Home can be where you make it

As Tami and I planned our break from the career/life path that we'd been on, we discussed a ton of different reasons why wanted to leave our home in San Francisco. It didn't take long for a short list to develop. I don't know if I've gone back and articulated those objectives but, now that I look back, we've been able to "check" many off the to-do list.

We wanted to enjoy some warm weather. Check.


Night market scene near our house

We wanted to get out of a 9-5...or, more accurately...an 8-6 schedule. Instead of clocks and calendars dictating how we used our time, we wanted the rising and setting sun or the seasons to dictate. Check.

We wanted to see if we could let go of some of the stress we were feeling. Check.

We wanted to spend time outdoors. Check.

We wanted to use our bodies i.e. trekking, riding bikes, swimming, etc. Check.

We wanted to share some of our experiences on the road with friends from home. Check.

We wanted to try different foods and cuisines. Check.

I'd traveled outside the US a fair amount before this trip and enjoyed all the above experiences to one degree or another. There was one thing I'd never done before, though, and that goal topped my list. I wanted to live somewhere for awhile - call some foreign city or town or village, "home". As we prepare to depart Southeast Asia, I am happy to say that we have been able to enjoy a brief version of that experience now, as well.




Neon sign for the market where we shopped in Phnom Penh.

Our goal in "living" someplace, meant that we wanted to get to know it better than you would if you were just passing through. We wanted to work. Originally, we had hopes of opening a restaurant or some other business. For a variety of reasons, we got cold feet on that one. The next logical step was to try to contribute something helpful to the place where we settled. On that note, we got extremely lucky with our positions with Kiva and Maxima. Not only did we find work, but the work was fascinating and the people we worked with were so gracious and professional that I'll do well to try to match their examples. I feel very fortunate that I leave Cambodia calling many of them friends.

Some of the Maxima staff at the wedding of one of their colleagues.


Wedding procession at the same wedding.

We wanted to live someplace other than a hotel. In this case, we were also very lucky. We looked at several places but fell in love with a third-floor flat in a family's house. We had a big, tiled terrace in front, a great roof deck...and the thing we wanted most - a kitchen. Tami and I will be working off the extra pounds for a few months. :)

Thanksgiving crew on our roof at sundown.

We hoped get to know people - locals and/or expatriates. Cambodia is a great place for both. I sound like a broken record going on about how nice the Cambodians are but that's the reality. Come and check it out for yourself. Lots of interesting non-Cambodians have settled there, as well. One nice ending story is that, Bari (second from right in the above photo) took over our apartment. We had some very good times with him and were super-happy to pass on such a groovy pad to someone we knew. Funny footnote: Bari's originally a Michigander and was one of the founders of a vegetarian restaurant I worked at in Ann Arbor back in the late '80's. Now he's making a home in Phnom Penh working with local folks out on Koh Dach, a nearby island in the Mekong River.

So, now we move on - sad to go but very happy we had this opportunity. If you're curious at all if you can do it, have no fear. It's a great experience. Somehow I don't think this is our last time, either.

Fruit shake vendor at the night market near Orussey

Rough (In)Justice

The former main entrance to Sihanoukville's market - Psar Leu

A few days ago we were in the town of Sihanoukville on the southern coast of Cambodia. In the middle of one night I woke up to sirens, an uncommon sound I recalled hearing only a couple times during our months in the country. The next morning our French host told us that the city's market had burned, "Zayr iss no moah mahket."

When we went by to take a look, we were speechless. We'd shopped at this market before and complained that it was scruffy, even by Cambodian standards. It was where the city shopped, though. All over Southeast Asia, people buy almost all of their food from central or district markets - sprawling covered warrens filled with stalls of produce, meat, fish, dry goods, clothes....you name it. Each stall is owned by a family and, at least in Cambodia, that stall provides the main or sole income supporting a LOT of people.

Piles of clothes smolder

It's no wonder that people pored through every scrap of their burned belongings trying to salvage anything of value. I saw one woman carrying the melted remains of a fan. I assume she was going to try to pull the copper out of the motor to sell it for scrap. Very few Cambodians can afford to waste anything.

Over the subsequent few days, we heard from several different people that the local government had tried to "influence" the vendors at the market to move to a new facility. The land where the existing market stood in the center of downtown Sihanoukville had been sold for another purpose. Most of the vendors chose not to move because rents at the new market were too high. Then, after functioning in the same place for decades, the market burned entirely a few nights ago.


Not one person we talked to was surprised that the market burned. They weren't happy, but they seemed resigned because they knew they have little or no recourse. This type of eviction happens with sad regularity in Cambodia. As cities become crowded and the economy slowly grows, land formerly deemed not worth much can, over time, become coveted. Squatters, small-business people, anyone not connected to the powers-that-be are forced to move, often to places distant from their former locations.

And no, you can count insurance among the many things that these people do not have.

Getting Around Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh may be one of the largest cities in the world with no public mass transit. It's the biggest city I've ever visited where you can't find even a single city bus. Gettng an accurate census in a sprawling, ramshackle place like this isn't easy. Most current estimates put the population here at somewhere just over two million. The population of buses, trains or any other form of surface mass transport is ZERO.


Phnom Penh experimented briefly with buses three or four years ago. The experiment lasted only three months because, I've been told, no one would ride them. The denizens of this city have a more unique form of transport that they seem highly unlikely to stop using - the motodup (augmented by the larger and much more romantic tuk tuk - see second vehicle in the photo below). A motodup is simply a 100-125 cc motorbike (often a version of the Honda cub made by Daelim from Korea) and driver that will put you on the back of his bike and drive you around town for a small fee. The cost varies depending on the distance. As foreigeners, we ALWAYS had to negotiate but we invariably settled near the usual cost of about fifty cents per kilometer.


Many guidebooks tell you that the street corners are full of waiting motodup drivers easily recognizable by their ubiquitous uniform - the baseball cap. It's almost impossible to walk past them without hearing the song of the streets, "Hello Sir, moto?" or the more simplified "Moto?".


Cambodians famously do NOT like to walk. That, supposedly, is the main reason why the bus experiment failed. Motodups will take you from door to door. With a bus, you have to get off at some predetermined stop and walk to your final destination. Motodups are cheap. You can find one any time of day or night. They're very convenient. It's no wonder we see thousands of these guys (NEVER have we seen a woman driver) around the city. Women riders go sidesaddle.


When we started work, we needed to get from our house to our office. We toyed with the idea of buying bicycles but never got around to it. Instead we hit up the motodups on the corner closest to our house. Both of us can pile onto single moto and get to the office in less than ten minutes. Since our Khmer was limited, we drew a simple map of our destination. With a little deciphering, the driver seemed to understand and off we went.


After only two or three days, a strange thing happened. One of our drivers picked us up for the second time - a repeat. When we tried to fumble through the map description and directions, he smiled and waved us off. He remembered where we were going. It was amazing. Get on the bike; no need to give directions; no need to negotiate the fee; just roll and enjoy the scenery. It was like that every day going forward unless we had a driver who'd never carried us before.

I won't go into the hair raising aspect of trusting your life to another driver in some of THE MOST chaotic traffic on earth. Suffice to say that, if you're paying attention at all, it can be very scary. The rules of the road here are minimal and traffic flows based on lack of resistance more than any other factor. It completely common to drive down the wrong side of the street agains traffic as long as you stay closer to the shoulder. Red stoplights merely mean "slow down". Intersections ebb and flow with the cross traffic pushing and nudging until someone can break all the way across. Of course, all of this happens without helmets for the passengers.

Don't eat the bear paw

Yes...the trade in endangered animals. We've all heard the stories about how anything goes (...onto an Asian dinner plate). Just east of Phnom Penh there's a long string of huge restaurants frequented almost exclusively by Khmers (Cambodians) reputed to sell all manner of exotic cuisine - everything from cobra to dog to different parts of endangered deer among other things. The above billboard is just over the river from Phnom Penh right where the restaurants begin. It implies that you go to jail if you serve up anything threatened or endangered. One can only hope the authorities actually enforce whatever regulations might be on the books. As Cambodia, like much of the developing world, is open to the highest bidder, I wouldn't bet on the menu being close to what most Westerners would consider conventional.

Friends Make It Feel Like the Holidays

Staying put seems to be the right tactic if you people to visit....and we always want people to visit. We've been in Phnom Penh for a couple months now and it seems like this city is on the road "to" or "from" someplace or other for a number of our friends. Sherry, pictured above with Tami on the roof of the Foreign Correspondents' Club, was the latest familar face to spend some time with us. We hadn't seen her for almost two years. She was one of the stalwarts who saw us off on our last night in the States back in NYC.


Unlike other visitors - this is actually a first now that I think of it - Sherry came to visit as a result of work, not pleasure. She works for the United Nations and took a weekend out of a very hectic schedule to fly down from Vientienne, Laos. She's no stranger to traveling in the developing world and fell right into the rhythm of seeing the sights in Phnom Penh. We did some of our local favorites (riding in tuk-tuks - above).


You never know what you'll find on the streets of this city. Notice how at-ease Sherry is. I was afraid the rump of that beast might have swung over and crushed me.


One of the nicest things we've been able to enjoy by staying put, is our kitchen for cooking . . . . and our terrace for eating. Every guest has had to endure long brunches or dinners where Tami and I try to get satiated on all the foods from home we miss. This particular morning it was Latin American - desayuno tipico. Homemade tortillas and salsa, too.

One afternoon, a friend of ours who lives here, Bari (far right) arranged a private, sunset boat cruise on the Mekong. Ouch. You can't believe how peaceful and mellow it was out on the river. Phnom Penh can be kah-ray-zeeeee and the boat was an unexpected release. After a couple snail-paced hours, we were all smiling.



The icy beers helped, too.


Even the captain enjoyed himself. (Check out his Britney logbook...)


One morning, we had the bonus treat of two more people joining in from home. Perry and Mike, two friends of one of Tami's girlfriends were passing through and joined for brunch.


In and out. Two days and she was back on a tuk-tuk to the airport. Much fun. It'll be that much more fun to laugh about our little sojourn when we're back home someday. Adios amiga!

The Eric and Margaret Road Show

Two more friends from home just rolled through for a visit...and what a treat it was. As fun as our time out here on the road has been, very little can beat catching up with friends over a long brunch or dinner. Every time someone visits, it feels like a personal envoy from our homeland has set aside time for classified debriefing.

This time was a little different, though . . . . and possibly even a little better. Eric and Maggie didn't merely come out for a vacation and throw in a visit to us. They have put together their own version of a "break from the path" and struck out on longer-term odyssey of their own. Both successful professionals, they took a step off the treadmill and have been on the road since this past summer. They started in Turkey, went back to the States for a full two-week stint at Burning Man, decompressed at Lake Tahoe then made their way to Southeast Asia. They arrived in Phnom Penh just in time to celebrate American Thanksgiving with us.

With their visit, it might be the first time Tami and I can include ourselves on our friends' "visitor-on-the-road" list. One thing we found especially nice is that, in the past few months, E & M have covered a lot of the same ground as Tami and I. It was refreshing to get their hometown impressions of experiences we've shared. It's also been encouraging to see how comfortably they seem to have adapted to life on the road and how inspired they seem to be about the things they've seen.

Tami and I know there's a lot of awesomely fun stuff out here. It reinforces our delight, though, to hear the enthusiasm in Eric's voice when he described having a complete stranger in Vietnam hop on the back of his bicycle as Eric pedaled along with the guy on the back while neither could understand the other...but it was all just fine.

Every time we see friends from home Tami and I know we've got a lot to look forward to on our return. We miss everyone a lot. Reconnecting with some of you will have the added laughs of reminiscing over some of the stuff we saw together along the way.

What can you get for your dollar today?

A lot less than you could back in August. That dollar you had THREE MONTHS AGO is now worth 91.4 cents. Our 12 Trillion dollar economy is now less than 11 Trillion. If your investments haven't appreciated 8.6% in the past ninety or so days, you're down.

The above chart compares the value of the US Dollar to a basket of currencies from other nations. A month ago, Federal Reserve Bank chair Ben Bernanke replied to questions about the falling buck by mumbling that within the US, the dollar is still a dollar. That leaves out those things Americans buy from abroad....starting with OIL. You can go down the list from there. We are a deficit nation. We buy more from abroad than we sell. Dollar goes down, our prices go up.

Got Gold?

Some Links To Our Fellows Work

As I said below, we've been busy. Here's some examples of what we've been doing. Just click the link and you can get to a blog for Kiva Fellows.

http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2007/11/16/do-what-you-know/

You can see a compendium of my journal entries for Kiva/Maxima if you click on the link over to the right of this page called "Kiva Fellows Posts"

What Have We Been Up To?

Man . . . it's been a busy last few weeks. Since early October we've been working as Fellows with a microfinance institutution (MFI) here in Phnom Penh. Micro-finance has been around in various forms for over a hundred years but most people date its crossover into wider familiarity with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in the 1970's. The founder, a man named Muhammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. (It's a fascinating story if you click on those links.)

As I understand it, the idea of microfinance is to loan money to people who otherwise have no access to credit either:

1) ... in sums large enough to do anything more than pay for day-to-day living expenses or...

2) ... at interest rates low enough to allow them to pay it back without incurring further debt.

Perhaps the most common question asked and certainly the first one I asked was, "If the lendees can pay back the loans with interest, why don't they just save the money themselves and save the interest cost?" I've been told by several loan recipients that the schedule of making loan payments enforces a discipline that they would otherwise find elusive. These people do not put money in the bank. They are too poor (most earn around US $2.00 a day, give or take) , bank branches are few and far between and Cambodia has a recent history of bank failure and total loss of funds due to civil war and corrupt mismanagement. So, the money of the people our MFI works with stays in their homes. And when the money is there, they tell is there is always some need that causes them to spend it - whether it's a child that needs clothes or an extended family member that has an emergency. The fact that a loan officer visits them once a month gives them the excuse to say, "No, I can't spend it."

Loan officer disburses a loan (US Dollars are the default currency in Cambodia)

When they do get the loan, they suddenly have open to them choices they never had before. For example, we interview many people who make their livings by weaving cloth on hand and foot operated looms. For generations many of these people had only one avenue of managing their cost and income. They would get thread from local middlemen who also serve as the sole buyers of finished cloth. The typical arrangement our clients describe is a middleman extending 0a weaver credit of enough thread to make three finished pieces of cloth with the middleman taking two and the weaver taking the profit (with a price set by the middleman!) for the third. Apparently they got by but there was little or no movement up any economic ladder. Now, a weaver can get a loan for a few hundred dollars, travel the ten to thirty kilometers into Phnom Penh to one of the large markets and buy the supplies themselves for a lower cost. When they have completed enough finished pieces, they can take them into the city and sell them for a higher cost. The power of capital!

Weaver on the Mekong island of Koh Dach

Other business fare better, as well. Many farmers formerly could only afford a limited amount of seed, fertilizer, pesticide, etc. because they had a long period of waiting before they harvested and sold the produce. Now, they can take out a loan at a reasonable interest rate, buy larger amounts of materials and harvest and sell more at the end of a growing cycle. Many MFI's even offer a special loan product for farmers that allow them to make small payments early in the cycle when they have no cash flow saving the larger payments for the end of the growing/harvesting cycle. Whatever the situation, my experience in five weeks of interviewing clients is that they are very happy to have access to the funds.

So what's the role of Tami and I in all this? We applied to work with this organization from San Francisco called KIVA. They worked out a system set up on the Web to connect individual lenders (NOT donors) with people in need in the developing world. If you go to their website they explain it in detail. The essence of it goes like this, someone in Seattle goes to the Kiva site. There they see profiles of businesses/people in need of funding. Seattle (after they set up an account) clicks on a business they want to loan to and the funds go to an MFI who works with Kiva in the target country. At some point in the payback period, someone from KIVA or the MFI interviews the loan recipient to assess the impact of the loan. That's where Tami and I come in.
Tami on one of our morning commutes - a ferry across the Mekong River

We work as Fellows for Kiva. We get the distinct pleasure of riding with our MFI's (MAXIMA) loan officers to interview then blog about the clients - and you might not believe what a great time this is. We're doing many of the things we left home to do but, because we're working with a local organization and with a Cambodian who can interpret, we are allowed much deeper into the local culture than we've been ANY time on this trip. We're seeing a whole spectrum of the entrepreneurial economy. Because, at this economic level business and family are essentially inseparable, we get to see lots of family life we'd never see as well. Working with MAXIMA, we also experience working with a professional organization and MAXIMA is first-rate. Even though we're only scruffy volunteers, their staff has welcomed us in and supported us as if we were managing partners.

So, we have about another month of our term with KIVA/MAXIMA as Fellows. We'll see what comes after that but for now we're enjoying this very much.

Well...we were just graced with another care package from home. This time, it came in the form of our globe-trotting friend from Manhattan, Manhattan. He's become so synonymous with his home city that his friends haven't come up with a better nick-name for him. Thinking about it, part of the reason his handle has stuck so well is that, more than most anyone I've ever known, Rich (real name) makes the effort to put in an appearance where and whenever he sees the opportunity to spend some quality time with friends. Exhibit A below...

Hell on Wheels (note mermaid surfing on the crocodile behind)

I don't think he's missed a Burning Man in nine years. He comes out to San Francisco or LA for fundraisers and parties. And now, following in the footsteps of Captain Ken, Manhattan has become our only other friend to make the super-hero list of people from home who've visited us twice. Man gets around...!

I've lobbied for a while now that Manhattan, while worn with unredoubtable aplomb, might be a less accurate moniker than he deserves. The more I get to know Rich, the more I see all these colorful and unique aspects of his personality incipient with naming possibilities. Those of you who know him might well agree. Consider this an opportunity to submit suggestions. :)

Right at home...

Rich has spent a surprisingly huge portion of his life on the beach. I learned more about that over the past few days. The man's second home is Jamaica and he knows his way around the sea, sand, thatched bungalows and cold beers as well as anyone I've ever met. He was/is very good company.

No, "Playa Shark" has been retired. Try again.

Our man blew into town from Thailand, checked out a few sites here in Cambodia and swept back out for NYC in time to celebrate Halloween. (At least we think he made it, we still haven't heard from him.) For a guy who'd I'd consider to be mellow, he sure tired Tami and I out. Seems like that's how it happened last time we saw him back in Amsterdam.

We'll miss ya Rich/Manhattan/Traveller/Excess/????