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

• In Morocco, the provision of solar photovoltaic kits to isolated villages has helped to raise access rates to electricity in rural areas from less than 15% in 1990 to more than 97% in 2009.

• The national utility, Vietnam Electricity, estimates that in 1975, electrification among poor households in the country was no more than 2.5%. Yet in a little over 3 decades, Viet Nam was able to connect millions to the national grid. By 2009 the country had electrified 96% of its households, bringing modern power to the Vietnamese people in both urban and rural areas.

Image credit: Some rights reserved by henrikj

Some apps that I use a lot or have recently discovered:

• Every time I am about to go “into the wild” I download the latest posts from my favourite blogs to Mobile RSS. It is great for random 10-20 minute stops where you don’t really know what is going to happen next and can’t pull out a book to read.
• I use Intl Meeting Planner to plan hookups between different timezones.
• I open World Map at least every other day to check out where exactly certain countries are in the world. This ties into a hobby of mine – studying country statistics to try and understand how each country fits into the world. Both The Economist World in Numbers and The World Factbook are great for this.
• What’s app allows you to message other people over the internet from your phone. It is suprising how many people are already connected.
• Nike Training Club provides great facilitated workouts – a great way to train if you are on the go and can’t regularly attend a training club or gym.
• I use The Economist and BBC World to get an overview of what is happening in the world
• And finally emoji is quite silly, but there’s something about being able to send someone an emoticon of a ghost that always makes me smile.

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.

The deadline for the Nepali constitution recently passed – it prompted my move from the east of Nepal to the capital, and then finally out of the country to Cambodia. Given the political vacuum the country finds itself in now, there has been a media storm this week over whether Nepal should be considered a “failed, or flailing” state.

• First there was this piece in the New York Times - “If the culture of impunity is not uprooted, neither the elections nor a new constitution can deliver Nepal from slipping further into civil chaos, poverty and lawlessness.”

• This was counted by a letter to the editor from Nepal’s permanent mission to the United Nations: “We categorically reject the notion that Nepal is on the brink of collapse. We are on the verge of restructuring and institutionalizing the state within a democratic, republican and federal structure.”

• And finally , then finally the hitback from the Kathmandu Post: “Nepal looks like a failing state from outside because this country has not been successfully coping with the challenges of the modern times. My own feeling is that Nepal is not heading towards being a failing state. The problem is we have short historical memories. What is happening so far is debate, peaceful albeit heated discussions about the structure and modus operandi of the political process, elections, reviving the CA or holding fresh elections. This is a very democratic process. The “ferocious” guerrillas have worked hard with the ‘parliamentary’ parties and disarmed themselves; together they have solved many complex problems. People from different origins and geographical setting are not fighting with each other. They are putting fresh ideas about equality and harmonious state restructuring. A democratically minded President is making calls to parties to work together and find a way out of this impasse. Equally, the other subject of great importance is that Nepal’s big neighbours India and China want these political parties to find their own solutions. They are not putting trade embargos or supporting any groups with money or arms. They are encouraging a return to normalcy. “

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:

• Poverty is notoriously difficult to measure and even more difficult to overcome. Noone knows the full answer, but at least part of the answer must lie in China where the poverty rate over the last few decades has fallen from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people.
• It is very hard to reach scale, and most projects never make it past the pilot stage. And many projects and people that have achieved very little seem to get a significant amount of airtime.
• Marketing in the development sector tends to forget that people often do things with are bad for them. In Australia everyone knows that 30 minutes of exercise everyday is the best thing you can do for your health, and yet there are plenty of people who don’t do it. It isn’t enough to tell people that your initiative will overcome the bad. You need to show them how it will give them the life they want.
• There is a lot that non-profits can learn from for-profit companies in the developing work. Mobile phones and Coca Cola are everywhere. I especially liked these learnings from Melinda Gates – Coca Cola focuses on real time feedback, local talent and established distribution networks and innovative marketing. Non-profits could achieve a lot by focusing on the same.
• And finally, people are more similar than they are different.

Shenzen – charter city

• Here’s an idea. Let’s say your country is poor and unstable. You know the only way out is to try something new. But how? How about going the way of Philadelphia, Singapore and Shenzen and running a city wide experiment ? The New York Times recently explored this question in their aptly titled Who Wants to Buy Honduras? “In 2009, Romer developed the idea of charter cities — economic zones founded on the land of poor countries but governed with the legal and political system of, often, rich ones.  Romer, who is expected to be chairman, is hoping to build a city that can accommodate 10 million people, which is 2 million more than the current population of Honduras. His charter city will have extremely open immigration policies to attract foreign workers from all over. It will also tactically dissuade some from coming.”

• Again from the New York Times, a piece on microinsurance and how AllLife, a South Africa insurance product, covers people with HIV/AIDs. “AllLife requires the people it insures to make regular medical visits, get the necessary periodic tests and follow treatment protocols. AllLife’s managing director, says that clients average a 15 percent improvement in their CD4 count — an immune system marker — six months after buying insurance. That improvement may partly be the psychology of seeing their disease in a different way: “If you think you have a terminal disease, you don’t care how you eat and exercise,” said Beerman. “Now I have an insurance company monitoring me. They are very active in keeping me alive.”

• Check out this creative street art, Nepali style, from right near my hotel. I leave this week to start Good Return’s Sustainable Energy Program in Cambodia.

Image credit: Lettersfrommitia

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

Turning a famous symbol into light

• On taking leadership – check out my very good friend Michael Mobb’s plan to make the suburb of Chippendale in Sydney sustainable. He’s thought about everything with everything green buildings to art to the urban heat island effect to his favourite topic — food.

• Again on leadership, I recently watched “The Lady”, about Aung San Suu Kyi’s struggle for democracy in Burma. Kyi was not able to return to the UK when her husband had prostate cancer and they were separated when he finally passed. When the dictatorship told her “you must choose between your husband and your family, or your country”, she responded with “what choice is that”? On May 12th, Kyi was formally sworn into the Burmese Parliament, ending 24 years of struggle, of which 15 years were spent under house arrest.

• I’ve got another post up on the Fifth Estate, continuing my series for the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All. This time I’ve focussed on new and innovative solutions for light – including the long lauded “coke bottle” light which was recently nominated for an Ashden award.