Be the Change Network

I have 9 beautiful faces leaning over my shoulder as I write this.   The girl to my right is named Srey Mom.  She is 13 years old and only in the third grade, having studied here for three years.  She started school when she was 10 and old enough to walk the 2 kilometers to this school.   She likes to study computer and English.  Judging by how close the girls are leaning in behind me, I’m guessing that class time behind the computer is quite limited.   At least the new super-capacity batteries I bought last year allow the solar panels on the roof to keep the two computers powered for 6 hours per day. Out of more than 400 students, only 40 are chosen for computer studies; you have to be the top of the class to get behind the keyboard.   We are bulging at the seams here, truly in need of another school building, or at least a library and extracurricular training facility.   The music class keeps their instruments piled in the library room and practices in the afternoon under the shade of the tree.  I love to sit with them and listen.   The music class is just as popular as the computer class.  They practice every day, even on Sunday.   I am contemplating buying the school director’s old house, dismantling it and resembling it on the land behind the school that I bought last year.   It could serve as a temporary home for the music class and library, until we can raise more money for another school building.
 
Before we jump that far ahead, however, we have to stay focused on the task at hand:  pulling together a briquette workshop, so that kids stop skipping school to chop down trees.    When you are working in a community with zero organizational skills, just making the necessary preparations for the workshop feels like it may do us in.
 
Sanu has had us working hard for 3 days to prepare for a community demonstration.  We’ve built a small shelter for our Briquette Workshop Training Facility.  The students have collected piles of dry bamboo leaves, rice husk, rice straw, scrap paper and cardboard.   Sanu 2 has been very busy welding the frames for the briquette presses, as Sanu 1 says that welded metal parts will compress better and last longer.   But we’ve impressed both our Nepalese experts with the strength, weight and cheap price of the local hardwood available and will create one briquette press with it.  That way our participants will know how to manufacture the necessary equipment completely out of locally available materials. We found a standing dead tree in the school yard to use - now if we could just find a working chainsaw.  You’d think those would be plentiful around here.  Every single day and night caravans of oxcarts travel the road with freshly sawn tree trunks – a completely illegal activity that is done with impunity right out in the open.    
 
We have a small but passionately committed group of local community members who showed up this morning to learn more about the curious little briquettes.  One man actually showed up two days early and has been volunteering his time to help us prepare the hardware; he has HIV and no job, supporting his family with 30 kilograms of rice donated by the Lutheran World Foundation every month.  Two monks from the forest pagoda came to see us and have committed to bring 4 members of their community to participate.   I was most pleased to see Tau Soka and her 6 month old baby in the group.  She is a twenty-year-old woman with four children who wrote the first letter last year when I asked the community to express themselves concerning their forest destruction problems.  Her brave letter ignited a campaign that sent 170 letters from this community to Voice of America, human rights groups and other media outlets. I learned later that her husband had quit his job as a policeman because together they had decided that they didn’t want to be involved in taking bribes.  Now she calls me “bong srey� for older sister.   A small amount of law enforcement resulted from our letter-writing campaign.  At least now there is some press living in the area.  The reporter from the local Mohoran newspaper spent time with us, going directly to the wood cutters in the forest to invite them to our training.   One wood cutter said he would come, but I didn’t see his face today.   
 
Sanu demonstrated how the piles of raw materials can be transformed into the briquettes which he burned in both the traditional claypot cooker and in the smaller tin stove we brought, specifically designed for the most efficient burn of briquettes.    It is definitely the people who are concerned about the forest who have shown interest in the briquette, but even they are skeptical about this curious new product.  Honestly, they just want a job.  Whoever participates in the workshop is guaranteed the job, either full day production with a salary or a half day with commission for selling briquettes in the afternoon.  But the business model is the least of our worries right now.   Getting the community mobilized, organized and committed to what we are doing is a constantly-evolving process.  Building the equipment, translating the manual and collecting and processing the raw materials will consume the rest of our week, and we have a bigger challenge on the horizon – getting the community to care about creating their own future.  This is a society too used to donor hand-outs.
 
It is easy to gather waste materials for free now, especially sawdust from the many lumber operations, but once local people see us create something of value from it they will want to charge. I am trying to convince Bun Vanna, our briquette workshop manager, to tell people we are performing a service collecting their waste materials to support their school.  The community contributes their waste, we turn it into a marketable product and use the profit to support teachers and strengthen the education opportunities for their children.  Bun Vanna and our school director understand the logic but are skeptical that the community will rally.   Frankly, so am I.  But step-by-step we must try to convince them that recycling their waste to support their school locally will offer a better future to all.   I have no idea if this will work. 
 
Ten people showed up to volunteer this morning, their labor committed in lieu of payment for the workshop.  It’s a start.  We need the local people to feel ownership of the project if it is going to subsist on its own.
Thankfully, we have the beautiful tunes from the music class that seem to quell my fears of the many obstacles we have to overcome.

Chrauk Tiek, Aural District, Cambodia. As expected, the road to Aural was rough; a mere 120 kilometers (72 miles) took five-and-a-half hours. Imagine using first gear the entire way to drive in and around potholes big enough to swallow a 9 passenger van. Passing us in the opposite direction and kicking up dust are the causes of the destruction - oxcarts, moto trailers, and vans heavily loaded with the dense and beautiful hardwood trees that are chopped into cooking sticks. During the rainy season the weight of the vehicles destroys the dirt road. Both of my kids were carsick and the rest of us weary but in good humor when we arrived in Chrauk Tiek at 5:30 pm. A welcoming committee of Ngim So Bun, our school director, and village man named Sok Sarith met us with their moto at the village outskirts, radioing ahead the news of our arrival. An orange sky cast a golden glow across the schoolyard as the new music class serenaded our arrival. Seated behind beautifully-crafted wooden instruments around their 84-year-old teacher, the students played and sang traditional Khmer music exceptionally well. Their smiles said it all. I cried. In that moment, every minute of hard work and struggle on behalf of this project became infinitely worthwhile.

The teacher’s residence was prepared for our arrival with a thin mattress, pillow, blanket and mosquito net supplied for each member of our team – absolute luxuries in this world. We need to keep everyone well-fed and comfortable if we are expecting to work together in harmony for 3 weeks. In addition to some western food treats for my kids, I brought 5 cases of Angkor beer. The first night we toasted our hosts and polished off 15% of our ration, awakening early to roosters making whoopee outside our window.

In the morning, the festivities began. The usual suspects gathered: various village leaders, members of the military, and education officials were seated on the stage with me. In the sun squatted 485 students, and in the school desks under the shady trees sat the parents who support what this school is trying to achieve. Not unlike the schools at home, there are school-supporting parents and those who barely give a damn. But the difference here is that these parents are all illiterate, and this school is their thread of hope to improve the future and they know it. They came with curious minds, not knowing what we had to offer. The environment is being destroyed fast, and with it, their children’s future. Even those involved in the timber trade are aware of the doom this activity portends, but they feel powerless. They have to eat and the trees are their only resource to exploit. The children’s voices singing beautiful Khmer music put everyone’s apprehensions at ease, including my own. For when the District Chief of Education began to blare from the loud speaker, we had the crowd in the palm of our hands. No one moved for the next 2 hours.

After the usual reproaches for everyone to send their children to study every day, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the District Chief exclaim the incredible opportunity presented for the students and their parents to learn about a better, more efficient and sustainable cooking fuel. “Do not let you children skip the class and send them to the forest to chop down the tree!� he exclaimed, “In the future you will have nothing, send them to school to learn this new and important skill.� Wow. This man owns a sawmill, after all. We are turning over new leaves left and right. The old sawmill owner across the street, Sok Sarith from the welcoming committee, is now a noodle maker and banana farmer; he decided on his own that our message was worth following. Maybe empowering change really is about choices.

I was given time to speak and followed the social graces as best I could, paying my respects to officialdom and introducing my family to the crowd. My Cambodian son and Indian daughter caused quite a stir. Grady doesn’t look Cambodian, they say he looks American. I expressed my pleasure to see the progress the music class has made in short time; now we have more and more students attending our school. I told them of our plan to build a life-skills training center in partnership with academic studies and the cooking briquette workshop is the first program. The reason I chose this program is because I worry about the children’s future if they skip the class to cut down the trees. “Not only do they lose education, in the future there will be no water during the dry season, and they will have to spend time walking a long way to get water instead of going to school,� I said. From their nods I understood they had already experienced this problem when the river dries out. Thus, I turned the microphone over to Sanu 1 and his interpreter Savin to demonstrate something new to consider.

Sanu stood behind his display of briquettes, tin cook stoves and raw material samples. He worked like a magician, showing that sawdust, scrap paper, leaves and rice husk can be transformed easily and cheaply into a highly efficient energy source. He asked our briquette program manager to put his hand over the stove and test the heat, the people stared with jaws agape. Even the officials behind me were out of their seats and creeping closer to the devices. Sanu spoke with equal parts delight and passion, a friendly Nepalese nod of the head and a reproach of the traditional sources, wood and charcoal, as wasteful and inefficient. Being Asian himself, he knew the right cultural attitude to take. “The tree you cut down in one minute, but you do not know how old it is� he said, “It is so much older than us; we must respect the tree like our mother and father!� This, they understood.

We invited anyone who is interested to come to a full demonstration on Saturday and if they are interested, to take the workshop. They can register and be prepared to contribute money, labor, or raw materials. A week after that, we will hold the 3 day workshop limited to 50 participants. Sanu has convinced me to charge for the workshop. “We call this participatory skill development,� he says, “It creates value and will create partnerships, naturally filtering out those not truly ready to embrace change.� But we agreed to make concessions for the ultra-poor; the Souy people especially have no money at all and can contribute labor and materials. Sanu is an amazing man; he has so much practical knowledge to share and an amazing sense of working with people. I will write more about his character later; he has all of us working hard to prepare for the workshop.

After the spectacular demonstration, Certificates of Appreciation from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport were formally presented to me and my assistant Sovann, listing the details of our contributions to supporting this school. Everyone is most impressed that a school so far from the city has the support and resources better than those in Phnom Penh. No other school in this district has a computer and English class. Then Sanu surprised us all by presenting some special gifts from Nepal. To our school director Ngim So Bun he gave a brass bell, to call the children to begin the briquette making. To me he presented a beautiful handcrafted bronze pot with 6 tiny chalices for sipping wine or whiskey - a gift I will cherish forever.

The ceremony finished with the English class singing to me, “You Are My Sunshine.� I cried again.

The crowd dissolved to the glee of children shouting as we broke out the clay pots I had brought filled with candy and balloons, one for each class to play a game similar to piñata. Even Grady joined in the scrum, a rough crowd for sure, to compete for a balloon or candy piece as if he’s never had any of these things before.

And when the fun was over, and our bodies refreshed with food and drink, Sanu set everyone to work. We have a team in the welding shop, another building a workshop training facility, another working on the computer to translate the manual, and others collecting raw materials. The community is volunteering their labor to prepare and we already have 20 participants signed up. I lie in bed at night and breathe deep, trying not to be overwhelmed with the gravity of what we are doing here. We are introducing something that could very well change the dynamic of environmental destruction and rural school poverty in Cambodia - all because I Googled “alternative cooking fuel� on the internet a year ago. And here we are doing it. The people see the hope this idea brings. I’m amazed. Even the District Chief wants to contribute sawdust. He is talking about spreading the workshop to other schools in the district and members of the Lutheran World Federation want to come to the workshop. The news is spreading quickly…. this is truly the greatest adventure. I cannot imagine a better way to spend my time, energy and talents.

I hope everyone reading this blog will spread the word to others. Press the Network for Good button to make a donation to help this amazing work blossom.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We’ve spent the past two days gathering supplies around Phnom Penh city to sustain 7 people for 3 weeks, and the materials to construct 10 briquette presses and 40 cook stoves.

The shopping itself smacks us in the face with the challenges of accomplishing anything in the chaotic urban squalor of the developing world. It took two days of discussion just to decide what we would buy and where we would buy it. Communication is a challenge, as we have 2 men speaking Nepalese-accented English discussing metric conversions with native Cambodian speakers. We find ourselves translating for the translators. The pickup truck driver we hired to load metal materials from the hardware store and transport to the mechanical shop for cutting got sick of waiting and decided to take another job instead. Thus a rickshaw driver was commandeered to transport the goods a block and a half for processing, and the negotiation over payment for his service ended in his dismissal, which left George sitting on a street corner for 2 hours with a pile of hardware until another truck could be commissioned. All together, it took 3 hours to get 3 meters of PVC pipe cut into 4 pieces. And that was just one item on a long list. You get the picture: patience is a survival skill here.

It would all be much easier there wasn’t a time deadline. But since my family is with me, our school director has planned a big ceremony for Wednesday to present us with a certificate of appreciation. My kids are excited to see the school they’ve heard so much about; they’ve been doing a lot of hotel time. We finally found an English-speaking nanny to assist them, a delightful young woman named Chakriya, so I hope it will be easier for them to make friends now. When the workshop is over and we return to the city on January 23, we hope to have time for sightseeing and a visit to the orphanage where we met our son, the starting-point of this entire journey.

A short post to say we are off to the village today. New Year’s Day seems auspicious for the introduction of a new way of cooking not only to our school, but to all of Cambodia. We have a 6 hour drive on a bone-jarring road ahead of us, so we will write more and send pictures later. Hopefully our new GPRS cell phone modem works the way it should in Aural. Mobitel (the phone company) assured us it will, but in this country you just never know.

Wishing everyone peace and prosperity in 2008 and beyond.

Keep your fingers crossed…we are breaking new ground here, and it will certainly be a learning experience for all.