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A day in Phnom Penh

9 Jul

The White Building on Samdach Boulevard 1

From the shelter of my guesthouse’s covered rooftop I look out over the street below. It is in chaos – pelting rain has sent all the street sellers into hiding.

I think back to the hostel I was at this morning. Two kids were rifling through the open garbage dump just opposite the hostel. I think they were looking for cans, like the woman who hovered over me last night. She was waiting for the remains of the 50c beer I was enjoying by the riverside.

I was in the company of young Frenchman who’d just ridden a single gear bicycle from the province of Kampot to Phnom Penh. I remember blowing her off in my desire to continue our heated conversation on the status of France.

That garbage dump would be floating down the street now, in the torrential rain.

I wonder about the families living in the kilometer long building the Frenchman took me to this morning. “My building” he called it. His building was so dilapidated it looked like the whole front had been ripped off.

He’d been spending his days photographing the families inside –  families packed in like sardines – playing cards, minding children, cooking food, going about life.

I mentioned his building to another man I met this afternoon. I was told that legally the families should have title to the land2. Legally they should be able to make repairs, patching the leaks that I’m sure are letting in the rain right at this very minute.

But they don’t have the titles. So they don’t make repairs.

Before the rain had settled in I’d headed out to the Olympic Stadium for a run. The place was packed. Around the outside boys playing football on every square inch of space, girls filling in the rest with games of badminton.

On the inside of the stadium there was row after row of dancers, busting out synchronized moves to Rihanna. This is where I usually run, weaving in amongst the dancers, looking over the the Phnom Penh skyline, watching yet another spectacular sunset.

I learnt today that there are rumors the stadium will be demolished. The land is apparently too valuable to leave to public space.

On the way home I see another near miss on the road. I have seen just about as many motorbike accidents as number of days I have been here. My record refuses to break – I return to the hostel  to yet another Frenchman, this time with injuries and stories of yet another collision.

Perhaps it is only the fragility of a hangover, but it would seem as if today is a day for open eyes, a day for being affected by the world.

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Image: License: Some rights reserved by Jonas Hansel

1 ”Cambodian architect Vann Molyvan designed this building, intended as a housing project for the booming middle class that emerged after Cambodia’s independence in 1953. The project was halted after the Khmer Rouge take-over in 1975, and never finished. Nowadays the decaying building is inhabited by hundreds of families, plagued by poverty, crime and prostitution.”

2 After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, “the Vietnamese made a bold, perhaps brilliant move: they rendered all prior property claims in the city null and void….Phnom Penh was opened up for settlement on a “first-come, first-serve” basis

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The West Wing – pushing on the ocean

2 Jul
I have just about finished watching all 7 seasons of The West Wing, which is a fair investment of time for someone who almost never watches television.
One thing I love about good art is when it stops you in your step, when it makes you think differently. The show is one of the few that has reached deep – one of the few that made me really stop. Months after watching an episode I would often still be thinking – even dreaming – about the themes it explored.
One thing the show really opened my eyes to was just how hard it is to be, or work for, the leader of a country. How hard it is to campaign, to negotiate legislation, to get just about anything done. If you think your day gets interupted…! If you think you have a lot on your plate…!  The show gave me a lot more respect for the profession than I had had previously. My brother once said to me that he had great respect for Bob Brown - for the years of service he had given to Australia.  One of the shows main themes echoes that very sentiment.
I love how the show has so much going on in it – but still manages to squeeze in character development. Like life really – we might have too many balls in the air, but somehow we still manage to fit in friends, families, personal growth. As part of this, the show considers why people in these high stress positions continue to be there – what it is that drives them to be on call at all hours, to sacrifice their families, their health and highly lucrative jobs outside of civil service. Ryan Adam’s song “Desire” plays poignantly in one of my favourite sequences of the series – showing staff members at the end of a long day – reflecting on what they have to come home to.
The show also made me laugh about some of the ridiculous causes out there – like the special interest group focused on getting the world map turned upside down and the alternative energy lobby group who couldn’t decide on a single positive group message that would represent all their interests. And then the negotiations about debate negotiations during an election campaign.
The show reminded me that existential crises I might have are “neither great, nor unique” – as a friend once put it. One of my favourite lines from the show is “Sometimes I think, what if I were at UNICEF or United Way pulling together the AIDS fight, or back in New York turning the public school system around, would that be a more effective use of my 24 hours? Not this. Not pushing on the ocean.”
Pushing at the ocean – a sentiment I’m sure we’ve all felt at some time or another. It’s of some comfort to me that others, even those with great power and ability, have felt the same, and have found it within themselves to keep going.

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Street scene, Birtamode, Nepal

25 Jun


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Birtamode, Nepal


Cows are standing in the middle of the street in front of us. Chewing on cud as the road traffic swerves around them.

We arrive by motorbike, and chat by the roadside before moving towards our favourite evening hangout. Most of the vehicles that past us are human powered – people walking trailers, bicycles, rickshaws.

We move across the dusty courtyard, taking up our seats our seats on the bench outside, waiting to be called in for dinner.

There is a dusty courtyard between the restaurant and the road, and as the sunsets the random assortment of students, grandmothers and dogs move about in a kind of dance, sometimes interacting, sometimes not.

I see the man who is Nepali, but looks so much like a foreigner that I tried to speak to him in English when I first met him. I am reminded how much people here look like members of my own family.

Baby goats scamper around feet. They are waiting to be fed left overs – and the owner of the restaurant happily abides – patting them affectionately on the head, like dogs.

The restaurant is family run, the wife always speaks directly to my face in Nepali. It is amazing to me how much I can understand what she is saying. I love that even though I have been coming there on and off for 2 months, she still does this – continually refusing to give up and talk to me through a translator.

The sun is setting behind the trees covered in red flowers. “Not native” I am told.

Like me I think.

Totally out of place, and yet not out of place at all.

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On having a mission – 8 months on

17 Jun

8 months ago I wrote about having a mission for my life. I wanted it to encompass “contribution”, “global”, “sustainability” and “poverty”. I didn’t know what this meant or how it was going to work.

I met a woman who was 67 who was working on a vocational training centre in the far west of Ghana. I realised that in around 40 years time I would be 67. So I decided to make my mission 40 years – to have it focus on the long term. As Bill Gates famously put it – we overestimate what we can do in 2 years and underestimate what we can do in 10 (or 40 for that matter).

I wanted my first step to be to begin to understand. To begin to understand what it means to be poor. To begin to understand what has been done so far. To begin to understand why this has not been enough. As part of this I wanted to give a substantial sum ($10K) to charity.

It is hard to say how I have progressed on the true knowledge front; and yet easy to show how I have progressed on the money side. This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a development practitioner  – “people in aid complain all the time about the report writing – but how else can we show our progress? It is not as easy as showing money in an account. If a business is successful the money will be there. If it isn’t, it won’t be.”

So first to the money. In the end I was more creative with accounting for the $10K than I originally thought I would be. I found it hard to part with my own money, but my goal meant that I stopped thinking about whether or not I should give away away the money and started thinking creatively about how I could overcome my own barriers and make it happen. I first managed to turn a relatively small donation into a significant amount through a very generous matching scheme I was able to access. After much deliberation I also decided to include my expenses for my India trip last year, where we initiated a pilot project, bringing light to one community. For the remainder of the sum I asked that all my Christmas and birthday presents from the last year be donations to a charity (as pre-selected by GiveWell).

On beginning to understand, I have certainly learnt a lot during the past year in my role with Good Return. For the next period of time however, I would like to be more focussed in my learning, spending more time reading and trying to understand concepts which are well researched and difficult rather than the easy one line answers (read this Study Hacks post on deliberate practice versus achieving flow if you want to understand more about what I am talking about).

Some key learnings I have written about previously on L+L have been:

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A year of one sentence a day emails

11 Jun

Friend – ship

Just over a year ago my awesome-est friend and I were struggling to keep touch. Both of us have things that won’t sit still – her with her two kids and me with my schedule.

After numerous failed skype dates an idea was born.

Why don’t we just try to email each other one sentence a day? Shouldn’t that be enough to keep in us touch – for both the big events, as well as the day to day?

That was just over a year ago, and somehow we’ve managed to keep the habit.

A sentence every day has mostly translated into a paragraph two or three times a week. But as my friend wisely pointed out – what kept us going was the knowledge that we could *just* write a sentence. That was the rule. And it was the rule because of two of my favourite pieces of life advice:

  • You are what you do everyday; and
  • It just doesn’t matter what you don’t do in life. It only matters what you do decide to do.

(As a side note, I love this piece on Steve Martin. “I remember getting my first banjo, and reading the book saying ‘this is how you play the C chord,’ and I put my fingers down to play the C chord and I couldn’t tell the difference.” “But I told myself, just stick with this, just keep playing, and one day you’ll have been playing for 40 years, and at this point, you’ll know how to play.”)

I’ve compiled some of these emails into a book for her birthday and I was struck by the picture of the year that was painted. From the hilarious mundane (“Yesterday I put white pepper instead of salt on my chicken curry”) to the advice (“BREATHE!”) to the life changing and occasionally sad (“I resigned today”). We have both managed to achieve a lot in the last year. But seeing it all in one place also reminded me that “the days are long but the years are short”.

Happy birthday Asteroid! Thanks for being my friend.

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Image credit:  Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney

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Why I blog

4 Jun

In the beginning I had all sorts of lofty aspirations for this blog.

Maybe I would make money. Maybe I would wield some influence. Maybe I would use it to develop new ideas.

Soon after starting I realised that the first two would likely never happen. And some time after I realised the last never really happened either.

So then I decided that it helped me to finalise ideas. Yes that was what the blog did.

Something would roll around in my brain until finally it got to a point where it was all I could do not to wake up in the middle of the night and write down all that I was thinking.

I tried this thinking out on a few people – why I blog is one of my frequently asked questions. And in trying out this thinking on a few people, I realised it was bullshit.

The only reason I blog is because I simply love it.

I love creating something. I love the way it makes me see things in a different way. I love the people I connect with through here – both new and old. I love the structure it brings to my very unstructured life.

I love how much it surprises me.

I love how sometimes I write something I think is bloody brilliant — only to have no one notice.

I love how sometimes I write something I think is awful — only to have people write to me to tell me that this is their favourite post thus far.

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Leadership: If we don’t do something about it, who will?

28 May

Microfinance in Nepal

Leadership to me is all about a choice.

The choice to take responsibility for the world in which we live.

It is about doing something (as Margaret Thatcher would say) to make the world a better place – taking a stand, being indignant, and sometimes being difficult:

Every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

I am working here in Nepal with Nirdhan Utthan Bank Limited, the largest microfinance organisation in the country – with 108,000 loan clients and 168,000 members at last count. An inspiring man named Dr Pant started the organisation after visiting the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

How many countless others have gone to visit the Grameen Bank and have done nothing?

I remember in Australia my experiences working in the green building industry with the Green Building Council of Australia. There were those who put in countless hours to make the organisation better, more effective.

And then there were those who spent countless hours complaining about it.

There are those who complain “there is no market for my product”. And then there are those who are “entrepreneurs of will – even without a market or economically viable business (they) would have grown (their) businesses through will alone.”

I am working on an energy access project in India and my friend Jamie recently put together a pitch for the project. In the reasons why he listed this first: there are 280 million people in India who lack access to electricity.

If we don’t do something about it, who will?

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Voices from Nepal pre a constitution

21 May

Protests in Nepal

The country is in indefinite “strike” or lock down mode. Political parties have called the strike, to protest aspects of the proposed constitution due in 14 days. (The country is currently operating under an interim constitution).  Where I am car and buses are not allowed to drive, shops and banks are not allowed to open and schools are closed to students. Last week I saw a long line of cars waiting for petrol – many of the other petrol stations had closed down due to lack of fuel. I have been called by my organisation back to Kathmandu.

I’ve been collecting a little of the word from the street over the last week or so.

  • “Nepal is on strike for 15 days out of every month, that is why we are so poor” 15 year old student
  • “Actually no one knows who called the bandha (strike). Just the shops are afraid so they do not open.” Businessman
  • “The banda is for the poor people. The rich people can get the plane or the tourist bus” Tour operator
  • “We are tired of staying home all the time, we want to go to school” 9 and 13 year old students
  • “The school is afraid, that is why they close. No other reason.” Father of 2
  • At the sight of a bus of protestors: “They have no work to do, that is why they are protesting”  Professional
  • “This office is not open to the public so no one knows that work continues during the strike” Office building owner
  • “I saw the bomb explode in Janakpur. Right in front of me. People died. Now I cannot go back there” Businessman
  • “We had to stop our collections because the protestors came and told us we would be punished if we collected” Microfinance professional
  • “The country is in transition and everyone wants their part in it. But the problem is that if you give to one group, you are automatically taking from another.” Engineers
  • “I have to walk 2.5 days to attend a government job entrance exam because there vehicles are not allowed to take to the streets” Professional and Masters recipient
  • “We cannot take you to the airport because cars are not allowed to drive today” Hotel Receptionist
  • “Nepal is like a doll. Everyone is just playing with it”  Tour guide

Just like everywhere, I think people want to be left alone to do what they want without being bothered by a state in turmoil.

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Bridging Worlds

14 May

Escalator which bridges 5 blocks in Hong Kong

Just 6 months ago I wrote this post about how transitions between locations almost sent me over the edge.

Now I watch myself barely flinch at Chanel bags and $20 cocktails one week, and 18 hours of blackouts and shoeless street kids the next.

I speak to one friend in Australia who just lost a job and ‘hates the job market’, and in the same day, another in Nepal who has been out of work 6 months. One who wishes there was a job market.

In Hong Kong I ride an escalator which bridges 5 blocks, in Nepal I am preparing to walk 18 hours to visit a community with no access to roads.

Recently I spent a day balancing my budget – I am $500 out over 6 months. I barely give it a second glance.

I work with women who take a loan of $350 over a year, which requires 2 visits to the branch office and the signature of a legal guardian.

I speak to my parents who complain about the difficulties of hiring a car overseas.

I look outside to see evidence of the indefinite strike here in Nepal – which in theory includes the closing of all roads for transport – over the lack of a constitution after 2 years of work.

I watch videos of the recent floods in Pokhara, and wonder whether I should change my plans to holiday there. Only to learn that one of my colleagues watched a woman out the back of his house drown in floods when he was 8 years old. She was washing her clothes. He was the one that pulled her out of the river, dead.

I am still affected by these contradictions. The world still feels like an unfair place.

But I can feel myself moving to a place of some acceptance – where the emotion subsides to a place where I am not paralysed by it and I am able to continue functioning.

I feel like I am on a bridge between worlds. I can get off the bridge in either world. But for very different reasons I don’t feel comfortable on either side.

For some reason the place I feel most comfortable is the middle – and I think I’m just starting to getting used to this bridge’s natural vibrations.

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On why I don’t have a plan for children and other difficult questions

6 May

Planting your own garden

“I really admire you. How can you make so many difficult sacrifices in your life?”

I am not making any sacrifices.

I am totally free.

I actually chose this life.

Any unhappiness it causes me is completely of my own choosing - “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”.

“You are always on the move. Don’t you get lonely?”

Sometimes. But no more lonely than I was in Sydney.

“How can you keep going?”

Sometimes I can’t keep going. So I have to stop. But it always passes.

“What does your family think of your life?”

When I left Sydney, my mother said, “I can’t believe it’s taken you so long to go.”

“Aren’t you afraid of not having anywhere to live?”

I feel like I’ve been a nomad my whole life in one way or another. I am much more afraid of other things. Like not having an impact in my life. Or working in a stressful job and becoming ill again.

“Why are you not religious?”

Occam’s razor. The most simple explanation is usually the correct one.

Also, if there is a god, I have not heard a justification I can believe for all the suffering s/he has caused in the world.

“Why do you not have a plan to have a family?”

I take the philosophy of a good friend: “If a family happens as part of the normal progression of my life, then I will be happy. If it doesn’t, then I will also be happy.”

On just while we’re on it, I believe that you must “plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”

“What happens if I can’t be your everything?”

Well, that’s OK. Because I can’t be your everything either.

I just want you to be you. And I want you to want me to be me.

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Image: Some rights reserved by pasma

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