Over the weekend, Sray Tal, one of our translators took us to the home of a 58-year-old woman who had been interviewed for our water safety project. She was living with her 28 year old daughter and two sons, and owned three small rice fields, enough to feed her family for 6 months, and sold some hot palm-fruit and coconut cakes to make a living. She earned about 1000-2000 riel a day (25-50 cents).

But I swear, her cooking, is AMAZING. She cooked some delicious red curry with snails for us, and it was so good, I would have eaten three bowls of it, if it weren't getting so dark near the end of our meal (there is no electricity in that village, so when it gets dark, it gets dark, and that is the end of your day). The cakes she made were also amazingly delicious. I ate 1 before the meal started, and she sent us home with 11 more - of which I ate 3 when I got home...

Eating this meal was more than just about the wonderful hospitality of these families who own next to nothing. It was about seeing that these people have something to offer, a very delicious cuisine! If she were to open a restaurant, I would be eating there everyday. All she was missing was some start-up funds.

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Today, I met up with my travel doctor's friend, Judy. She was a very charming and well-spoken woman with a million-dollar smile, short but lush gray hair, and an amazing energy about her. She and her friend Linda were staying briefly at the Kep Lodge, a 15 minute walk away from where I was staying. She was working as a consultant specializing in organizational change, working with an NGO whose job was to provide policy leadership for hundreds of other education-focused NGOs in the country. She was just terminating an 18-month volunteer work experience with VSO, which is a UK-based NGO that places volunteers with particular skills in NGOs across the globe.

Her friend, Linda, who had come to Cambodia for about a month and a half, was a specialist in gender issues and health and was working with UNICEF to assess its programs and make recommendations. We discussed the issues involved with trying to educate uneducated people about health. Because many of the Most Vulnerable Families are illiterate and have very little education, often times, they will know what germs are, but will not know how germs can make you sick, or why you ALWAYS need to boil/filter your water, not just SOMETIMES. There were a lot of gaps in their knowledge, and if you think about it...it's not that surprising. How many times have you zoned out during a very boring office meeting? or during class at school? If you are illiterate, and do not have any picture books or written materials to review what you've just learned at a "health education meeting at the village chief's house" you are bound to forget things, misunderstand things, and ultimately, be very confused about what it is that you've just learned. So, it is VERY DIFFICULT to do health education in a population that is largely uneducated.

Judy saw the issue from the Education perspective. She noticed that a lot of students did not get the opportunity to go to school not just because of poverty, but because of bad health and illness. One third of deaths of children under the age of 5 are due to water-borne illnesses. Those that make it past the age of five often suffer from respiratory diseases, or malnutrition. Talking to Judy made me realize that we can't just offer people education or health, they have to be supplied in tandem.

Another issue is community mobilization, which we talked about as well. Linda explained that often what happened with community health projects was that they were abandoned after a while, because nobody took responsibility for them. If the water pump broke, sometimes the only 2 people trained in the community by NGOs will have migrated to Thailand or Laos to work. There was no sense of communal ownership of the water pump. So, what UNICEF has been trying to do since 2006 is mobilize communities by supplying them with nothing but information. They do things like visit the feces-covered areas of the community to show the villagers where the flies also hang out besides around their open food. They calculate as a group how much feces the village produces in a year to give a sense of how much bacteria is circulating the community endangering the health of the village's children. And so far, these efforts have been successful at getting the community to think for itself and demand change, rather than passively accept it from a hodge-podge of NGOs.

A huge barrier to political or community participation though for the poor is, simply, poverty. If you are poor, your options are extremely limited. If you barely have enough food to eat, are you going to go out of your way to visit the village chief and make a complaint? And risk not having enough to make it to the next day?

Anyways, it is getting very late, and I should close up. Thank you for reading!