One of our volunteers, Kathleen, who went into the field to do interviews about water safety encountered an angry villager who complained to her saying that an assistant village chief had forced her to pay 10,000 riel (about 2.50 USD - keep in mind that everyone we interview are families that made it on the Most Vulnerable Families List, and therefore have 25 cents or less to spend on each member of the family per day) for a communal water filter that was yet to come.
When Kathleen heard this, she, very responsibly, asked the woman to bring her some information about the water filter or organization that was providing the water filters, and the villager showed her a black and white photocopy of the CIHCambodia pamphlets we have been giving out during our interviews to educate villagers about clean water practices. It appeared as though someone, perhaps pretending to be the assistant village chief, was scamming the villagers into paying 10,000 riel for a filter that never showed up, and was doing it all in CIH's name.
In shock, Kathleen's translator, Mr. Sun, told the woman that she had gotten jipped because she had paid $2.50 for a water filter that she could have gotten for free from CIH (because she is on the Most Vulnerable Families List - although this isn't true. We now make villagers pay a sum of 50 cents "contribution" to avoid giving out "free" things and encourage recipients to take good care of the donated filters).
When our supervisor Rebecca, she was absolutely alarmed and decided to put Kunthy, our Kep Program manager, on the case immediately. We knew that the Red Cross was selling filters for 2.50 USD, but it seemed as though the fact that they collected the money before delivering it made it very easy for any official to come around and say that they were collecting money for filters.
The next day, Kunthy personally went to visit the woman who had made the complaint. After speaking to the woman, she came back to our CIH office, and told us that it had all been one giant misunderstanding. What happened was the woman who had complained had actually sort of been interviewed before by CIH - by me, to be exact. Kunthy showed me the picture of the villager, and I recognized her face immediately. She was the neighbour that had sat down next to my interviewee, and started answering all my questions, even though they were not directed at her.
A few days afterwards, a Red Cross Volunteer (who often happens to be a village chief, or one of the village chief's many assistant community-chiefs, you could say) had come around asking for $2.50 in exchange for a Red Cross water filter at a later date. She had given him the money, and the next day, my fellow volunteer, Kathleen, went to interview her. When Kathleen asked her for some information about the organization who provided the filters, the poor woman got confused between the two organizations (Red Cross and CIH), and her neighbour (the man that I had interviewed the week earlier) showed up with the pamphlet that I had given him.
To make matters worse, Mr. Sun's well-meaning but ill-informed comment about the price of the Red Cross and CIHCambodia water filters caused the woman to demand that the assistant village chief/Red Cross Volunteer give her her money back, which he did. When Kunthy came a few days later to find out what all the fuss was about and to clarify to the woman that the CIHCambodia actually wasn't free, but cost 50 cents, the woman became even more frustrated and upset. "Whatever," she said, "I don't want a water filter anymore!" And apparently scooped a bowl of dirty water from an open ceramic jar and fed it to her young toddler to drink. So, in the end, the one who is harmed most in this entire misunderstanding is the villager, and her family, who now are not only extremely poor and uneducated, but are angry and unwilling to consider the option of using a water filter.
That same day, Kunthy notified the Red Cross Chief about the issue, and she and I went to meet up with him. In a room with a long desk, topped with binders and papers on one end, I met with a solemn looking man in a pink dress shirt who refused to look at me when I spoke to him. It was incredibly distracting, because I wasn't sure whether he was disrespecting me or respecting me, and later learned that often Cambodians will do that because they feel shy or embarassed when they do not understand the foreign language I am speaking. The whole meeting, I felt as though we were in a precarious dancing competition, trying to see who could back down first.
My aim in meeting with him was to try to figure out why some of the villagers were feeling like they were being tricked into paying money for filters they might not receive, and how we could work together on this same issue of safe drinking water. I wasn't questioning him or anything, but the whole format of the meeting, with us facing each other, Kunthy having to translate everything back and forth between us, and the Cambodian body language that was so new to me made it feel like I was in a face off.
I found out that the Red Cross Volunteers were only being paid $4 a day to do Red Cross administrative stuff, like collecting money for water filters (which they do separately from the filter distribution in order to avoid mis-counting money or losing filters because of theft - CIHCambodia had lost about 8 filters the last time it distributed filters and collected $ for them during a ceremony - one of the theives was someone rather important in the community that shall remain unamed). When they broke, it would be up to the villager to notify the Red Cross Volunteer who would come around and try to repair the damaged filters, or re-educate the villager. However, because the Red Cross recently ran out of funding for the water project, they had to stop paying their Red Cross Volunteers, which resulted in worse service, and problems like failing to tell the villagers what the money is being collected for, what the filters are for, how to take care of them, etc.
At the close of the meeting, feeling a need to end with something positive and diplomatic, I thankd the Red Cross Chief for his time and his free bottle of Red Cross water, and expressed my hopes that we would try to share information with each other, if either of us found a better way to educate villagers about safe drinking water. A nice, but rather unproductive, end to an awkward meeting. I would have hoped to come out with more concrete steps as to how we were going to avoid misunderstandings like the one we had experienced with the villager, but there wasn't enough time, I only have 6 more weeks here, and they apparently have dried up their water project funding. But this whole story just goes to show how much can be lost in translation...
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Other updates (on the food front):
- finally tasted the water fromt the water filter - earthy, but still good! (and free!)
- located a bubble tea stand at Kep Beach and am now in danger of becoming one of my supervisor's and fellow volunteer's diabetes research project subjects. Bubble Tea: bubbles, condensed milk, powder, and ice....yum! And for only 37 cents!
- then today, I visited my favourite dessert stand and thought, 1 bubble tea (37 cents) = 3 bowls of sweet green bean with ice (only 13 cents/bowl!) therefore...felt entitled to two bowls of dessert.
It appears that better coordination among various charity organizations is much needed in order to avoid confusion and misunderstanding, to reduce duplication of efforts, and to save costs (administrative and otherwise) from money donated. Don't you think so, Christine? A very good post, though.
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