I wrote a piece for the PEPY Newsletter this month about a failure we had at one of our programs at PEPY and I thought I would share it here as well. I just realized that we should also post it on the Admitting Failures website – a site I have tweeted about before and really appreciate. One of my cohort through the Skoll program at Oxford is David Damberger who helped create the site through Engineers Without Borders (and here is a TEDx talk he did on the subject of failure). I’m excited to have a chance to study with others who believe that admitting failures and lessons learned is a way to improve our global impact!

Failing: A story of forgetting our own lessons at PEPY

Sometimes, even when we know the right thing to do, we fail to do it. We do this with seatbelts, diets, speeding, and love, and as it turns out, we sometimes do this with PEPY programs too.

Recently one of our programs faced a failure which should have been avoidable but which will hopefully help us set better systems in place to avoid similar problems in the future.

You might have read about our “Saw Aw Saw” program, the arm of PEPY which partners with communities to help them create and implement plans to improve their government primary schools.

To build more long-term sustainability into the program (click here to learn how we define “sustainability” at PEPY), SAS includes a small business development component. The idea is that if schools are able to generate additional income on their own, they can use this income to further develop their school beyond what the government or other fundraising efforts provide.

Last year one of the SAS partner schools decided to start a small mushroom growing business. It did quite well, as there was no other local supplier of these nutritious mushrooms, and their first rounds of sales went very well. Eventually, it became too difficult to source mushroom spores and the program stopped.

This year, two schools decided to start a spore-growing program, as spores typically generate a high net profit and in this way they could support local families in improving their nutrient intake by affordably growing their own mushrooms at home. This sounded like a great plan!

BUT we rushed into this program to try to get it started before the end of the school year. We didn’t do enough research, or support the communities with the tools and networks to do this themselves and we also didn’t have the in-house technical expertise to understand the threats to this agriculture program.

Part of the SAS model provides support for the one-off training costs which go into business development. We sent representatives from both schools to a course on mushroom growing. In addition to poor research, we made another big mistake, which goes against the lessons we have learned:

WE paid for this in full. The school support committees did not have to invest funding into this project, only their time. As such, if there was a financial waste, they had very little incentive to point it out or prevent it.

We didn’t send any PEPY staff to the training, which would have helped us to understand the program into the future and might have also prevented us from wasting funds on unnecessary equipment. You see, the key to growing spores, it turns out, is a sterile working environment. We had researched this enough to know the very basics, but when signing community members up for the course, we failed to research what technical tools, apart from the training component, would be required for the success of the program. When the community came to us with a proposal to go to a nearby training on spore growing, we accepted the proposal without doing enough research on how the training would work.

It turns out that part of the training included how to use one of the key tools in spore growing. This sterilization device is, you guessed it, electricity-powered. We had sent two people who live in remote communities with no electricity to a training about how to use an electronic instrument, just because they had asked.

Big oversight.

One of the more important lessons which was reinforced through this process was that when we asked the community members to return these products, they didn’t want to and instead wanted to try to just “put the machines on coals”. Clearly, apart from being dangerous, this would have been a waste of money and a valuable tool. Why didn’t they want to return it? In large part, because they didn’t pay for it. We did. If they had been making decisions with their own funding, it is much more likely that the decisions would have been pushed by impact rather than interest.

Rather than grow spores, the plan now will likely be to search for more affordable and reliable sources of spores so the School Support Committees can go back to growing mushrooms to support their education programs. In the meantime, we’ll be sure to improve our systems of research and decision-making so that this type of problem can be better avoided in the future.

When I first saw “Changing the World on Vacation“, I had to cover my eyes for half of the film. Did I REALLY say that, do that, THINK that? Ugh….

Watching the first year of our work at PEPY is like watching someone act out the exact opposite of what I now believe in terms of responsible tourism, development work, and “volunteering”. It’s PAINFUL to watch…

But, it’s a good reminder that my opinions and beliefs were formed, and that I too acted in the ways I am trying to see changed. It makes me hopeful that others can change too, and that ideally they can learn from my mistakes rather than repeating them themselves.

I just recently got to see some footage Daniela Kon, the film maker, had taken in late 2008 or early 2009 when she returned to Cambodia. It is great to see the progress of my own learning, and interesting to note that it took me three years to realize that “orphanage tourism was wrong” but I still hadn’t realized that some orphanages are not only exploiting children through forced dance shows, but through so much more including taking them from parents and corruption so deep that it involves bribing police to be allowed to drag “orphans” through the streets to advertise “free orphanage tours” to tourists. (I had written some of my reactions here.)

I went from naive to enraged with a rest stop at shocked along the way.  Here is a look at my reaction to the film from nearly three years ago:

Daniela Papi INTERVIEW (2009) from DEEDA PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

When I first read Greg Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, I loved it. It was 2007 or 2008, I had just spent a few years beginning our work at PEPY, an organization which had started with our own school construction story in 2005. The story resonated with me. I loved that he was talking about building schools in a place where we had recently only heard about building wars. I was onboard.

Over the past few years though, I have looked back on my own actions when starting PEPY, and realized that we made a big assumption in our work: that school buildings equated to improving education. You’ve heard us say this before at PEPY, but here it is again: We learned that schools don’t teach kids. People do. (And from this recent Mortenson fallout, I’m glad to read that other people feel this way too! “Why Three Cups of Tea Are Not Enough” – TIME Magazine)

We began shifting our focus away from building structures and towards building human capacity. We realized that we’d rather see kids studying under a tree with a great teacher than sitting in a beautiful empty building. Now, if we could have BOTH, that would be fabulous, but focusing on the human aspect of education was where we realized the dearth of effort lay.

As we began to focus on people, I became more judgmental of organizations selling “things” as the educational solutions to donors. Donors, who had grown accustomed to being able to donate a set of books, a uniform, a bike, or a school with their name on it were asking us how they could do the same with PEPY, and I realized that our first few years of selling donors the perceived ability to make changes in human’s attitudes and actions through giving them things was flawed. We were fighting a losing battle by focusing on the wrong investments.

This realization made me question Greg Mortenson’s school building work: although schools were definitely better than guns, weren’t teachers better than schools? In other words, I realized that I admired many things about Greg Mortenson’s work with the organization he co-founded, Central Asia Institute (CAI), but that revering him as infallible hero would not leave room for a view that his work, like all work, could always be improved. I began to realize that some criticism, both from ourselves and from the outside, is always needed to continue to strive towards higher goals.

I was just as shocked as anyone to hear the news of the 60 Minutes report this week about unethical behavior from Greg Mortenson and the CAI team. I had a lot of reactions: I was sad that so many people’s hearts were broken, glad that I had never donated to CAI when I had considered it in the past, angry that so much money has perhaps slipped through the cracks when it too could have been used to further education, and worried about what the impact of this news might mean.

My first reaction though, like so many others, was “If you can’t trust him, who CAN you trust?” And this is when I realized I too had bought too much into the hero worshiping of an NGO rockstar. I had only read the book that he himself had written about his work, yet I somehow believed I had received the full picture of his story. If Pol Pot had written an auto-biography after the Khmer Rouge, I wouldn’t read it and assume it was the only side of the story I should read, but when a person is doing “good” work, or “aid” work, they somehow become beyond question in our mind.

Because someone is “doing good” we assume everything about them is good, and visa versa. I have met a few people over the years who said they liked Pol Pot. One woman told me stories of having lived in the area where he was from and how he was good to them, how he took care of people, and how she had respect for him. When I hear these things my mind immediately refutes them as exaggerations or untruths. How could someone I have categorized in my mind as so “evil” do anything good? “And who cares if he did do some good things, he is still EVIL,” I would think to myself.

Once we have decided if someone is “good” or “bad”, rather than just “medium” and therefore capable of both extremes, it is hard for us to change our opinions.  I have heard many people react to the news about Greg Mortenson with opinions like “but all of the good he is doing still outweighs the bad” and “it must be an exaggeration as there is no way these allegations are all true.” These defensive views were my natural instincts too. Why? Because so many of us had put him in our “hero” category. Because we had mentally stood beside him and checked his name on our ballot for the “good person” poll. And because if we find out that WE were wrong, that he is not 100% good, that he is capable of anything bad and therefore no longer infallible, we don’t want to believe we have made a wrong vote. I believe that part of this reaction is in our own self interest – not wanting to be wrong and not wanting to use the effort it takes to make a mental shift of our own perceived realities. If we had miscategorized one person…. what about the rest? “If we can’t trust him, who CAN we trust?”

The effect of a large collection of people having to make this mental shift can have some far-reaching results. Being disappointed by someone makes it harder to feel as confident in our hero worshiping of others we might have viewed as thoroughly altruistic. I am of two minds about this news: The majority of my initial reaction is worry about the fallout the news about Greg’s fallibility will have on the NGO sector as a whole. Another part of me is glad that we are having to receive this type of news about an NGO “hero” and that we are all forced to go through the arduous task of mental resifting which inevitably leaves us feeling more vulnerable in the future. My fear is that the majority of that vulnerability will translate into inaction: people wanting to “help” when they come across an injustice they see, a goal they have for our world, or a problem they want to see fixed but feeling stuck and unable to take action for fear of being “tricked” again by someone selling a solution they might later find out is flawed. My hope though is that some of this vulnerability will translate into action for self-improvement on the part of donors.

Some people get mugged and then go out into the world with more fear. Others sign up for a self-defense class and perhaps emerge more confident than before. Let’s hope there’s more of the later.

By donor action, my hopes are that this news will result in:

• people taking the time to educate themselves more about the issues they are looking to effect change in and the best practices in those areas
• people becoming less likely to donate simply based on the hero story with less money going into projects whose impacts were overlooked due to more focus on the novel than on the reality of the NGO work
• donors asking more of the NGOs they support, not in terms of more heartbreaking books or more GPS coordinates of the things they give away, but rather more transparency and follow up on the impact of their donations
• board members asking more questions, pushing for audits, and requiring financial transparency from their teams
• and most importantly, more people realizing that NO ONE is a hero all the time (except maybe Mother Theresa…. Oh wait! Woops, hero-worshipping again – she is human!)  and therefore, that each of us are also capable of creating (perhaps obliged to create?) extreme good.

Perhaps it is good to continually remind ourselves that we are all human. By remembering that even Pol Pot was capable of good acts and that a man who helped build schools was capable of using donated funds for chartered flights to book signings for personal gain reminds us that we too are capable of both extremes. Perhaps this is the most difficult part of swallowing this reality. If Greg Mortenson isn’t some kind of “natural born altruist”, if he isn’t innately “good” at his core, if he is flawed like the rest of us and just as capable of self-interested pursuits, then it means he is human, just like us. And it therefore means that he was capable of that selfishness the whole time, yet he choose good very often (and it seems he choose poorly often as well). And if he is capable of that and not a “hero”, therefore, so are we.

He’s just a guy – and he could, and SHOULD, strive to be better. We too should strive to be better. We should strive to ask better questions and not hero worship someone so much that we allow them to go 14 years with only 1 audit. We should give our money to places we research and then follow up on our impact. We should strive to close the feedback loop and know where our money goes. And most of all, most shocking, and most hard to imagine: we should realize that there aren’t “good” and “bad” people. We are ALL capable of choosing heroic, challenging, phenomenal, life-affirming acts EVERY day. Those who choose to act heroically, those who were in our hero vault, were not wired differently than us after all – they are human too. So, you too can be, and are, a Greg Mortenson – capable of all aspects of the work he has done, both the good and the bad.

Choose to do with that what you like. I hope we all choose to dig deeper, aim higher, and strive for our most altruistic self from this news. I hope that each of us, including Greg, continues to strive daily for self-improvement to create our own TRUE hero story and then live out the results with integrity, transparency, and the constant quest for the good we are capable of ourselves.

I recently put up a post about a speech Ivan Illich gave to a group of young American volunteers about to head to Mexico to “help”.  It’s one of those speeches that makes you re-question all of your good intentions and perhaps reflect on your past actions with a new light.

And then it can make you stuck, and confused.  If I shouldn’t “go to help”, but I want to HELP, how can I?  I’ve read this speech many times over the last 5 years and continue to struggle with what is right, what is ethical, what ethnocentric, and what is more harmful in the long term even if it makes ME, or others, feel good now.

I read a post a woman named Jody put up using some quotes from my blog.  She called her post “Wrestling” – and I appreciate that.  I hope that, if anything, my blog makes us to continue to wrestle with this stuff until we feel our actions are better inline with our intended impacts…. it’s tricky – so much grey area!

I am re-posting my comments to her blog below.

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Thanks!  I don’t know that I have ever been quoted like that before – but I’m glad to see that my words are resonating with you.

Wrestling is a good word to use for the thinking that needs to go into successful traveler’s philanthropy work. I wrestle with this daily – and I know that my attitudes and actions more than five years ago when I first moved to Cambodia were very different than how I feel now and that they are based on a very different perception of reality.  Both, though, were based on good intentions and a desire to “help”, I just didn’t realize before that I had such limited knowledge of how to effectively do so.

I also realize, a) we’re all still learning b) there is no “right” answer c) every situation is different d) short term and long term impacts can sometimes be dichotomous e) creating value for travelers IS valuable as their actions and funding can be strong forces for good or for harm in the future so inspiring people to improve the way they give, travel, and live has value f) aligning that value for travelers with long-term positive impact on the communities/causes being “supported” is really hard.

Wrestling!

But the best I think we can do is to think about these things and be willing to change our actions based on what we learn, even if it means admitting past mistakes, and then talking about those changes so that we can inspire others to do the same.

Great to “meet” you.  Please come visit us in Cambodia some day!

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Read the original post  here.

Join the discussion on Social Edge about voluntourism and how to “do it right”.

I argue, that “doing it right” means not coming into a place to “volunteer” in the first place, but to learn and to share mutually.  “Learning service” rather than “service learning” is what we should teach our students to seek out when they visit a new place.

In this post, Saul Garlick starts out by asking, “What would you say if I told you that all of the work that Westerners do in the developing world for less than 6 months amounts to nothing more than poverty tourism?”

I am pasting my comments below, but click here to read the whole chain of the debate!

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Thanks for starting this discussion, Saul. I disagree with the premise of the question though: it is not the timeline that we should be focusing on. To establish more effective cross cultural understanding, we need to go somewhere to LEARN first, not to SERVE a people and a place we know little about.

Trying to give a timeline to when voluntourism becomes “effective” is like saying “You will gain more muscles if you work out for 60 minutes than 10 minutes”. If your goal is gaining more muscles, it’s not about the time, but about WHAT you are doing for that time period – are you lifting weights or doing jumping jacks?

I have lived in Cambodia for five years and I have seen way too many people who have stayed for 6 months or longer to “volunteer” but who would have had a better impact on the world had they gone home after a week. It is NOT the time that matters. What matters is what you are doing, how what you are able to contribute matches with needs, and how your time is structured so that you are not leaving a hole but rather building a bridge for when you do leave.

Cambodia, and other countries like it, do not need more rich tourists who want to (and I quote from many an email request that I get from teachers or parents) “paint something, spend time with kids, or build something so that they can really feel a sense of accomplishment for their time there.” If you are coming to paint or pet kids (I was thinking, “painting kids” tours might work very well given the high demand for both), it does not matter if you are here for a week or 6 months: you might be helping YOU, but your main impact is not helping others.

As you note Saul, a two-way dialogue is important, and that is why we have a problem implicit in the world voluntourism. What you are talking about – a two-way chance to learn – is not about “service”, it is about “learning”. Schools these days are removing the word “volunteering” from their international itineraries and replacing it with “Service Learning” as they are starting to realize it needs to be about learning. I think we need to take it a step further and flip the words to “Learning Service.”

We have to learn before we can help. As I’m sure you would agree, that advice is just as true for the budding “social entrepreneurs” heading off for 6 months to “teach” people from a foreign culture about something they decided would be a good solution for “their needs”. I know, because I have done this myself. 6 months or 2 days, it’s about listening, learning, and knowing our place – as at the end of the day, it IS tourism. You are visiting a new place for the first time, and you should be there to receive an education about a new place, new people, and new culture. We are the ones being served via new knowledge. With this new knowledge we can then move on to get angry, get interested, and take action, starting most likely with changes to our own lives.

I come from this from two perspectives: running an educational development organization working in 10 rural schools which constantly get requests from those looking to volunteer, and from running an educational tour company designed to offer travelers a chance to learn about development issues. We don’t take volunteers to come work in our school programs – those programs are managed by our Khmer staff – but we do take short-term travelers on learning adventures which fund our educational program work.

We have made changes at PEPY Tours as we went from offering people one-off voluntourism trips designed to “help people” to edu-tourism trips designed to change the way travelers give, travel, and live after they join us. Here is a piece I wrote about that transition: http://travelanthropist.com[…]rips-over-giving-trips.html

As we had gotten so fed up with the negative impact of voluntourism work here in Cambodia, through both our own mistakes and those of others, we decided to create a Voluntourism101 self-check guide for operators (though there is still more work to do on this to make it more effective and spread its use further – and I’d love your thoughts on this Saul).

http://voluntourism101.com/guide

Conversely though, I do think I think there is a need for a way to accelerate the understanding of needs to be matched with short-term travelers’ skills. For example, at PEPY, if someone was an expert at Joomla!, or Salesforce, or was willing to do a short training on US tax accounting, we could use their skills for even just a half of a day and be better able to solve our problems in the future. Some friends and I have been talking about creating a program where a select number of local social-entrepreneurs would be selected for a fellowship period and they could self-identify skills they want to learn (business plan writing, etc) and these could be listed for travelers to then “apply” to fill during their short-term stay. In exchange, they would get a chance to learn about a new culture from a socially conscious leader who might offer a cultural tour, a language lesson, etc. It’s like Couchsurfing meets Kiva/Kickstarter – but with a human time investment focus and cultural exchange rather than start up funding or loans. (If you are interested in this, be in touch.)

Finally, I’d like to point out that when we say “A two-way dialogue is essential between the social entrepreneur and the poor” we are implying that the social entrepreneur ISN’T “the poor” and herein lies another problem. The most effective leaders for a cause will be those whose problem is their own. We should be focused on helping local social entrepreneurs solve their own problems, as they are the ones who have already done the “learning” – they know what the needs are and are going to be the most passionate about making changes. Travelers who go and spend 2 days or 2 years learning from a local leader who is passionate about taking action to improve their own country will be better for it and can then find ways to contribute to that social entrepreneur’s needs. It’s not about time. It’s about the how and what, and as always, no matter how fun painting kids seems to some, it’s about investing time in people.

I recently wrote a piece about PEPY Tours on World Nomad’s website.  I am reposting it below as it relates to a lot of the themes of this blog: Responsible Giving, voluntourism, Cambodia, etc

Fast Five Profile: PEPY Tours

One of the PEPY riders on her bike for Cambodian based PEPY Tours

1. Who are you?  Brief description of trips you offer

Daniela Papi, Director, PEPY and PEPY Tours.

PEPY Tours offers educational tours where travelers have the chance to learn about development issues and support programs committed to making change even long after the travelers leave.  Our tours of Cambodia and neighboring areas range from bicycle trips and high-end educational adventures to service-learning programs for school groups. The required donation portion of our tour fee supports the ongoing educational programs of our partner non-profit organizations.

2.  How do you define Responsible Travel?

Responsible Travel is a conscious and educated approach to tourism which incorporates learning about and supporting local initiatives and goals in the areas we visit. If we have limited knowledge about an area, it is very difficult to make the most responsible decisions, so the most important aspects of responsible travel are the research stage and the monitoring/follow up sections.  If we want to be responsible, we need to understand the true impacts of the choices we are making.

3.  What does your company do to make sure it travels responsibly?

We are willing to change, transparent about our mistakes and the lessons we are learning, open to suggestions and new ideas, and we work to educate travelers on ways they can improve all aspects of their future travel. Our tours bring travelers to meet with the people and organizations making changes in Cambodia and helps them develop a framework for which to better analyze and understand the issues facing Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and community groups. Our goal is that travelers with PEPY Tours will change the way they give, travel, and live as a result of their trip with us.

4.    Tell us about a successful initiative.  And an unsuccessful one – what did you learn?

We used to bring people to visit a variety of programs in Cambodia, including model orphanages. Our trips were supporting these orphanages through on-going funding, so we felt that the chance to visit the place where their money was going would be a great way to connect travelers to their local impact. This view was too traveler focused, as even if it would increase fundraising potential, the cost of bringing groups of foreigners into a home which is supposed to be a safe-haven for children is not a responsible practice and should be replaced by less voyeuristic fundraising initiatives.  We did not have any direct incidents as a result of bringing travelers to these orphanages, but we felt that we were contributing to a growing trend of orphanage tourism which we believe is, overall, very harmful to both the children and to efforts to reduce corruption in Cambodia.  If donor dollars can be linked to orphanage tourism, then more and more fake orphanages will continue to be created as business, as we see here in Cambodia.

In the first few years of offering tours, we used to indulge the travelers and our own desire to “give back” on our tours through tangible ways.  Most people feel more connected to a project if they can physically “help” – paint something, build something, “see results”.  The problem with this mindset is that most of the actions travelers are contributing involve giving things away to people or building items, not building people.  We have learned that what Cambodia needs most is capacity building among leaders who are looking to improve their own lives and that things like teacher training and skill building will do more to improve education than building schools.  If we continue to only offer travelers ways to give back physically, we will teach them that improvements are equated to developing infrastructure but not a nation of people.

For the last few years we have taken the time to expose our travelers to these ideas and concepts through reading materials, educational activities, and sharing our previously incorrect assumptions and mistakes.  Travelers now leave our trips better able to support sustainable on-going projects designed to leave Cambodia and Cambodians better equipped to improve their own country rather than fostering a continued dependency on outside support.

5.   What’s some advice you can offer to travelers wanting to travel responsibly?

Read up before you travel. Do NOT give money to any organization you do not know and have not researched. To do your research, speak with people working in a similar sector in a nearby area as they will have more honest feedback about a group’s work than their own website will offer.

As one of our NGO partners said, “You have to earn the right to leave your money in this country.”  If we all recognize that we, as individuals, DO NOT HAVE THE POWER TO FIX THE PLACES WE VISIT by giving money away, we will have less negative impacts of funding corrupt and ill-planned programs. Sustainable changes take long-term efforts and need to last much longer than a short visit to a new place on vacation.  By finding the people and programs committed to finding ways to make long term change, your money will go much further than giving it to a child-beggar on the street. In fact, perhaps that child would not be begging in the tourist area you are visiting if it was not profitable to do so. By cutting off that funding stream to the “pimp” who possibly rents that child out per day as a beggar and redirecting it to on-going programs supporting the needs of children living on the street, you will likely have a much better impact on the places you visit.

Our focus is really on encouraging travelers to be socially responsible. The media and public relations campaigns from large tourism corporations are full of green travel tips, such as conserving water and energy, recycling, using refillable water bottles, and making sure your hotel is doing everything they can to conserve. These are certainly important things to work on. At that level, though, the entire social aspect of sustainability is just missing.

If you are looking to volunteer abroad, ask a lot of questions about how they choose their partners, monitor their impact, and what mistakes they have made. The most responsible groups will offer you transparent and honest answers to those questions.  Ask about how your specific program was designed.  I have asked English teaching volunteer programs which travelers pay a significant fee for why they have chosen to offer English teaching as their volunteer opportunity when they seem to always be scrapping to find NGO partners as the response has been “That is what travelers are looking to do.”  Do we want our impact to be designed for YOU, or designed to fit actual needs? If we want to fit actual needs, then sometimes we need to be willing to do the less glamorous jobs, have less opportunities to visit orphanages and pet children, and be satisfied that we are indeed doing good rather than “getting a rewarding experience.”  It shouldn’t be about us.  If you want to be comfortable, have fun, and get to play with kids, go to an amusement park.

If you want to know more, visit the PEPY Tours website.

About WorldNomads.com

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The original post and comments about our end-of-year reflections where in the PEPY Newsletter last week.  Read up to see what we would have done differently in 2009 and what we hope 2010 will look like.

Happy New Year!

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What do you think your biggest achievements have been this year?

MA: Well, I think I’d have to start with the four schools we built.  It might be surprising to say that, since those of you who have traveled with us know that one of the things we always stress is how the biggest changes in education will not be the result of buildings, but will be the result of investments in training, capacity building, and community advocacy.  That’s all true, and I think we’ve had some incredible progress with the intangibles.  But when I think about the year, my strongest memories are the community workshops, meetings with contractors, moments with volunteers, and the learning our staff went through that resulted in four safe (and beautiful) spaces for learning.  I don’t believe that these buildings are the way we have impacted education in the most significant way this year, but I think managing four community-based school construction projects at the same time was a major achievement for our staff. Being on a construction site checking steel rebars, engaging the community in the construction process, figuring out how to make a building go up in Cambodia…. it was a tremendous challenge and our team did a fabulous job.

I think the other huge achievement is with our team of program staff.  The most pressing challenge we deal with is getting the right people in the right places and keeping them there.  Whether by luck or learning, we’ve managed to form a tight-knit, hard-working, inspiring team.  Awatd, our Community Program Manager, and Ratana, our Education Program Manager run most of the show these days.  I smile every time they get up in front of a training, or share their ideas for future program changes with us.

D: Watching a proactive team of PEPY staff, Cambodian government teachers, and trainers from the Provincial Teacher’s Training College (PTTC) make our second Khmer Literacy Camp a really inspiring place to be was one of the highlights of the year for me.  Last year when we tried to do this for the first time, we didn’t have the right staff, we didn’t have the right materials, and we didn’t really have a strong plan for what the camp would look like.  It was a success last year in that it opened the doors to several literacy improvements in our school programs, but it took the full effort of nearly all of our team to make it happen, and it was not a very community-driven initiative.  This year, in contrast, the PEPY staff had much less to do with the camp, as the teachers and principals of the 10 schools involved led the way, along with the PEPY team, and they had the vision of what the camp should look like.  Finding talented teacher trainers from the PTTC was one of the biggest keys to success of this program and we will continue to look to them for advice and training as we improve our programs.

What would you have done differently?

MA: Not eaten that ant soup? Hmm. . . there’s lots I would do differently, which I hope means we’re learning!  One of the things we could always do better at PEPY is more planning before jumping in, and hiring farther in advance the people we expect we will later need. Because we have such a proactive and motivated team, we often stretch staff too thin before we hire extra people to work on a program/project.  In retrospect I probably would have hired someone to manage the Classroom Library Program instead of having staff we already have work on development and implementation of the program.  The Classroom Libraries have SO much potential that they aren’t yet reaching because we don’t have staff with enough time and resources to devote to building the program.

D: I agree with Maryann, and I confess to being the “push-aheader” in a lot of our blind-jump decisions. The Classroom Library Program does have SO much yet unreached potential, largely from lack of leadership and ownership, mostly from us moving forward without getting the right people in place to make this project work.  Getting the right staff has been the biggest struggle from us from day 1.  What might be a funding dilemma in the US (“Oh no, we can’t afford the $200,000 fee to hire the best English early literacy curriculum development team!”) in Cambodia, when it comes to Khmer literacy, it is a staffing dilemma. . . those skills either don’t exist or are extremely hard to come by.  This puts us in the dilemma of either pushing forward with foreign leadership behind certain initiatives that we want to be locally owned, or choosing staff who are typically new entrants to the work force and have less experience than our ideal candidates—but who have the passion for learning and believe in what we are trying to achieve.  Point being, we have great staff who believe in what we are doing, but in projects such as the Classroom Library Program, we are not yet close to reaching the program’s potential as we have not put enough time into identifying or developing the skills we need to make the program work.  But we are getting there…. We are learning a LOT. To some, that might mean we were not qualified to start PEPY in the first place, which is true. We were travelers “looking to do good” who funded a building. Later, when we realized that buildings don’t teach and the “priorities” of community needs are different from our initial ethnocentric ideas, we could have gone home, but that would have meant leaving a project a failure. We weren’t qualified to stay. I hope that the fact that there are many things we would do differently hopefully means we are bringing in qualified staff who we are learning from and that there is a lot we will continue to do better in the future.

Have any favorite moments stood out?

MA: The first school building volunteer trip we did with Dubai Cares was a pretty amazing week.  Because of publicity agreements we didn’t write much about our partnership with Dubai on our websites, but that partnership defined 2009 in many ways for our team on the ground.  We spent four months working with the community, working on school construction, developing agreements, etc, and it was rewarding when we finally had the opportunity to start working with the Dubai Cares volunteers directly.  This year’s literacy camp was incredibly special as well.  Seeing Ratana, Aim, and the Provincial Teacher Training College trainers manage the camp with such success was inspiring.

D: Once again, I agree with Maryann here.  The Dubai Cares partnership really shaped our 2009. The song “I’m Yours” will forever be etched into my memory surrounding the school construction, as Rithy took it upon himself (and all of us!) to learn all the words.  The literacy camp, which I was not able to attend last year, was so rewarding to witness this year.  Having Maryann run our programs this year, with little to no support from me (as I tend to just stir things up by throwing new ideas into programs which were working fine already) has been a big key to this success. Having Awatd and Ratana as our program managers has also been one of the reasons that there are so many program highlights for me this year.

One last thing: about two weeks ago I was in the library and the bell rang to announce a break in classes. Typically, until this year, there would always be some teachers who didn’t show up or who let their kids out early, so there would always be some students milling about the school grounds.  On this day, everyone was learning in class and the school grounds were silent.  When the bell (aka tire rim hit with a stick) sounded, I was standing near the library entrance making a phone call.  I heard a stampede and fortunately was able to get out of the way before being run over by about 50+students, who were pouring into the library to report to our librarians about the books they had read the night before.  Kyla helped work with Srey Touh and our library team to create a system to track student reading progress and to get the librarians involved in asking questions about the books students have read.  It was really fun to get almost literally run over by the excitement the students have for the program!

Also, we can’t forget the launch of our new websites with the help of Soe, who fell out of the sky and landed in our technology-expertise-free laps.  How lucky we have been to have his leadership this year!

PEPY has been working in Cambodia now for over four years.  Where do you see PEPY five years from now?

MA: Such a hard question! I guess one of the trends that I’ve seen with PEPY is that we’ve become more professional as an organization.  We have better accounting practices, monitoring and evaluation, stronger working relationships with other NGOs and the government.  I expect that process of increasing professionalism to continue, though I hope that it continues only in so far as it allows us to be more effective and organized (not to the point where it inhibits creativity and flexibility).  In terms of what I expect we’ll be doing. . . Running a girls’ dorm?  Publishing early literacy books?  Promoting Child Clubs throughout Cambodia?  Running a leadership camp in Siem Reap?  So much of this will be directed by the Khmer staff we hope will take the reigns of the organization within the next 5 years.  For PEPY as an organization, our vision is of communities empowered to take action to improve their living standards, knowledge of health, environment, and quality of education.  Our staff are going to figure out the best way to make that happen, in line with their experience and passions. Right now the programs we are starting and modifying in Chanleas Dai are being developed with end dates, mostly in the 3-4 year range.  The goals of each of the programs are to encourage sustainable changes to the point they are no longer needed, or to the point where local community members are trained to take over.  So, our English teachers are working with government English teachers, our PSDP Program is helping develop and strengthen local school support committees, and our Child Clubs are developing the skills of young people who could run their own groups in the future.  I can’t say that PEPY won’t be in Chanleas Dai in 5 years, but I won’t be surprised if we hand over most of our projects to a group of trained community members, and begin working in other areas, or supporting education in other ways.

D: I hope that even by the end of one year I will not be the one being interviewed for this, but instead our Khmer staff will be.  Part of the reason it is always Maryann’s and my voice here is that taking the time of our Khmer staff to write updates in English, or even taking staff to translate, often comes at the expense of other program work.  But I do think it is important that it is not my dreams and goals pushing us forward in the future, but the vision of our 35+ Cambodian PEPY staff, or more specifically the 20 staff who are from the target area where we work.  I would love to see PEPY help develop more training, materials, and curricula around increasing Khmer literacy skills for new readers.  There is a lot of unmet need in this area, and I think that creating a repeatable model would be a way for us to spread our impact far beyond Chanleas Dai.  Then again, if our Khmer staff take us in another direction that better meets the needs of the community—as Aline originally did when introducing the Child Club concept to PEPY—I will be delighted.

Anything else you want to share?

MA: Just that we’re grateful, and feel really lucky to have the support and encouragement that we do. Thank you.  And as they say in Cambodia to celebrate the New Year: Wishing you all happiness, love, beauty, luck, long life, good health, and a fertile harvest J

D: Thank you! As we get ready to greet The PEPY Ride V team this weekend, I can’t help but be in shock at the turns PEPY has taken and the fact that all of you and our staff here have jumped on this bandwagon to keep us moving in the right direction. I know that my role at PEPY will change, as it must (likely before our next annual update) as my strengths do not lie in sustaining something, creating processes, and following a routine.  We are at the stage of PEPY where we need to further focus and improve the outstanding programs that have floated to the top of the array of work we have entered into, and I think changes in leadership will follow our changing needs. . . so stay tuned.

Your questions, criticism, and support have pushed us to be more open and honest about our programs, with ourselves and with all of you reading these. (There are people reading this, right?  Feel free to reply and let us know you are out there—we love knowing that the work we put into our newsletter to keep our supporters informed and educated about our programs is not in vain!)  Thank you for being a part of our team!

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