2010 Cambodia Trip: Greetings from Phnom Penh!
By Kari Grady Grossman
When you’re the director of a humanitarian organization in Cambodia just about everyone you meet asks you for a job. There aren’t many good jobs in this town, but when I tell them our positions require living in the rural village and working with marginalized and desperately poor people (even by Cambodian standards) our prospect loses its appeal. We only have one staff in Phnom Penh, everyone else works in the village.
But every once in a while I meet someone who gets it.
Pen Vibol appears to be such a person. A middle-aged man in his early fifties, he’s looking for a new job. He hands me his name card - Seminary Institute of Religion, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, coordinator. He’s not a Mormon, he just organizes their scholarship program here in the city. Everyone focuses their education efforts in the city hence the city grows, the real education problem is in the rural villages where nothing ever changes. You’re right, he says.
They don’t need to build more schools until they figure out how to run the ones they have. Vibol agrees.
I recently read a UNESO report entitled ” Reaching the Marginalized” a review of education efforts in developing countries around the globe. It’s a pretty complicated analysis of what works and doesn’t work in helping marginalized people gain access to education. In my experience there is one way to “reach the marginalized,” simply reach out to them. That means live with them, talk with them, and know them. It’s not that complicated, it just takes a willingness to be in community with them. It’s hard to do from an air-conditioned office in Phnom Penh or a Land cruiser. It takes very special people to love the poor the way our education officer Paul Chuk does. We are working on a training system to teach new education officers and build our capacity to expand into the secondary school. The job is not for everyone. It takes a person with the right personality.
Pen Vibol has a typical Cambodian story. During high school in the 1970’s, when the Khmer Rouge regime took over, his parents were killed, and he was arrested and he was arrested for speaking French. When the militants shoved a book in his hand, he faked illiteracy by turning the book upside down and acting stupid. They blind-folded and shot him anyway but the bullet missed his head. Afterward, while living in an orphanage, the communists sent him to Russia to study locomotive engineering. He spent the 80’s in Leningrad and speaks Russian fluently. Can you imagine a half starved Cambodian kid living in Leningrad for 11 years? Sent back to Cambodia in 1993 to work on a unfunded train system, he found himself jobless most of the 90’s and got by as a motto driver. Nowadays, he tows the line of the Latter-Day Saints. He’s got the universal Cambodian survival skill - whatever it takes.
Vibol told me that in Russia teachers who choose to go teach in rural areas of the cold north are paid more; those who choose to live in the warm south are paid less. Teachers can decide what is more important to them, lifestyle or money. If Cambodia really wants to change the education access of the rural poor, the answer is quite simple: Pay the Teachers More! I wonder if UNESCO took the money they paid PHD’s to offer their analysis and simply paid a group of teachers more, would they find their answer “reaching the marginalized?” Maybe they don’t really want to reach the marginalized, maybe it’s more interesting to study the problem than fix it.
A middle-aged man who speaks, Khmer, French, Russian and English, who understands the importance of paying teachers to do a difficult job and the personal sacrifice of teaching the marginalized. Vibol may just be the perfect person to train with Paul and learn how to be an education officer at the secondary school we want to expand into. Who is going to help me pay him what he deserves? UNESCO?
February 7th, 2010 at 12:31 am
Glad to hear you’re back on the ground there. I’ve never known of any Khmers in Russia–what a unique background. I hope he joins the team and is able to contribute to SSI’s mission.
About teacher salaries, I wonder if you’ve heard of Michelle Rhee, a top school administrator in Washington, D.C.–she says the same thing, but in a very different context, of course. Unfortunately, I don’t have much insight about money and educators. Too often we see those whose job is to entertain getting paid the most, while basic, less glamorous occupations are overlooked and underappreciated.
I suppose there is some balance to be found in those PhD salaries, at least, but as you say, that doesn’t help at the fundamental level of elementary education in developing countries. The only real hope seems to come from greater awareness. That is, the more attention to the cause, the more likely people’s generosity will show. I think your persistence will be rewarded eventually.