A Year in Cambodia
Another rainy afternoon
in Phnom Penh
Photo: Steven McPhillips
The main
entrance of the National
Library of Cambodia, c.2000
Photo: National Library of Cambodia
A typical French
colonial building with the National Museum in the background
Photo: Steven McPhillips
Moto-taxis in
the rain, Phnom Penh
Photo: Steven McPhillips
As was usual in Phnom Penh for that time of year, the rains came at 4:30 pm. I had planned to race home on my motorbike early to avoid being drenched, but there had been just too much to do and I didn’t end up locking the door of my office (also known as the Newspapers Stacks and Reading Room at Cambodia’s National Library) until 5:30. The rain showed no sign of letting up, and things outside were not good. Street 92 was hidden by a river, coursing its way past the library and eventually snaking around Wat Phnom, the main Buddhist temple (and tourist attraction) of the city.
Being the foolhardy barang (foreigner) that I am, I headed out anyway. And all too soon my little motorbike was flooded, literally: it held its own down the newborn river previously known as Street 19 until a gigantic Lexus—haphazardly piloted by a man of more considerable financial means than me—sped past, parting the waves and sweeping me aside. The bike stalled, water engulfing the now silent exhaust.
A Little Help from Friends
An hour later, I had found refuge. A small pond was forming under my bar stool as I texted Ryan, a housemate who also rode his own bike: ‘Don't go down Street 19!’ He met up with me shortly after and we had a good laugh about the vicissitudes of life in Cambodia’s chaotic but charismatic capital.
It would later cost about US$5 to get the bike fixed, including an oil change, but for the moment I knew I could enjoy another amber brew or two (at the very reasonable price of US 75 cents) while I dried off; sooner or later one of the locals would ask if my bike was okay. And yes, they did. A quick inspection and a few laughs later, the problem was diagnosed, temporarily fixed and immediately forgotten while I offered my new friends a few thousand riel for a beer or cigarettes. The sheer friendliness of the Cambodians made it seem criminal not to offer them something, even though they never asked for payment for their work. I had been living in Phnom Penh for nine months or so by that stage and can’t imagine what I would have done (and how much I would have been swindled!) when I was a green volunteer, fresh off the plane from Australia.
Background to Volunteering
How did I come to be volunteering in Cambodia? A friend had sent me an email in February 2006, something about volunteer work: a chance to try something different and help others at the same time, working in a national library ‘doing IT stuff’. It didn’t sound all that different from my role at the National Library of Australia, so I applied, despite having never previously considered development work.
In September 2006 I met the other people who had successfully applied for postings to Cambodia. We had all entered a new community: the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) program, an AusAID project that annually places over 400 young Australian volunteers in the Asia/Pacific region for a maximum of 12 months. Targeting key development areas such as health, education, agriculture, environment, trade, gender issues and government, the program assigns volunteers to Bangladesh, Mongolia, Tonga and a swathe of developing Asian and Pacific nations in between.
My assignment was to provide IT advice to the National Library of Cambodia. My energies were to be put towards staff training, some work on the library catalogue, and possibly a website, all the while showing staff how IT could be of assistance to their work. On paper this is a sound proposal, and 12 months seems too long for a few training courses, rolling out a website, and all the rest.
Challenges and Changes
Of course, the AYAD training taught us about the enormity of living (not visiting, but living!) in a developing country, and to expect three months or thereabouts of settling down time. However, it’s one thing to be taught and quite another to experience.
The first four months were spent sitting in my office doing little more than making notes and having small conversations in English and Khmer with the people at the National Library of Cambodia. I’m not sure what eventually changed, but I doubt it happened overnight. Gradually my work became more inclusive; workmates confided in me their thoughts and ideas; people asked for my advice and actually acted upon it! We began to work together, and I soon found nothing was deemed out of my scope. Help with public speaking, library exhibitions, funding proposals, common English, common Khmer; absolutely everything to do with the library—IT related or otherwise—became a job requiring my assistance.
And fair enough, given that apart from the Director, I was the only library employee who had completed tertiary education. Fair enough, given that the library has a real annual budget of US$10 000 (which has to pay around 25 staff as well as cover supplies, building maintenance and that inexhaustible line of things that go towards keeping a national institution open). Fair enough, given that the underpaid staff are often exhausted from working their second (or third!) job in the early morning and struggle to find motivation to work again for less than US$1 a day. Unlike finding the best way to help (which took me five months to learn), the realities of life in a developing country don’t take very long to manifest themselves.
In the end, I managed to use my IT skills and experience to provide valuable advice and find solutions for the library, and with necessity being the mother of invention, I discovered an unknown ability to provide assistance in areas I hadn’t dreamed of, including donations and corporate sponsorship. As a result, during my stay ANZ Royal Bank—a partnership between the ANZ and Cambodia Royal banks—donated computers for public use and are now keen to assist the library in the future.
Giving and Receiving
Although I'm proud of the achievements I made over the 12 months of my stay, they are pale in comparison to what I received: cultural awareness, tolerance, new ideas about the Really Important Bits of libraries, and memories I’ll treasure for life. And, most importantly, I’ll never forget the Cambodian friends I made: people who often lived through daily hardships that I could never imagine, but who never stopped smiling, never stopped giving, and—as the zealously enforced three-hour lunches would attest to—hardly ever stopped eating. My new friends embraced me and let me into their world, one so special and in many ways so different from the one I had known in Australia.
And one in which an understanding about what to do when confronted by monsoonal rains on a clapped-out old motorbike, left me for dust.
Steven McPhillips
Systems Administrator, IT Business Systems
For more information regarding the AYAD program, visit www.ayad.com.au