Monday, June 23, 2008

Call me lazy....




The pace has quickened lately. This is my lame excuse for having not updated this page in a while. My apologies to the friends, family, acquaintances, fans, internet addicts, detractors, and faithful groupies who no doubt monitor this page closely and have been awaiting this post with bated breath. I shant keep you waiting any longer. The last three weeks, in brief:

1) Zooming around Pursat province on a moto. My official function was to shadow the RACHA people as they launched the insurance thing in a new area. It would have been a lot more edifying if I had anything that resembled competency in Kmer. But I don’t. So I took to wandering the village, which was fabulous. A lot of the kids had literally never seen a white person before, so I was a smash hit. When the launch was done, I took off on the moto, following a rural lady around as she was selling insurance and telling people about the relative merits of using birth spacing. Not knowing Kmer was less of a crutch, I got to amuse myself by distracting the infants and children while their mothers listened attentively, which suited me perfectly. On top of that, I was staying for free at the RACHA guest house, using their motos and spending time with their staff, who were so pleasant in every possible way. People here are amazingly welcoming and generous. There was a mango tree in front of the house, so every morning I was presented with a fresh mango for breakfast. Yum!

2) The ladies in the office invited me to see a traditional Kmer dance. The Kmer rouge tried to exterminate the art, but it is being revived, slowly. Cambodian dance is slow and precise—they move with deliberate, graceful steps and tell the story with their hands. The traditional costumes are fabulous, with sparkling beads and smooth silk. And the ladies in the office are so good to me, showing me a culture I may not have found on my own.

3) This is me on the top of a mountain. Awesome.

4) You can also go inside the same mountain. It was a phenomenal place—a Buddhist wat marked the entrace to the cave, which lead to a circular glen inside the mountain, lined with smaller caves, wherein there were several smaller shrines and things. The mountain was pretty much hollow, there were caves everywhere—some had swimming holes, some reeked of bats, and one was used as an extermination site during the Pol Pot regime. The kids who were our guides called that one the ghost cave. It is eerie how the past can sneak up on you where you least expect it.

5) Welcome to paradise. Unfortunately, we could only stay for a night. But this is what tropical islands were supposed to be like, before tourism ruined them. Solitude. The sound of the waves. Cool, salty sea breeze. The most beautiful sunset you can imagine. Fresh tropical fruits to your hears content. A hammock strung between palm trees. Cows, pigs and goats roaming freely between the thatched bungalows. Ours was equipped with a mesh hammock, a bed, and a single bare light bulb, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

6) School has begun in ernest—by that I mean, I have 12 credits of work to complete in the next month or so, and this while traveling throughout southeast Asia. Fun stuff, as a course on world religions couples readings (which in theory I should have already completed), talking personally with religious leaders and my extremely knowledgeable professor, and visiting ancient religious sites.

7) Faced with my complete inability to communicate, Ashley and I found ourselves a language tutor. Chhinn is a fabulous fellow that we met at church. He just got off a mission in California and was looking for a productive way to fill the one month before he goes back to the states to start nursing school. He’s been helping us every night to learn basic words and grammar, and he pretty much rocks.

8) Thanks to the Cambodian knack for simile, I’ve learned a lot about myself that I didn’t know before. I have hair like gold, a pointy nose, and teeth like pearls. My face looks like a doll’s face. And the hair on my arms looks like pigs hair. Nice.

Tomorrow morning, I take off for Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia (tourist edition), Malaysia, and Indonesia. All things told, it will be just under one month of travel. It should be fabulous. I’ll try to post pictures periodically, but no promises.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Sunrise on the Mekong


Motivated by the lethargy that I had been feeling lately, I decided to wake up early and go for a run. At 5 am, the streets are almost empty, things are relatively quiet, and the air feels cleaner. I ran away from my house, down towards the quay, where the river is flanked by a broad walkway, complete with paving stones, grassy patches, and hibiscus trees. I wanted to do yoga and meditate in relative peace along the river, while watching the sunrise. I didn't find relative peace, but what I did find was better.


There are no gyms or health clubs in Cambodia; the lifestyle is such that the days activites, combined with fresh foods, leave people healthy and satisfied, feeling very little urge to work out in the western sense. The fitness fad, however, has begun its eastward migration, and the motivated few are finding ways to get their aerobic excercise fix. Behold Cambodia's primitive aerobics class. I am not sure what this exercise is designed to accomplish, but I found the whole spectacle highly entertaining.
An explanation might be in order: there are several bunches, like this one, composed mostly of middle aged women arranged in rows in the open air, taking up most of the walking space doing something that resembles a line dance. The instructor is easy to identify because he'll be the only 20-something male, located in the front line next to the boom box that provides the soundtrack. He'll also be shaking it with a little more enthusiasm and ease than most of his followers, whose movements are generally a bit awkward; clearly this type of movement is not what people are used to.

In between excercise groups, apparently unfazed by the upbeat music (strains of 'Just beat it, beat it beat it......' can be heard from a more distant locale) are flocks of pidgeons being fed by people of every age and description. Feeding the birds is a joy shared by old women, children, and middle-aged men alike. My favorite was the toddler who took great pleasure disrupting the birds by running through the middle of their feeding zone--I failed to get a good picture, but I'll be back. This side of Phnom Penh is a pleasant window to the life that exists beyond my neighborhood, office, and the typical tourist experience. I love it!

Monday, June 2, 2008

Practical matters

I've had some inquiries after what I actually do while at work. When I am not surreptitiously blogging or writing emails, I amuse myself by contemplating the mechanics of Community Based Health Insurance, known henceforth as CBHI. A seasoned NGO employee (that is, one who works with a non-governmental organization) would use such acronyms prolifically in order to speed the typing process, retard reading comprehension, and, as is usual all respectable NGO circles, to legitimize any and all documents by increasing their resemblance to official government rubbish.

CBHI, then, is intended to alleviate poverty and improve health among the rural poor by making reliable health care more accessible. RACHA (the Reproductive and Child Health Association, my place of work) started the project--they make contracts for payment with health centers, advertise the program, and try to get villagers to join, with varying degrees of success. Basically, RACHA is the insurrance agent and broker; they attempt to pool the health risks among the rural poor, asking a phenomenally low premium that is subsidized by interest earned in a micro-credit program that they run in the same village.

The CBHI pilot program in Pursat province has been in place for a year, and it is time for the yearly review. The program is losing money faster than they are taking it in, which is causing people to worry. Their solution is to expand the program but charge a higher premium in the new areas. My original plan was to get information on health indicators and find out if RACHA had been successful in targeting the poor and in improving their health by improving access to care, and to measure how people respond to changes in price--somewhat generic, but interesting to the economics geek in me, because it is a unique sort of program and scholarly works on Cambodia, and CBHI, are slim.

Well, it has transpired that, rather than taking an ex-post gander at CBHI to determine if it works or not, I am now responsible for analyzing the existing program, improving it, and implementing the improvements in the new area. So, with my 3 semesters of training in economics, I am designing a financially solvent insurrance scheme that will actually be put to work at the end of July. Undergraduates aren't really supposed to do this sort of thing....it somewhat resembles turning a chem major loose in the lab, telling him to experiment with alternate uses of gunpowder, and giving him a box of matches. Adult supervision recommended. But, as previously noted, normal rules don't apply in this country, and since 3 semesters of economics is better than none, I am in charge. I'm just hoping nothing explodes. How is that for an objective?

Anyways, current tasks include working with the monitoring and evaluation unit to design a survey that will theoretically tell me the things I need to know about the village economic and health status, the Health Centers that are supposed to treat people, and the CBHI scheme that is supposed to make treatment affordable. Also on the docket are figuring out how to get vital documents translated in English, discovering whether the aforementioned vital documents actually exist (the Cambodian health system has some issues with transparency in accounting and record keeping), and finding a way to procure the information requested in the beginning of this paragraph.

In the next week, I will venture bravely away from my desk, computer, and swivel chair to visit villages and health centers in order to see first hand what I'm talking about....right now it is all just paper, which isn't very exciting. I'll probably have more questions and fewer answers, but that is the fun part of this game.