Cycling Sisters Say Soo-sih-day!

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Cycling through the city, I tried out different intonations of "Soo-sih-day" as I sung out my hellos on the fly. A moto driver replied "hello lady" and a monk gave me a subtly saucy smile. I reasoned my Khmer pronunciation must be improving. Nicola, my partner in crime since Saigon, pedals up alongside. "Do you think we should call in at your boyfriend's for a cup of ice cream on the way home?" I readily agree to the plan.

We've been cycling around the city all day, scheming over our morning tea and coffee, sussing out the NGOs in town, and doing our best to network our way into the wild world of Phnom Penh. In the oppressive afternoon heat, we're ready for a leisurely rest at the Okay Guesthouse and a naperoo. Nicola has been working her way across Asia, trying to gain some working or volunteer experience so she can continue her studies in Social Development when she returns to Ireland.

Driven by similar goals in related professional fields, we're both trying to figure out how to win our ways into the golden opportunity... any opportunity. It seems deceptively easy in a city with over 350 Non-Government Organisations. They should be fiending over our ambitious minds. What we discovered during the course of our research, was quite another story.

We conferred with Dottore Massimo of the W.H.O. a couple times, who came to embody the NGO scene in town for myself, not only because he was meant to be my mentor, but because he exemplified many of the problematic attitudes within. Seemingly arrogant, his speech was full of rhetoric about protocols and conferring with colleagues in Manila. He declined to answer questions about programme implementation and evaluation, and seemed increasingly flustered by my "need to conceptualize this as an emerging epidemic." By the end of our meeting session, little had been clarified other than the apparent comforts of his lifestyle in Phnom Penh.

And this, we learned, is the lure for many of the expats working in the city. He is one of many making first world wages in a third world country, socializing among elitist circles that frequent fancy bars for "business meetings." And so, despite the obvious problems of service overlap that come with such a high concentration of agencies, there is also an underlying current to perpetuate the system as it is. After all, making these programmes self-sustainable would mean losing a great job and cozy lifestyle for many an expat.

At any rate, while our discoveries were startling in the world of alleged philanthropists, we made headway. Nicola uncovered two job opportunities, and I made some contacts with the Australian Youth Ambassadors programme for future research and volunteer work.

More to come on the Khmer boyfriends we acrued....

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