So, this is my third week at work and things have reached a point where they are just slightly less confusing. I can write about work now without my brain exploding.
Day 1: I find out about the existence of international labour statisticians.
My first day of work I arrived at the ILO. It wasn’t that hard to find. I work in the Phnom Penh Center which is this enormous building 5 minutes from Independence Monument. It’s a block long and it houses 2 universities, a bunch of organizations (including the Phnom Penh post) and us. The only ones there to greet me were Kunthea (the admin at my work who has been dealing with all my visa stuff) and Undraa (one of my bosses). Everyone else, it turns out, was at this “very important workshop for the ILO.” They assured me that tomorrow everyone would be around to brief me (actually, maybe not because the workshop was supposed to last 3 days) but for today I could just relax. I had, after all, a desk, a computer and an air conditioned office which I share with a woman named Pheary.
“Undraa,” I asked, “if this workshop is so important and I have nothing to do, can I come?” Undraa looked delighted as I had just solved her problem of what to do with me.
“Yes! Of course you can! What a great idea!” We would be leaving in half an hour. This was my first indication that this would be the kind of internship where I would have to take a lot of initiative if I didn’t want to spend a lot of time in my office on facebook. It felt very different than coming into Jungpyong Middle School two years ago, where the expectations for me were SO high (which may have had something to do with the fact that in Korea I was actually being paid to do a job). This was less stressful, but more disconcerting.
In 30 minutes Undraa came to collect me, as well as a woman named Gloria and we headed downstairs. As soon as we stepped out the door, a cream coloured SUV pulled up and we got in. “This is Virak,” Undraa explained, gesturing at the young man driving the car. “He’s our ILO driver.” This was my first taste of the luxury that comes with working for the UN.
“Our driver?” I clarified. As in, not just a driver we hired for the next half-hour?
“Yes.” Undraa confirmed. “He drives us anywhere we need to go. So if you have a meeting somewhere, you can just ask him and he will drive you and pick you up. Like tomorrow, you’ll have a meeting at the other BFC office, Virak can drive you.”
Just to clarify: The ILO has many projects in Cambodia. One of them is called Better Factories Cambodia. It’s an initiative that just celebrated its 10 year anniversary and is recognized pretty widely as a success in improving conditions in Cambodia’s garment factories. BFC has recently created a side project called SPG (Social Protection and Gender), which aims to deal with issues in factories surrounding the health of workers (who are largely young women). SPG tries to give women who are pre-industry (haven’t started working yet) tools to help their migration to the city be a smoother one. When women are in the factories it tries to provide them with health services and education (in particular, reproductive health services). Finally, since work in the factories is typically not long-term, SPG also tries to provide women with education and tools to set up their own small businesses in their post-industry stage. Undraa is the head of SPG, and it is the SPG office that is in the Phnom Penh Center where I am working. But I am working with both projects – SPG and BFC – which means that I often have to shuttle back and forth between the two offices for meetings. Apparently shuffle actually involves me being driven back and forth in a huge, air conditioned vehicle. This is quite the change from how I usually get around town – on the back of a motorcycle taxi – and I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about it. It’s really hard to feel part of your environment when everyone around you is sweating on motos and tuktuks, and you have a driver at your beck and call. It’s also a luxury that I really did not associate with development work.
On the way it turned out that Undraa was from Mongolia, spoke Russian, and had a daughter my age. She was really pleased that I spoke Russian as it would give her an opportunity to keep hers up, and she immediately took a real mentoring air towards me which was really nice. She also told me, and this I didn’t really expect, that if I wanted to work in international bodies like the UN, Russian would be a real asset to me. I actually didn’t realize this at all. I figured English and French – yes. But Russian? Why Russian? Apparently though, in that whole region of former Soviet countries, work in bodies such as the ILO is still done in Russian because it is the one language that everyone probably has in common. Being able to work in that whole area of the world would be a real advantage to me if I applied for these jobs. Cool. We chatted in Russian for a couple of minutes and then we were at our destination.
The meeting was held at Phnom Penh Hotel, which is an enormous, relatively new building that mainly caters to businessmen and generally wealthy travelers. The interior is suitably ornate: large chandeliers heavy with crystal; gleaming floors; soft couches; vases filled with fresh flowers. A young woman in a smart black and white uniform welcomed us to the cool, spacious lobby and directed us up the wide staircase to the second floor. The meeting had already begun so the men at the table in front of the room hastily pushed a bunch of printed powerpoint documents into our hands as well as some notebooks and folders, and ushered us inside.
At the front of the room a gentleman was speaking in Khmer. The audience was made up mostly of men in suits and women in ruffled blouses and pencil skirts. Again the contrast struck me. I just hadn’t seen people like this in Cambodia before. It’s not like I didn’t know that there was an upper middle class. It’s just that when you travel, you don’t see it. I think, in fact, as a tourist you see some of the worst urban poverty in the city because typically beggars congregate around the large tourist attractions. As well, when you’re backpacking, you’re usually eating in small cafes near the tourist sites or around street stalls, and the people who were in the room with me just don’t go there. There were also a couple of foreigners but fewer than I would have expected in an NGO meeting. Someone handed me a pair of headphones and I put them on though they weren’t connected to anything. I heard the scratchy stumbling voice of a translator. Looking around I saw him in the back of the room speaking into a microphone.
The speaker was from the national institute of statistics. He was explaining where the institute gets its data. Apparently each ministry has a department that collects data and then feeds it to the NIS. I wondered to myself how good that data actually is and how thoroughly it is collected.
The next presentation was by a woman named Monica and she talked about different indicators for measuring decent work (that’s what this was, by the way, a tripartite workshop organized by the ILO and the ministry of labour, on measuring the impact of the decent work program in Cambodia). She talked a lot about disaggregation – by gender, disability, etc. She also talked about the employment rate being a somewhat misrepresentative indicator of the labour situation in a country like Cambodia, and that underemployment had to be looked at as well. I hadn’t really considered this, but it makes a lot of sense. Unemployment is only really an option if you’re in a place with social security where people can choose to be unemployed. In countries like Cambodia, unemployment is not an option. People will do something – they’ll drive tourists around, or they’ll paint houses, or work in a factory – anything to put food on the table. They might have an educational level that is far above what they’re doing but they can’t afford to stop doing it. Thus, the fact that people are employed in a country like Cambodia does not give you the full picture and data needs to be collected about whether or not people are working in jobs that are appropriate to their level of education.
After Monica’s presentation we headed to lunch, which was a whole new level of excess. There were three long tables with stainless steel dishes full of steaming curries, soups, and meat dishes. One of the tables was a sushi bar: plates and plates piled full of different kinds of sushi and sashimi. On another table – heaps and heaps of fruit: watermelon, mango, durian, dragonfruit. On the edge of the fruit table there were cakes and pastries and truffles…
I was surprised at how much this bothered me.
When Paul and I were in Battambang last time our tour guide, upon learning that I was an English teacher, asked us to come with him to the orphanage he ran and speak English to the kids since they had very few opportunities to practice their English with native speakers. They had practically no supplies. Paul and I spent about $40 buying notebooks for the whole orphanage. Now, looking at all these notebooks, folders, and tables full of food in one of the most expensive spaces in Phnom Penh – you could have refurbished the entire orphanage for the cost of this meeting, or bought a new bicycle for every child in there. That would actually make a difference in the lives of many individuals. What difference would this workshop on the latest scoop from the international labour statisticians make? I’m pretty sure that the government officials there understood about as much as I did about statistics. Some probably less. The highlight of the day was when the gentleman from the NIS felt the need to clarify: “does everyone here know median?”
Personally, I learned a lot. I find it really interesting to think about where and how we get the data that we get, and how we can get and process the information that we need. But my coworkers – Undraa, Pheary and Gloria – thought that the workshop was useless for our project’s purposes. They also thought that the international labour statisticians were being unrealistic about the kind of information that could and would be collected here, and that almost certainly the suggestions made at this workshop would not be put into practice. In fact, they decided on the spot that we wouldn’t be attending the rest of the workshop because our time could be better spent on other things.
My discomfort with the luxury around me would lessen over the coming weeks. I would go to other meetings with our NGO partners and realize that most of them are not like this at all. This workshop was different because it was a ministry of labour workshop and the government was heavily involved. This made me think more of the ILO and less of the government. I guess this really should not have surprised me at all. This is a standard arrangement in lots of countries where the general population is incredibly poor. But I was startled nonetheless in part because this was so different from the Cambodia I had experienced up to that day, and in part because I thought it was my organization that was responsible. The ILO does in fact pay its employees pretty well, and we have a driver and an air conditioned office ( I know I keep mentioning air conditioning, but it is a pretty big luxury in Cambodia because electricity is so very expensive here, and many NGO’s can’t afford it in their offices), but it’s nothing like that display of wealth at the Phnom Penh Hotel workshop.
As well, as my coworker Maeve pointed out to me, if the ILO wants to draw competent individuals who had invested in their educations and would be capable of doing this work well, it needs to pay them at least decent middle class salaries. I had made this same argument in Korea when people complained about how much foreign English teachers were paid: if you want to draw top workers, you need to pay them competitive salaries. I had not transferred this type of thinking to this line of work and so it startled me at first.
In any case, the workshop took us almost to the end of the day and I excused myself early to go check out the house I would be living at this summer and pay the rent and the safety deposit.
Day 2: I unsuccessfully try to figure out what phrases like “capacity building” mean.
On my second day I had my first briefings with Pheary and with Sophal. Sophal was the main person I was in contact with about my internship, and he’s the person with whom I will be working the most this summer. He’s also great. He’s very soft-spoken and humorous, but as I would find out over the next couple of weeks, he gets things done with lightning speed. Sophal told me in detail about BFC, and clarified some things that I didn’t understand about the project. For instance, although independent BFC monitors go into factories and collect information about compliance/non-compliance with labour laws and ILO standards, the information can’t be released to buyers like GAP unless the factory gives the ILO permission to do so. Thus, if a buyer doesn’t insist that the factory release that information and does nothing about it, then the ILO has no real enforcement mechanism. The government doesn’t do a good job of making sure factories follow the law, even when it knows about non-compliance. So it turns out a lot of the momentum for this whole reasonably successful project comes from the pressure that big buyers like Nike and Gap feel from their customers to make sure that labour conditions in their factories are decent. Without that pressure, it would be almost impossible for this project to operate. Sophal’s briefing was also peppered with interesting anecdotes about the relationship between the ILO and the ministry of labour. For instance, he told me that MoL factory monitors refuse to coordinate their visits with ILO monitors because the ILO pays more than the government and this frustrates the MoL monitors. They don’t want to work with someone who gets paid more to do the same job that they do.
In my briefing with Pheary, I kept stopping her to ask questions because I didn’t really understand what she was talking about. I don’t come from an NGO background so a lot of the language is somewhat new to me. At one point she described several totally different projects as “capacity building” initiatives. She was using the same words for both, but when I pried they were completely different in practice, which renders the language practically empty – by itself it doesn’t tell me anything. As it turns out, lots of NGO people also think this type of language is bullshit. Maeve, the UNV was like, “good. Keep asking those questions. You should be – this language is meaningless.” In practice people use it because for some reason donors like it.
I could tell Pheary was getting a bit frustrated with the amount of practical detail that I wanted about our projects because eventually she just gave me a whole folder full of our memos of understanding with our partners so that I could read through them and see how the projects are implemented.
I didn’t really have a good grip on this when I came over, but I began to understand much more clearly that the ILO doesn’t actually do any of the things it says it does. What they mean when they say, “we do X” is “we work with a partner organization who does X, and we give them money and support while they do X.” Everything got a bit easier when I figured that out. Really should have done my research a bit better on how my organization works before I came over here.
I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by this point because I thought when I was coming over here that I would be doing a research project on maternal nutrition (and how to improve it). But as part of my briefing Sophal had given me a report on maternal nutrition, which looked exactly like what I had imagined I would be doing. Now I wasn’t really sure what to do. Furthermore, Undraa kept saying things like, “you’re here for yourself, you’re not here for us, so you have to think really hard about what would help you in your career.” That’s really nice on one hand, because it’s obvious that they are sensitive to the fact that I have a funder, and that I’m not there to be an odds-and-ends girl for 3 months. But on the other hand it is also code for “we don’t know what to do with you.” I was starting to feel a bit panicky about work. What was I going to do for these 3 months? And how likely was it that I could avoid being stuck in an office for the whole time (which is precisely what I wanted to avoid!)? I had thought it was going to be maternity protection research – specifically maternal nutrition. What now?
Day 3: I sort of figure out what phrases like “capacity building” mean
Friday was another workshop. This time it was a meeting of SPG and many of its partners. This was great. This was going to be a chance for all of them to communicate with each other so that everyone would know what everyone else was doing. It was good for me because it would give me chance to figure out in more detail what was happening with SPG.
Not all partners were there when we arrived but there were several (Marie Stopes International, RACH, Care) there so we began. As I mentioned earlier, this meeting was a lot more modestly organized than the last one and I realized that it had just been my luck to arrive on the one day when there happened to be a tripartite workshop involving the government. Those are actually quite rare.
Each of the partners did a 20 minute presentation on the details of their work. It was actually pretty useful for me. Marie Stopes,for example, goes into factory infirmaries and provides support. They train the doctors and nurses in reproductive health services. They provide condoms and other contraceptives at cost on the condition that the infirmary provide it to the workers at cost. They basically try to build up the capacity of these internal infirmaries to provide care because very often these are the only healthcare facilities that the workers have access to due to their working hours. As a result they have access to all the factories involved in the SPG project and detailed information about the workers there. This could turn out to be helpful in terms of gaining access to the workers for the purposes of my research project.
On the other hand RHAC operates outside of the factories and because they have significant funding from USAID, they could create a system which encourages workers to come back for follow-up visits. Under RHAC’s system, a worker can purchase a 3-visit card for a very small amount of money. The first visit is free. The second visit is 50% off. The third visit is also free. The idea is that workers are a lot more likely to come in for that second visit if they have the incentive of a third free visit.
The workshop and discussion afterwards took us to the end of the day, and the end of my first week at the ILO.
Summary:
The good: I learned a bit about stats, and figured out how the two main projects I’m supposed to be involved in operate. Also the team I’m working with is LOVELY. All of my coworkers are really wonderful to be around.
The bad: I was nowhere close to knowing what I was going to be doing this summer. Definitely a problem.
May 18, 2011 at 3:39 am |
Are there any recommended next steps in the maternal health report you mentioned reading? Can you make some based on the data?
May 18, 2011 at 6:41 am |
Oh I ended up getting a slightly different project to do (that’s part of the week #2 post that’s coming up)