Now THIS is news!

I have left planet Cambodia for eight days to be with my honey, Lizzy, in London. As I write this entry I’m sitting in the Dublin, Ireland airport getting ready to board a flight back to London. I was here, just for the day while Lizzy was working with one of her clients.

I arrived in London on Friday from Phnom Penh after flying a cool 14 hours in two flights while chasing the sun. It’s a great flight because it isn’t overnight, which is the bane of my international flying experience. Plus, jetlag is never bad for me when I fly westward – this was just a six hour time difference. The downer was that as I got on the plane to fly west, Tyler and Katie got on their plane and flew east, back to the United States. We had a great “final” two week holiday before Tyler officially becomes an independent income-earning adult, teaching English on the idyllic enclave of Izu Oshima, a small volcanic island off the coast of Japan. Big changes for all of us.

It is so good being with Lizzy. It’s been over five weeks now and that’s about four and a half weeks too long for me. We just celebrated her 40^th birthday on Sunday and as a special surprise, I asked her to marry me. She said yes, so we are officially engaged!

I was a bit nervous doing this in front of 30 other people, but all were close friends and relatives. Many of them were expecting us to get engaged, but all were surprised by the occasion. What was absolutely wonderful was that we have it all on film, thanks to many cameras that were present. You can click here to see some of the pictures. You’ll be able to figure out the proposal – it’s toward the middle of the photo album, just after a series of 8 photos of Lizzy and I standing outside the restaurant having a conversation.

When I was at home in May for Tyler’s graduation I went to my jeweler, the same one that Lizzy and I had visited back in February when we began looking at stones. I knew what she wanted and all, so I made my selection and asked them to hold it until mid June when I would let them know. After I gave the go-ahead, my daughter Katie picked it up and couriered it to me in Cambodia. Then I brought it to London.

Now, how to do the deed?! I thought long and hard about it and settled on Lizzy’s birthday party with everyone present, at the same small, lovely Italian restaurant where we had our first date. Very poetic.

I designed a “special birthday crossword puzzle” and inserted the printed copy in a $2 crossword magazine and wrapped it up. The funny clues all added up to the proposal words. I thought this would be a good way to honor Lizzy’s dad as well, since he loved to do crosswords and she would sometimes join in with him. And the guests at the party jumped right in to help with the puzzle’s clues. Then Lizzy read the completed answers in no particular order and then everyone knew what was going on.

So that’s how it happened. We’re thrilled and I hope you are too.

My trip here is short and I’m returning to Cambodia on Sunday to complete my assignment over the next two months. I’m sure it will fly by and before long I’ll be back home, first in America for awhile, then in London for some time, while Lizzy and I sort out our next steps, together.

Water, water everywhere

Imagine a residential neighborhood, perhaps your own, except there is one difference: all of you are floating on water. Instead of grass and streets you have water, rather than taking a short stroll you take a short paddle instead. Welcome to life in the floating villages around Tonle Sap Lake.

Tens of thousands of people live this way and everything has been adapted to a waterborne way of life. Door to door sellers of produce, household goods, clothing, charcoal, ice – everything floats directly to your door.

Children attend school in floating barges and play football on the roofs of their schools in fenced in areas. Churches, stores, work areas, repair shops all float. There are two reasons. First, these people make their living from the water, mostly as fishers. Secondly, they are largely Vietnamese and are landless, so this is one of few alternatives. And above all, a floating village makes complete sense when you realize the water table fluctuates by as much as ten meters.

The Tonle Sap Lake floods annually and expands beyond its normal 1,300 square kilometer borders to nearly nine times its size. At the height of the flooding in August, brought on by the combination of the monsoon and the snowmelt of the Himalayas delivered by the Mekong River, 60% of Cambodia’s land mass is covered with water. And it is around this swollen lake that a miracle occurs: little fingerlings grow up to be adult fish because they find refuge from predators in the shallow flooded forest areas.

Tonle Sap is perhaps Cambodia’s richest natural asset. It is the second most biodiverse natural freshwater body in the world, home to nearly 400 aquatic species. Annually, nearly 340 million tons of fish are harvested from its waters, serving as the livelihood and nutritional backbone of the Cambodian people.

Tyler, Katie and I got a good up close view of life on the water during our trip last Wednesday when we crossed the northern tip of the Tonle Sap and cruised down the Sangker River on the way to Battambang. This was the second time I’d done the cruise which is conducted on a non-US Coast Guard approved boat. Ignorantly charitable, the safest thing about it was that it had no life preservers. And the ultra hard wooden seats made the journey anything but comfortable. This boat dredged up images and stories of the many boating disasters that we often hear about coming from SE Asia.

Safety and comfort aside, it was an experience. The first remarkable thing happened in the first hour. The man directly across from me was hit in the back by a largish, two foot long catfish that jumped into our boat. It caused quite a commotion but eventually the crew tossed it back into the water so it could live to fight another day.

We cruised along the Sangker River and passed through floating villages which appeared about every five kilometers. The boat did double duty as a water taxi by uploading and off-loading locals who paddled out in small canoes to board, many with old rice sacks serving as luggage. We stopped halfway, about four hours into the trip, to have lunch on a floating dock. Little did the rest of the westerners on the boat realize there were still four hours to go!


Amazingly, the Lonely Planet Guide to Cambodia lists the trip as 3-5 hours, but longer in the dry season. Well, the water was way up this time and it still took 8 hours. Of course, that did include the 30 minutes or so we were stranded while the crew finally figured out we were out of gas. No problem, just scurry up the bank to buy a five gallon can of petrol from a farmer and we were on the way again. The Cambodians are terribly practical and resourceful people.

It’s been really fun sharing this experience with Tyler and Katie. Both of them exclaim how wonderful this country is, even with its quirks and inconveniences. They really understand why I enjoy it so much and what I mean now when I say it is a different pace of life entirely.

On Saturday, Tyler and Katie bumped into their tuk-tuk driver, Moul, who had taken them around Angkor Wat on the Tuesday before. Amazing! 25o kilometers away and the same guy turns up on our street visiting his family who live the next block down from me. We invited him to join us for dinner that night, as well as Eddie and Marie (Indonesian and French, respectively), our neighbors from across the hall. So we had quite an international gathering with differing degrees of understanding one other. And this was the first time I have cooked Khmer food for a Khmer person - I think it was also the first time Moul had had an American cook for him!

So now we’re back in Phnom Penh after having visited Siem Reap and Angkor Wat temples for two days, then Battambang for two days. The bus rides on Mon and Fri were 6 hours each and the boat ride Wed was 8 hours, so it can be a wearing experience. Each day of travel, however, is part of the experience.

I’ve uploaded several pics on the web from the floating village to share with you. Perhaps you’ll come here one day and see for yourself.

Three Roys in Cambodia

Yesterday, to my great delight, Tyler and Katie emerged from Pochentong Airport customs and into my life in Cambodia. They are here for two full weeks to enjoy some time with me and to learn about my surrogate home for six months.

They arrived at 10am Saturday after having left Atlanta at 6:30pm Thursday, which sounds horrendously long. But after you realize the 13 hour difference in time and crossing the International Dateline, you come to understand it was only a shade under 24 hours travel time – only semi-horrendous.

 

Tyler and Katie have always been great travelers. Tyler went on a cruise ship in the Caribbean when he was just three months old and Katie went on her first international trip to the United Kingdom when she was just 15 months. Since then they have traveled so many places, including the typical suspects near America, like Mexico and Canada, as well as extensively in the USA. But international trips include the UK several times, Ireland, France, Mexico; and South Africa, Australia & New Zealand (Tyler), Spain (Katie). Now Cambodia. Tyler, soon to be Japan.

Hmmm…when I was 21 years old I had been to Canada when I was 9 years old and that’s it!

I’m really glad they’re here. They are such fun and easy to travel with. Whatever comes their way they adapt and roll with new challenges that pop up. We’re on our way tomorrow to Siem Reap, which is the gateway to the Angkor temple complex, which is over 70 square miles of nearly 300 temple ruins from about 800 to 1300a.d. Simply magnificent. The granddaddy of all is Angkor Wat, which is the largest single religious complex in the world, even bigger than the Vatican. The picture at the very bottom of the blog is one of Angkor Wat, which I took back in January.

We’ll stay there for two days and then take a very long but scenic boat ride to Battambang, a town I’ve written about on the blog on several occasions. We’ll spend two nights there as well. I’ll be working during the day while they are out and about exploring. I’ll join them after work hours to explore as well, but since I’ve seen much of what they are about to see I’ll be able to give good advice on what to see.

I’ll have plenty of pics to share with you next time, as well as tell you more about amazing Angkor.

The REAL rain returns

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an entry entitled “Today’s forecast: Monsoon”. Well, since then it’s been dry, really dry, and hot. This afternoon that all changed.

I was sitting on the porch, two floors up this afternoon enjoying my new splurge – WiMax – internet in my home, finally. Expensive, but I want to make communication with the family much easier. Cost is $110 per month(!!) and that’s for only 500mb per month. It’s .10 per mb thereafter. In one hour this morning I burned through 28mb…oh boy (I'm taking donations!). If you want to Skype me, my handle is “scottroy” without the quotation marks. I’d love to hear from you.

Anyway, back to the rains. The clouds built up and I thought, ‘gee, I sure wish it would finally rain!’

Be careful what you wish for!

All it took was 30 minutes of hell-bent-for-leather breaking loose and the streets were completely flooded. I mean F L O O D E D. My lovely little intersection below the balcony had 18 inches or more in the center. Bikes and motos being pushed by hand and people strolling up to their kneecaps in the stuff. The curbs had disappeared. The occasional automobile threw waves into the adjacent properties. Now I understand why there are so many SUVs in town – to simply clear the water!

But what amazed me was the laughter I heard – and not from just a few children. From the depths of this “big problem” came a guttural joy of the highest order. Lightning crackling all around us, thunder rumbling like a freight train, and yet sheer mirth infused the masses.

Once again, a lesson in Cambodian life. From people who really know what struggling is all about, I learn that life’s little (and big) inconveniences are to be accepted, embraced, and even celebrated.

It’s like the multitudes are chanting: “It is as it is, so why not enjoy it?”

Half Way Home

I can’t believe that it’s June and I’m nearly half way through my assignment in Cambodia. Time has flown.

I’ve really enjoyed my time here, so much so that I’ve even considered how I might stay here and work for awhile longer. VSO has liked what I've brought to my work and has asked me to extend my work here as well. I must say, the pace of life and the impact of my work are two really enticing realities.

Studying and researching Enterprise Development has been a very unique project for me rather than building enterprises. Actually, what I’ve been doing is creating a business plan for VSO to get into the business of building businesses. But I can see why VSO wanted an experienced entrepreneur to design this intervention. Who would know more about what to look for and to design a workable plan?

VSO is really thinking outside of the box on this one, seeing that it usually focuses on capacity building in other organizations. They are aligning with current development approaches which very reluctantly embrace private enterprise as probably the most sustainable and effective solution to poverty. A major problem is that it is one thing to recognize what needs to be done, but it's another thing entirely to actually be able to do it. NGOs are not business builders per se. But they do have the right aim at trying to help poor people, so we must also design this into the project so that we don't just assume benefits will trickle down to the poor automatically. We must take the best of both business and NGO approaches.

My role here is to develop an executable plan that will support the development of enterprises owned by relatively poor people in small villages. That means study the problem, understand the enabling environment, find strategic partners, uncover money, and formulate a detailed plan that will create more financial opportunity for poor families. They’ve scheduled six months for the project so that I can take my time, what with the cultural differences, the relative alien quality of the economic and business conditions here, and the nature of NGO work.

Coming here, I thought, ‘Great, let’s help some fishermen make a little more money by helping them build their businesses better…(yadi, yadi, yadi)’. What I now know are two things: one is that I am a spoiled business child reared in the American garden of business Eden and never knew it. And two, while the Cambodian business context has formidable problems there are still some very significant and impacting strategies I’m seeing.

Can you imagine operating a business in an environment where your government is a serious predator? Where the judiciary makes such erratic decisions that you know you’d better only do business with people you trust? Where contracts are nearly unenforceable? Where property rights are cloudy? Where access to credit has such a high threshold that you must have three times the amount of assets to the size of the loan you take, and you have to pay it back in one year at 18% interest? Where paying bribes to police and government officials are part of the business plan? Where you avoid becoming too successful for fear of reprisal?

Yet even in the midst of all of this there is still opportunity. It comes in the form of problems to be solved, which is an entrepreneur’s dream. Businesses and entire industries are formed to solve problems and Cambodia has a lot of them!

I look forward to sharing my plans for enterprise development in the next few weeks as the project comes together. I’m very excited about its possibilities and impact on poor people who depend on fishing, as is VSO, about the preliminary recommendations I am making that are currently under consideration. After a conference call on Wednesday with VSO’s international Livelihoods Programme Director and then a planning meeting with the Livelihoods Team in Cambodia we are now ready to proceed with writing up the project proposal and identify donors. Stay tuned.