Lessons I Learned

Yes, somehow my blog has become an orphanage/orphanage tourism discussion platform for the time being…. so be it!

I recently met a video editor named Regina who had also been living in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  As she was starting a video education program for youth in the area, she became aware of the problems of profiteering orphanages in the area and she was inspired to make this PSA video:

I agree with the video, but I feel like I’m sure many of you do, that there needs to be a “Call to Action” at the end.  The good intentions people have who want to donate to orphanages can end up being harmful if the money and time these travelers give goes to the wrong places…. but what can they do instead? Clearly, they want to help – so what should this video tell them to do?

I know that many of the people who read this blog are working with children and have a variety of ideas on this topic. I have received emails from a range of people including people working in orphanages, people working in large INGOs and UN organizations, people who have donated to places they believe in, and people who have realized that they donated to places which were causing harm.  All of you have ideas for this, I’m sure – please share!

What should the call to action be?

In the comments on the video site, Regina links people to information about a recent UNICEF report about Cambodian orphanages. What other resources do you think should be shared?

Some ideas might be to encourage people to:

LEARN MORE: Please add comments to this blog with links to places where people can learn more about these issues (such as Friends International’s page “Myths and Realities about Orphanages in Cambodia” and Child Safe).  What other resources should people read up on?

GIVE BETTER: As Regina’s videos suggests, many agree that family care is a much better option as well as day care education and transitional support facilities which allow kids to return to a family home and avoid institutionalizing as many children.  Friends International has supported this type of work in Cambodia and there are programs like M’lop Tapang, but what other programs do you believe in? And why?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reading through your list of resources.

Oh how I wish that I had heard Ivan Illich give this speech in 1968.

I imagine myself as one of the students about to be sent off to Mexico to “volunteer”, eager to “help the poor people”, smiling proudly as I shine in my own self-worth. And then I imagine hearing him start out by proclaiming his “increasing opposition to the presence of any and all North American “dogooders” in Latin America” and wondering why this guy was raining on my parade. I might start to wonder why he was invited to speak, and then he says “you might have invited me here hoping that you would be able to agree with most of what I say, and then go ahead in good faith and work this summer in Mexican villages. This last possibility is only open to those who do not listen, or who cannot understand me.”

I’d start to get angry!  BUT I WANT TO HELP, my brain would yell, and he would respond back in his speech, “I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans.”

But I’m DIFFERENT, I would think. I WILL be able to help…. yet his speech would respond saying “All you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder.”

He’d go on to say “You start on your task without any training. Even the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting you?“

But I will LEARN from this experience, I would want to tell him. And his speech would respond “The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn’t have been volunteers in the first place.”

But… but…I’m so PRIVILEGED, I’d say. I want to give back!  And he would respond with “I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the “good” which you intended to do.”

My heart would break a little.

And then he would conclude with, “I am here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.“

And maybe then, just then, after I had heard this Illich speech in person, and listened to his passion for these words, would I have been able to walk away, having learned these lessons without living them.

And I’d re-hear a part of his speech: “Perhaps there is also something to the argument that young men should be promiscuous for awhile in order to find out that sexual love is most beautiful in a monogamous relationship. Or that the best way to leave LSD alone is to try it for awhile -or even that the best way of understanding that your help in the ghetto is neither needed nor wanted is to try, and fail. I do not agree with this argument.”

And I’d realized that someone should have told me this earlier, but I couldn’t have absorbed it unless I lived it myself, OR heard someone as knowledgeable on this subject speak so directly – so honestly – without caring about hurting my feelings or sugar coating his words to avoid making me feel bad because he knew my intentions were good. I would have maybe then realized I should walk away, because he told me directly, and I realized that he was right: “The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn’t have been volunteers in the first place.”

Read the full Illich speech here: http://bit.ly/hkJN17

Layheng Ting is PEPY‘s new Director. Here is a piece she recently wrote for the PEPY newsletter which I thought I would re-post here.  Thanks Layheng, and welcome to the team!

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Sustainability has been a buzz word in development work for a long time, but how to actually make a project sustainable still remains a big challenge. At PEPY, the challenge is no different from elsewhere. This is the second year in a row that PEPY has focused on helping schools become sustainable using a borrowed model called SAS (Sahakum Aphiwat Sala), or “Communities Developing Schools” in English. This model was originally developed at the Schools for Children of Cambodia, in which one of our consultants, Andrea Messmer, was involved with its development and implementation. I personally believe in the model, as it has so much potential to help schools be self-sustainable if implemented correctly. Like any other sustainability model, it comes with its own challenges.

From my interactions with the SAS team during my first month at PEPY, I can say that the model is now gaining momentum. Our team has worked to form active School Support Committees (SSCs) in each of the three schools we are implementing the model with. Each SSC has identified the problems that need to be fixed and has developed an annual development plan. Last year’s main projects included community initiatives like building shade structures for students to study in, life skills training from community members, and effective teaching and learning (ETL) workshops for teachers. This year, one project that has been recently accomplished is school land filling. This project involves filling low areas at school with soil to raise land levels in order to avoid flooding during the rainy season. A second project, building a school garden, is on its way to success as well.

Two main income generating projects, fish raising and mushroom growing, have been identified by the SSC in their development plans, and our SAS team has been working very hard to help them figure out if these programs could provide the schools with a decent income. If these two projects are successful, next year schools can continue these projects by themselves without any intervention from our team. For the mushroom growing project, one difficulty the SSC faces is the lack of expertise in mushroom spore making. For fish raising, it is a completely new experience for the SSC, but according to the business plan, it would be a worthwhile project for the school to try out this year.

To improve the capacity of SSCs, the SAS team has so far provided SSC proposal-writing classes, which were attended by many committee members. Through proposal-writing trainings, the SSCs can gain the ability to find various sources of income by themselves after PEPY moves to a new target area, as SAS is aimed to provide transitional community support for 3-5 years.

The SSCs were so enthusiastic about the trainings. While the momentum is high, the SSCs’ ability to grasp the contents of the training varies, and thus the SAS team is now trying to figure out the best strategy to make the proposal training most effective. The most recent school visit to two model schools was a great learning experience for the SSC, and the team was able to bring back new ideas to develop their schools.

Despite signs of success, some challenges remain. From our past experiences, we realized that in order for the schools to be more sustainable, we need more in-house technical staff. This would allow more capacity building of teachers and leadership training for school directors and the school support committee, which is key to improving the quality of education offered at our partner schools. In the past we hired technical experts external to PEPY to offer training to the teachers, and that is not enough. We have so far interviewed a number of candidates for these technical expert positions. When we have technical experts on our team, we will start a rigorous training for teachers and management.

In the first month I have spent with PEPY, here are some lessons I have learned from being involved closely with SAS program:

1. Lack of teacher motivation might hamper the entire SAS process. We can only do so much if teachers do not have the motivation to teach well. To help fix this, it is important for the SAS team to learn how to ask the right questions to the SSC, so that everyone understands that a teacher’s motivation is important, and that low salaries might hamper motivation. Thus, in their next school development plan, they should focus on raising community support for teachers’ salaries if they see it as a problem.

2. The community can only do so much to help schools with their stretched pockets and their doubts regarding the usefulness of education. To respond to this, PEPY’s next step would be to focus even more on community mobilization through brain gain and encouraging educated community members to continue to be involved at the local level. With this in mind, PEPY should work more closely with the Junior High School to ensure a quality education, so that students who graduate from Junior High can do well in High School, pass the high school exit exam, and can continue on to higher education. I believe when students from the community continue to succeed in their schooling, get a job, and give back to the community, they will set a good example for the next generation to follow and the community will have more belief in education.

3. PEPY should continue to find ways to involve the community in all the programs that it has been implementing. One of the biggest outcomes I have seen from PEPY’s programs is the VCD initiative.  Students from Chanleas Dai have created their own organization called “Volunteers for Community Development” and they are taking action to improve their own communities, which is exactly the type of initiative we want to foster.

I can’t see any better model than SAS in helping such a marginalized population to be able to achieve what they deserve: a quality education. Community involvement is the best solution to making schools successful in such a circumstance.  I look forward to continuing to work with the PEPY team to try to find the best ways to provide communities with the skills, models, and motivation to forge ahead in making improvements to their schools.

Whenever a group of people visit me in Cambodia and want to learn about responsible development, we usually go visit RDIC, an organization working with a variety of rural applicable technologies in the areas of water, health, agriculture, and more. Whenever we’re there, I’m always struck when one of the managers, John, says one of his staple lines: “What gives you the right to think you can leave your money in this country?”

He’s spot on…. what gives me the right to leave my money here? What makes me think I know the best way to give my money to solve the problems I perceive here? Who was I to think I could come here and try to serve when I hadn’t learned?

BUT, what gives me the right to travel to this country and NOT leave my money here? If I travel through and I take so much from the place I am visiting, what right do I have to leave without trying to “help”?

Such is the traveler’s dilemma…

This, I realized, addresses our core message at PEPY Tours. We do NOT have the implicit right to leave our money in a country because it’s burning a hole in our pocket, because we come from a wealthier country than others, because we feel pity, because we feel guilt, or just because we “want to help”. We have to EARN the right to leave our money here, because throwing our money around without doing research and following up on our actions can do more harm than good. It could be argued that we shouldn’t have the right to come to visit to begin with if we aren’t willing to try to make sure our money, both from our travels and our giving, goes to responsible hands hands…. but this learning sure takes time!

I had no right to leave my money here when I first came to Cambodia to fund the construction of a school – I knew very little about the country, about development, about how to vet a partner NGO, about what successful community development might look like, etc. I hope I have now educated myself and earned some rights to financially contribute to development in Cambodia by:

-    RESEARCHING and learning how to give wisely. This also means vetting projects and programs well, connecting not just with the people involved in the project, but others who are much more knowledgeable about the specific area that I want to work in.

-    INVESTING IN PEOPLE, not just things, through capacity building, trainings, and connecting people to ideas and to each other. I realize now that before PEPY went out to invest in a building in 2005, we should have first joined forces with an invested community and involved teachers and school support committee in the process.

-    FOLLOWING UP on the funds I have given. I have made mistakes and funded irresponsible projects, but if I walked away, didn’t ask questions, or refused to believe when I found out that my funding had been misspent, I would have failed to learn from my mistakes and I would perhaps have continued to invest in the wrong things.

-    COMMITTING TO IMPACT, not inputs. It is easy to give away a few bednets and equate that action to saving a few people from malaria. In fact, if I gave you three bed nets, you can probably guarantee that you can give them away in the next hour and consequently report a 100% success rate for your “project”. But if I asked you to REALLY save three people from malaria tomorrow, it would be a lot harder to achieve and perhaps even harder to measure. That said, we can’t take the easy way out, just because it has guaranteed results. We need to commit to impact over inputs, which makes our work messier, harder to track, and more prone to failure, but has the potential to be way more successful at working towards solving the problems we face.

Once we have committed to researching, investing in people, following up, and committing to our impact, I believe that we can then tell John that we have indeed earned the right to leave our money here. The more we learn about development successes and failures, the more right we earn to donate to Cambodia by becoming more likely to invest in positive impacts.

It seems that nearly every GAP year program, international school curriculum, and business incentivizing “volunteer leave” is now harping on the concept of “service learning”. They are no longer calling it “volunteering”, as the learning is being emphasized, but what I think we need is a further revolution of this concept. I no longer believe in “service learning” as the best thing to promote to travelers visiting a new place. I now believe in and want to promote the concept of:

Learning Service

or

Learning to Serve

By prioritizing learning, we are able to live the mantra I now try to repeat and remember: we have to learn before we can help. By noting that learning comes before serving, we are reminded of participatory development theories, about researching before we act, about how doing good isn’t something we can take for granted – it takes work. Learning Service means we are learning HOW to be of service: learning about development issues and how we might help or hinder progress through our interventions, about how to vet responsible partners for our money or our time, and about who the players are in the areas we are passionate about and where our skills might add the most value.

Businesses, let your staff members have that same “volunteer leave”, or even more of it, if they decide to learn before they help. Invest in their learning service options so they can become better world citizens and they, your company, and our society will be better for it.

Schools and parents, incentivize your students to learn before they help. Don’t send them out telling them to solve problems they don’t yet know about. Remind them that, just like writing a great paper, we need to do our research first. Show them how that is done by modeling learning service in your school programs.

If any of you reading this are interested in writing a short paper with me on this topic at some point, let me know as I’d love to send this concept out to schools and CSR programs as a challenge to them to incentivize more responsible service by prioritizing learning first.

What are your thoughts on this? Is there a better way to do or to describe whatever you believe to be the most responsible way to travel to a new place?

Ahh, bednets. NGOs sell the idea of giving things away by equating each thing we give away to “the poor”, like a bednet, as equal to “saving a life”. If only it were that easy….

This week a fascinating group of visiting students told us about a campaign that had happened in their school to send bednets to Africa. They spent their week with us as we all learned more about how to be a responsible donor, and eventually we touched on several points that lead all of us to agree that sending bednets to Africa is perhaps not the best way to “save the world”.

Let’s analyze some of the problems.

What time of day to mosquitos usually feast? When are you usually itching and scratching and putting on bug spray?

If you said sunset, then you’d be CORRECT!

So if YOU don’t usually hang out in your bed at sunset, and the “poor people” we seem to all be trying to “save” are working in Cambodia (or your favorite African country) until sunset, well then THEY probably aren’t hanging out in their beds at that time either. In other words, bednets are indeed IMPORTANT, but they are not the holy grail of health. Bednets alone do not “save” ANYONE from malaria; rather they are only a PART of the solution.

What else is needed to combat malaria? Well, in Cambodia (where I’d like to note that malaria is not prevalent in many parts of the country – much less so than in places like Papua New Guinea) deaths from Malaria are very preventable. No one should be dying from Malaria here – there are medicines, free clinics, and lots of groups trying to “save” people with bednets.  So why would anyone die of the disease here anymore?

Some people get very ill from malaria because they avoid a visit to the doctor right away and wait until they are near-death before going in order to avoid wasting money. In addition, there’s often a lack of knowledge regarding malaria. Many people don’t know:

- Where malaria comes from

- How to prevent the spread of mosquitos in and around their home

- How to tell the difference between malaria and the flu

- How severe the illness can become if left on treated

- The ease with which the malaria can be treated

- Which local remedies are effective

- The availability of medicines in urban areas

- Where they can get treated

- If a free clinic exists nearby

This lack of knowledge is a direct consequence of benefactors relying on giving away THINGS, like bednets, without investing the time in education or connecting people to the other resources and information they might need.

We can’t continue to dumb down statistics and create false facts. A bednet does NOT save a life. It’s a part of the solution, but it’s the EASIEST and QUICKEST part. It’s a tempting solution, because we can act instantly, and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. We can’t keep advocating that THINGS are the only solution – that giving out a bednet, equates to saving a family.

We all know our time is the most valuable resource that we have, so we create false metrics to help us save time and fool ourselves into thinking that we achieved guaranteed results, because anyone can walk out the door and give away a mosquito net. It’s not as easy to walk out the door and “save a life”. Mosquitos are sadly still biting at sunset, and although NGO marketing material might tell you otherwise, our things aren’t out there “saving” people for us.

Reminder to self: There’s more to it than giving things away.

Yesterday I posted a piece which has gotten a lot of attention that is questioning our human tendency to focus on the hero story rather than the impact of development work.

My complaints are not so useful if I don’t consider giving alternative options … so here we go. Here are some of my take-aways for the Would-Be-NGO-Fan-or-Donor which also apply to the Budding-Do-Gooder. There are MANY more ideas for guidelines than this and countless development blogs which focus on responsible development work (like this one), so don’t take this as a complete list.  I will focus on a few topics relating to yesterday’s post in order to help us avoid the hero-story dilemma and to stop incentivizing people to move to a “poor place” and take immediate action. I believe that, if we all stuck to this code of conduct, we’d have at least slightly fewer failures in the social sector and our money would be having more impact.

PLEASE add your thoughts to this.  It is not a thorough list, and I’d love to read more ideas about what I might have overlooked.

The Would-Be-Donor and Budding-Do-Gooder’s code of conduct

I, the soon-to-be do-gooder or donor to one, do herby commit to doing good through following these principals of high-quality do-gooderness:

1)   I promise that, if I know nothing at all about a social issue that I would like to effect positive change in, before choosing which group to fund or starting my own project or NGO, I will ask others who DO know about the issue to educate me a bit more before taking action. If the project I am considering being a part of is in a country or area I know little about, I will ask a range of people who live in that area their opinions and value those over mainstream media reports.

2)   If I can find a role model in this area, I will even go out of my way to thoroughly research or work for their project for a period of time so that I can better understand how and why their work is successful. As a donor, I will choose to praise and fund people who do research before starting large projects and who value and acknowledge that we have to learn before we can help.

3)   I will do research to educate myself by asking a range of other organizations working in the same sector to understand the lessons they have learned and to try to avoid making the same mistakes others have made in the past.

4)   I will ask a range of people working in the same field who they respect in the sector and why. I will ask people about their failures and what changes they have made to their programs now rather than in years prior which have increased the impact of the work they are doing.  If they can’t or won’t answer questions relating to mistakes they have made, I will not give them funding nor will I consider theirs a highly respectable model worth repeating.

5)   If I feel that I understand the sector, the common mistakes and the issues involved, and if my proposed solution is embraced, not only by my family who are pretty much obliged to love my ideas, and not just by local media in my hometown who know little about the work I am trying to do, but is supported by a range of experts and experienced do-gooders who are also working in the same area, only then will I consider taking action.

6)   I will focus on designing and refining the impact of what I am doing first before I start thinking about branding, logos, and fundraising.  If I am donating to a project, I will fund groups who speak about, focus on, and answer questions relating to their impact rather than being wooed by the NGO choices with pretty websites, main stream media, or late-night TV features.

7)   If I am not the beneficiary, as in, if I am trying to help a group of which I am not a part (perhaps “the poor people of such-and-such place” or “people with a, b, or c problems which I don’t have”), then I will first seek to find a leader who IS part of that group, and consider partnering or working for them first rather than taking charge on my own. As a donor, I will value organizations which are spearheaded by a local person or member of the beneficiary group, or at minimum, a group working towards such leadership.

8)   If I dare to then start something, knowing the hard work, the common problems, and the level of commitment this is going to take, I commit to admitting my mistakes along the way and sharing them with others so that they can hopefully learn from them too. I will admit and share my failures, and I will not try to hide them. As a donor or super-fan, I will “like” organizations who talk about and share the lessons they learn with others and I will value discussions of failures.

9)   I will always remember that I am human and that I can’t solve all of the world’s problems at once. I will keep in mind that I have my own needs as well, and that I shouldn’t make life-long promises to anyone if I am not sure that I will commit to keeping them in the future.

10)   If a donor, journalist, friend, or fan praises me saying that I am “like Mother Theresa,” thinks I’m so great for “dedicating my life to the poor,” or says “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you go out there and do something,” I will correct them. I will let them know that development work done poorly CAN cause a lot of harm, and I will give them examples because I will have seen some of these while doing my research. I will remind people about the IMPACT of the work I am doing and tell them that is what they should focus on, not the fact that I’m so brave/cool/or nun-like. As an observer, I will become a fan of people who don’t let me compare them to Bono.

Please add more!