Most of you reading this will have worked with me at some point or will be family and will know that I’ve been desperate for a challenge workwise since I was 19. The pattern so far has been, I get bored and become destructive. No doubt, I need to be kept on my toes. Well I’m not sure why anyone didn’t ship me off to Cambodia ages ago cos there is sure challenge here!!
It’s been an interesting 2 weeks workwise to say the least.
On my second day I started teaching the teachers English. I was given a book and the responsibility was dumped on me from then on. No explanation. Nothing. The head of our partner charity I’m working for disappeared for days with no contact. I wasn’t 100% sure if this was a sign of things to come or what.
First contact was late Friday, a week later, when he called me and asked if I could attend a meeting on Saturday (Cambodians work 6 day weeks with Sunday being the only day off) with a guy who runs another charity. I had no idea what the meeting was about except for that this guy wanted to meet me. So I agreed, thinking, what’s the harm in it.
I arrived at this meeting and this guy is your typical New Yorker (Chuck I know you’ll know what I mean). Really loud, really brash, spoke about things I would consider a little more confidential really loudly in the middle of a café and was generally very forceful. At first I was a little put off by him but after a while I got a little used to his way of communicating.
He’d provided the charity with some volunteers the week before and wanted to give some feedback about the schools, the teachers etc. The feedback was great, for me especially, given that the project has a few isues that need to be ironed out and I’m not sure how many people provide feedback of what a westerner would expect to see on a project. This helped my cause a lot!! This guy has been here for 16 year and does know his stuff, how things work here and has set up and run 6 very successful schools throughout Cambodia, 4 of which are now self sustainable.
The feedback this guy gave was that the level of English for the teachers needed to improve, especially their conversational English, the curriculum needed to be re-addressed to make it more relevant to Cambodian life and he wanted breakdowns of the budgets for each school (these desperately need to be revised as corners have been cut everywhere possible which makes thing very tight) and the short, medium and long term goals need to be addressed for the teachers, students, schools and charity. If we can have this done within 10 days he can guarantee funding for 2 of the schools for 3 years! So, everything I was meant to be doing in 6mths was suddenly condensed into 10 days. Oh crap!!
So thinking we would get to work the following day I arranged for us to meet the next morning to discuss what we needed to do to prepare (10 days to me means 10 days!). Next day got myself all prepared for this meeting, thinking it was quite an important one and waited and waited and waited for him to arrive. I finally get a call that evening saying I’m sorry I was busy can you do tomorrow? So I said yes that’s fine but call me in the morning to arrange a time. No phone call all day!! I was prepared for Asia time but this is a joke! Accepting Asia time and not flying off the handle in a full on Leah rage is a difficult balance to find.
I thought a lot about how to approach this and I let the week pass as normal (well normal for 2 weeks here). I could sort this and provide the guy with what he needs but at the end of the day I’m not here to sort shit out. I’m here to assist and to teach others how to sort shit out. So I have to step back, let go of my desire to control and sort shit out and be here to assist, advise and teach. If they are not stressing about it then I need not stress about it. If there is any stressing due to time constraints then some shit might go down!!
A week later and I’m sitting in another meeting and suddenly the guy I’m working with turns to me and says, “So in the budget we need to include………….” OH MY GOD. BREAKTHROUGH!! I couldn’t believe it. I’d left it alone, he’d thought about it and we were on not just the right track but the same track. So he says “when are you free to meet this week to get things ready?” I got a little less excited this time round as I’ve learnt my lesson (smart cookie).
So lets see what this week has in store………….
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