Lessons I Learned

UGH!

I am SO fed up with these “pay to volunteer” organizations making money and taking in young gap-year kids and then “offering” them to us as employees where we “only need to cover their living expenses.”  REALLY?  You want me to take your unskilled 17 year-old, play babysitter for a few months as they struggle to add value to our organization while being tempted away by the likes of “Bar Street” and expat adventures, and you want me to PAY them to have his “life changing experience” while branding it “volunteering”?  NO… thanks anyway.  I wrote a comment like this back to an inquiry a few months ago, and the response was “Yes, well their living expenses do not need to be very high and we can negotiate those,” in which case I realized that even their email-responders must also be 17 years old.

I am being a hypocrite –  I know this.  I have done trips in the past where I was able to fundraise for my trip and I certainly have volunteered my time in ways where I was clearly not qualified to be “helping”.  Having done those things though, I think I am still, if not better, able to state clearly: this should not be common practice.  Additionally, PAYING a 17 year old kid to work in an organization is taking this even a step further which makes me half want to yell into the email when I get this kind of request and half laugh at the audacity and ludicrous idea overall.

There are all these volunteer placement organizations based in Siem Reap which send volunteers to teach English at orphanages, but I have already written a lot about my strong feelings against orphanage visits after having learned from making many of these same mistakes myself.  Those groups sometimes call us to see if we will take their volunteers, and to the group that emailed today asking if we would take their 17 year olds as they were in a “dire situation as their other placement canceled”, offering that I would once again only have to cover their living expense, I wrote this reply:

Hello Name-Removed Lady–

I assume my response from a few months ago when another member of your team contacted us about taking your volunteers was not passed on.  I rejected the “offer” then as I will now because I do not believe in this type of program.  These are 17 year old kids, many of whom have little to no experience other than having been privileged enough to go to good high schools.  I am fine with them wanting to come help, but I am not at all fine with:

a) their being allowed to “fundraise” for their flights, as if their time would be more valuable than using that money to directly support these causes.  The experience they will get and the lessons they will learn in Cambodia are indeed worth paying for, and I assume many of them come from families that could indeed afford this.

b) the fact that your organization has them fundraise over $5000 and they then still expects the NGOs on the ground to cover costs. Once again, if they want to “volunteer” – they should volunteer – and at minimum cover their own expenses on the ground.

c) their placements being working with kids.  There is too much scrambling to find volunteer placements with kids in Cambodia – we often get calls about this for our education programs.  Kids should not be treated as a commodity to be sold by international agencies as a way to keep their volunteer programs going.

We do indeed take volunteers, but they have to have the skills to fit our needs, are unpaid, and work in our offices, not with kids in our programs.

I hope you understand that my strong feelings on this matter come from five years of watching young “volunteers” get drunk and run around scantily dressed on bar street here in Siem Reap as they get paid a “living wage” which is over double the local salaries of people much more qualified than they are.

I am sorry that we are not able to help you at this time and I hope the tone of this message reflects that my attitude towards this situation is not particular to you or to your organization, but this growing trend in general.

– Daniela

Now I can just link people here next time they ask if I will pay for their gap year students to work with us!

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.

One of the things that I have learned over and over is that “PEPY is confusing to explain!” and we need to have a cogent message that conveys what we do. I can still work on being more concise, but here is how I have learned to describe the different areas in which we work:

PEPY’s overall philosophy is that if each member of our team is working to be the best person (s)he can be, achieving personal goals while committing to helping others reach theirs, only then can our organization reach its potential. It is not our job to solve problems for others, but instead to encourage and support others with the tools to solve their own problems. To do this, we support

Leadership: PEPY works to empower school, community, and youth leaders to take action to create quality learning environments in the areas in which they live. We do this through youth leadership clubs, school support committee development and training, and government school partnerships.

Literacy: PEPY empowers teachers and students with the tools to increase literacy rates, the use of printed material in the classroom, and a love of reading in government schools. We do this through school and classroom library programs, teacher training, resource creation, and summer literacy camps.

Supplemental Education: PEPY works with government schools to offer additional academic programing during students’ free time and school breaks. PEPY’s junior high school program focuses on creativity and critical thinking through a “Creative Learning Class,” which uses XO computers, science experiments, and (coming soon) robots as a medium for learning problem solving.

Educational Tourism: These education programs in rural Cambodia are supported in part through our tourism arm, PEPY Tours. PEPY Tours offers learning, adventure, and development-education experiences to students, teachers, families, and independent groups looking to travel through Cambodia responsibly. The tour fee supports the participants’ travel expenses, and the required fundraising or donation minimum goes directly to support the non-profit programs, which will continue on long after they leave.

What do you think about the information above?  Does it describe what we do, from your previous experience and understanding about PEPY?  What would you add, or remove, to make the message about our work more clear to those who are meeting us for the first time?

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.

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This woman has carried a photo of a young American girl named Ashley, whom she met while in the Thai/Cambodia refugee camps, for the last 20 years.  She asks every American she meets if she knows Ashley.

The picture if faded from where she has held it up for every blond haired or light-skinned passerby. She keeps it in a plastic bag along with her ID card and photo of lost relatives, underneath the pile of jewelry she is selling.  She says when Ashley said goodbye, she promised to meet her in Cambodia some day. Since she was able to return to Cambodia, she has been trying to meet up with Ashley, but does not know how.

Siem Him is the first woman I have met who carries a photo of a lost foreign friend.  For those who survived the Khmer Rouge, letting go of a lost one means accepting they were killed.  Meeting a Cambodian who keeps a photo of lost relatives is not uncommon, but a foreigner who she met ten years after the official end of the regime?  This was a first….

I was visiting Battambang with a group of American teachers who met Siew Him as they were examining her jewelry offerings in the market.  “No, we don’t know Ashley,” they said, wishing they could say they did. As we sat at breakfast overwhelmed by the fact that this woman has kept up a search for 20 years (and slightly giggling imagining an image of America as small enough for people to recognize each other by photo), we watched Siew Him thumb through her photos again, perhaps wondering if Ashley too was still looking for her.

My co-instructor, Claire, said we had to at least try to find Ashley.  So here we are.  Are you Ashley? Did you visit a Thai/Cambodia refugee camp in 1990? And does this photo look like you?

If so…. come to Battambang.  There is a lady who has been waiting a long time to find you.

I loved this piece!  It is not only the part where Christopher London says “A building can’t teach.” when referencing donating school buildings that resonated with me, but his whole conclusion that product-driven development might sometimes be easier but less effective.

Sing it, Christopher!

(I wrote to his organization to get approval to re-post this here.  I’d love to read comments!)

Process-driven models of change work better

Every organization dedicated to social change believes it is providing a service in its community. Consequently, there are perhaps as many models of change as there are organizations. All these efforts can be placed loosely into two categories: “product-driven” models of change and “process-driven” models. We at Educate the Children, an Ithaca-based nonprofit that works to provide educational opportunities for women and children in Nepal, employ a process-driven model.

Now, what can be wrong with building a school? Well, nothing. But, what is a school? Is it the building? Or is it the administrators, teachers, parents, students and the relations between them all that make it a functioning educational environment? An excellent teacher can make do with the shade of a tree and a stick to draw in the dust, though a classroom with desks and a blackboard certainly can make the job easier. But a building? A building can’t teach.

There are excellent things that can come from product-driven programs, like well-stocked libraries or low-cost computers. These products can be useful, but without a social structure to support them, they easily become white elephants. The problem with product-driven models is that they are mechanical models: add Product Z and social change follows. If only life were so easy.

By contrast, a process-driven model strives to build the necessary social relations that make products useful and sustainable features of local social life. Rather than build school buildings, we work with the community and local government to plan and execute the refurbishing of existing structures. This is far more cost-effective than starting from scratch, but it also initiates a process of the community working with what they already have, instead of relying on outside agencies. This means we can use resources to train teachers, provide teaching supplies, establish kindergarten classes and provide in-kind scholarships for students who otherwise could not afford to attend school.

However, there is more to succeeding in school than better classrooms or just being able to show up. One of the most important tools for success is breakfast. Children who arrive in class with contented bellies have the energy to exert their minds and bodies and the capacity to relax and concentrate. In order to ensure that kids eat, we must work with their families. This means initiating a process of consciousness-raising through literacy and communal organization in addition to intensive follow-through on subjects as diverse as proper use and maintenance of toilets, child and pre-natal nutrition and improving the productive capacity of farmland for food security and income.

While a product-driven approach starts with a pre-determined solution, the process-driven approach starts with people, works with them to identify needs and then devises solutions. Ultimately, product-driven approaches sell solutions while process-driven approaches help make them happen. So, whatever organizations you support, ask them, “what is your model of change?” You will get many different answers. Just remember: the best models start with people, not products.

Christopher London is the executive director of Educate the Children.

Here is a (poor quality) video of the TEDxBKK talk I did a few months back. I am speaking about “giving things” away vs. investing time in people. I’d love to hear your thoughts.