying longer in certain conversations, migrating to different people in social settings. Will it last? Here’s hoping.

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This was a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project.

Everyone wants to “support girls”. Being a girl myself, I think that is great and all…. but let’s not forget the boys! In Cambodia, there are many sectors which only provide jobs to women: many garment factories only employ women for their line jobs, there are many silk weaving programs and NGO interventions targeting women’s skills training, and a few years ago I visited a crab canning factory in Kep which only employed women as well. Come to think of it, a lot of time the people who are employed to flatten the salt flats in Kep are also all women (with male supervisors pushing them on, but that’s another post…).

Yet there are very few employment options for young men. This leads to a culture in the cities where men sit on street corners (if I want to further a stereotype, or perhaps a generalization, I would add “playing cards”), waiting for someone to come by who wants to hire them for a motorbike ride. Many of these young men would like to find employment, but with such a young population and high unemployment rates, sitting on a ‘moto’ waiting all day for a customer is the best option they have found.

The Iron Workshop/The Craft House in Siem Reap is now doing men-only skills training in jobs like iron work, brick laying, plumbing, air-conditioning repair, etc. We partnered with them at PEPY to support their expansion and we’re hoping this organization focused on investing time in people will help more young men in Cambodia find gainful employment and empower them to continue to share their new skills with others.

So, next time I get an email saying “and we’d like to support education for girls”, I’ll remind them that boys need education to connect them to the skills they need to reach their goals too!

About a year ago, I went to TEDx in Bangkok with my friend and co-worker, Rithy, and immediately afterwards we decided that we wanted to organize at TEDx event in Cambodia.  One year later, with a team of 7 other fabulous people, we helped bring TEDx to Phnom Penh for the first time.

Our goals had been to be part of a movement to bring idea sharing type events to Cambodia but mostly to connect with young Khmer students and leaders.  Rithy started a group called Khmer Young Entrepreneurs (KYE) and they are going to organize Khmer Talks, an idea sharing forum by young Khmer leaders, for young Khmer leaders.  I can’t wait to see it happen!

Rather than give you all a breakdown of the TEDxPhnomPenh day, I’m just going to link you to a post by one of the attendees, Leigh, as she did a better job describing the day than I could do anyway!  Read up, and enjoy!

For the most part, my life in Cambodia is not nearly as “exotic” as people living in cities like Chicago and Cleveland might think it is. I ride my bike around our small town, I work in an office with cement walls (though of course the lack of air-conditioning and high temperatures can make it interesting at times), and I order the same things at the restaurant at the end of my road.

Overall, though, things are pretty easy here, unlike what many think. Take, for example, the time I broke a pair of sunglasses. Actually broke them—snapped the frame in two. In the US I could have spent money to send them somewhere where they would inevitably get lost or I would get told it would cost more to fix them than to buy new ones, and I’d be lucky if I saw them again in a few months. Here, I walk to the end of the road and for 6 and a quarter cents someone welds them together for me in less than a minute.

Our bio-diesel truck broke the other day. The number of parts we needed to replace would mean considering the car totaled in the US. It cost us less than $400 to fix the truck and fix it well.

Overall, it is pretty easy to get things done here. Life is not “hard”.

But then random things happen, like the time an ant colony set up house inside my computer and my screen went black as hundreds of little ants emerged between the keys. The man at the computer shop who fixed it said, “Oh, that again. Ants ate your motherboard too?”  Turns out he was able to fix the computer for a few dollars with a quick clean of the computer innards, and tada! I was back typing away, ant-free, in no time.

Then more difficult stuff happens that makes you depressed, annoyed, angry about being here. . . and all of the rest of the “ease” of living in Cambodia doesn’t seem all that easy any more. A few weeks ago, when I was staying in Phnom Penh with a group of teachers who were visiting Cambodia to learn about development issues, I woke up, and my phone as gone, as were two other phones from the other instructors staying the room. Someone had stolen our phones WHILE we were sleeping. Yikes!

I ran downstairs in my pajamas, upset that I would be losing the phone number I had had for 5 years and feeling strange that someone had been in my room while I was sleeping. I told the men behind the desk that I assumed it was someone with the key to our room, as I know I had locked the door, and they set about trying to find out what happened.

It turns out the guesthouse had video surveillance, and the person who had picked the lock was the prostitute staying with the older Australian man across the hall. When the staff came to knock on the door to try to get the phones back, the Aussie said, “She stole phones?!” then turned to her and said, “That is disgusting.” Too bad we were all too flustered by the situation to tell him that HE was disgusting.

The poor girl. Ugh—it broke my heart. She was clearly not a professional thief, or she wouldn’t have walked over two laptop computers before stealing our cheap and old phones. She let me come into the room and asked everyone else to leave and then gave me back our phones, while crying and holding my feet, saying she was supposed to leave that day to see her sick mother and she needed the money and she was so, so sorry. Sobbing. Both of us. Broke my heart. I told them not to arrest her. The hotel did anyway when she went downstairs. She won’t get a fair trial. It’s Cambodia afterall, and life here ISN’T easy for most. You can buy whatever you want: a computer cleaning, glasses fixing, ANYTHING. . . IF you have the money. If you don’t you will sit in jail, because you tried to steal a phone to get some cash to see your mother. And the man who bought you, the guy who has all the choices in the world, sits there, takes out cash to give to you (as he has been with you for the last few days and owes you money), and then puts the cash back into his wallet and says, “You have been a bad, bad girl for stealing their things!” and walks away.

It’s a pretty freakin’ hard place to live afterall.