VSO celebrates 55 years

I found this blog in the draft section - I wrote it in May, just before I was heading home for the summer for three months…


This week, VSO celebrates its 55th birthday. In that time 43,000 volunteers have gone to 90 countries to help fight poverty. My mum and I are two of those 43,000 volunteers.

As part of my placement as a communications adviser, I'm a member of the internal communications network for VSO International. The network aims to improve two way communications and basically get people talking throughout the (VSO) world. A month or so ago, network members from the UK, Ireland, Uganda, India and Malawi had one of our regular online, multi-country phone calls (which I think are exciting just by the sheer fact I'm chit chatting with people in so many countries all at once). We were asked to think of ways to celebrate these 55 years for VSO's staff intranet. I suggested that there must be volunteer 'families', like my mum and I, where someone volunteered 55 years ago and someone else is volunteering now. A few weeks later I had an email asking if mum and I would mind being that 'family'. I guess 40 years apart is enough of a time difference!

We had to answer some questions for an article and they also asked if we had photos of me in my placement and mum in hers. Queue my parents raking through old slide photographs and dad having to do some kind of jiggery-pokery to get those slide photos email-able to me (how fortuitous that  a few years ago sis and I gave dad a slide converter thing for his computer!) They were so good though that I had to share them here. Plus some of the chat from mum of course...

I love these two pics. They're basically the same motorbike, 40 years apart. Mum's is a Honda 90 which, I was told when doing the moto training, is the predecessor to the Honda Dream that I'm riding.

Mum went to Papua New Guinea in September 1971 to be a teacher in Orokolo Primary School. That's Orokolo marked on the map in red. It's seven seaplane stops from Port Moresby, the capital. That is one of the things I remember most about mum's VSO experience. Seaplanes!

Seaplane - mum on the right

One of the obvious questions I was asked was what made me decide to volunteer. Mum's experience must have had something to do with it although she's never spoken about it a lot. But considering that  I've wanted to do VSO as long as I can remember, it must be down to her. Here's what she answered in response to the VSO questions:

After a long flight to Sydney there was a flight to Port Moresby. There were six volunteers at this point. Some flew north to New Guinea and a few of us boarded a small plane. There were, I think, four or five ups and downs with volunteers getting off. Eventually there was just me. My stop was Ihu airstrip. I was met by a tractor to take me the remaining miles along the coast to Orokolo.

The school was in the bush with buildings made from local materials. The classrooms were on stilts to keep snakes, pigs and various other creatures out - also it kept the water out in the rainy season.

Mum's class and classroom

I took over from an Australian teacher. I taught standard 3 till the year end and then standard 6 for the next academic year. It was disconcerting since the pupils did not necessarily know their age and if you had not completed a year at school, or had moved, you had to start that year again. As a result I had pupils whose ages ranged from 10 to 14. I was given the pupils who would sit the High School exam at the end of the year. Only a third went on to High School and if you were a girl you were only allowed to go if your father agreed. In my spare time I helped the other teachers with their correspondence courses in English and Maths.

Initially I lived with an English minister and his wife and children in a rambling huge house on stilts. Underneath the house was where I did my laundry, bedding included, in buckets.

the big house

After they returned home I spent one year living at a leprosy/general clinic. There were two European nurses who dealt with anything from a machete wound to toothache to breach births. Their only backup was a doctor at the end of a radio and a float plane if they were lucky. We had no mains electricity using kerosene both for our fridge and for lamps. The shower was a pulley system with a bucket which had a watering can rose for the shower.

United Church Hospital

Living at the hospital was never dull. I was always keen to go on patrol in the float plane with them to visit villages up river. It was fascinating to help weigh babies in bags hanging from a scale. Living there and going on patrol gave you a feeling of what it is like to be the only white face. I am sure volunteers now still have that feeling in many parts of the world.

weighing a baby on patrol

That's my mum in the middle

The biggest difference today in a volunteer's life is in communications. I can speak to Claire by the magic of Skype. I was an only daughter and my only contact with home was snail mail. I did not speak to or see anyone from home for 15 months. Think; no internet, no phone, no iPod to listen to music. I think I had a tape player but that needed batteries which were expensive and rats liked to munch on the tape. I also remember having to keep my camera and film in a plastic box because of the humidity. One of the nurses had a record player and she introduced me to The Emperor Concerto and many other pieces of music.

I think the fact that you were on your own made you very resilient. However my source of encouragement if I felt low or that I was not perhaps being as good a teacher as I might have been were the unlikely Swiss priest and the two Australian nuns who looked after the neighbouring station school. Many a Sunday afternoon they would feed me and lighten my spirits.

When I left it was with a heavy heart. The nurses at the hospital and my pupils had become my 'family'. Returning home was strange since in some ways I had lost over a years worth of events. It was difficult trying to explain to people how I had been living because in some ways it sounded awful. No electricity, no running water, rats eating soap, collecting food from the freezer boat as a treat. The list goes on.

I would not have missed my time as a volunteer for anything. It shaped lots of my ideas and beliefs of how we can work alongside countries who request assistance.

Visiting Claire in Cambodia reminded me of my time in Papua particularly when we went Kampot - the basic showers, the huge spiders and the rats in the roof. Happy days!!

Cambodia defies Gladwell's outliers

My eldest nephew was born in February so he could have started school either aged 4 and a half or five and a half. My sister, intuitively knowing what Malcolm Gladwell explained his in book 'Outliers', decide that he would start when he was 5 and a half.

Gladwell explained that in Canada people born at the start of the year are more likely to become professional ice hockey players than people born at the end of the year. When children are young, say 8 years old, the 11 month difference between being born in January and in December can create large physical advantages. The older kids are bigger and stronger and catch the eye of the coaches, who in turn provide more and better coaching. This makes the kids born at the start of the year, bigger, stronger and more skilled and makes them much more likely to be come professional ice hockey players. 

The NGO that I'm working with recently tested 1000 children in each grade 4, 5 and 6 in language and maths. As part of this, we also collected data on children's ages. In grade 4, children should be age 9, possibly 10 depending on what month they were born in; in grade 5, age 10, possibly 11; and in grade 6, age 11, possibly 12. However, off all 3000 children, only 30% were in the grade that corresponds to their age - and that includes all of the children who could be a year older because of the month that they were born in.

A school in Kampot province

In Cambodia, there are large problems with children enrolling in grade 1 already older than age 6 which is the age at which they should enrol. In 2011/12, 31.5% of all children starting grade 1 were older than 6. It is also common for many children to repeat grades which leads to so many children being overage.

In contrast to ice hockey, where older children enjoy physical benefits that assist them, children enrolling late experience mental deficiencies which harm their education. Our tests showed that overage children did worse than children of the "correct" age, and that the older you were, the worse you did on the tests. Starting school late leads to poorer educational attainment. 

She was laughing at my Khmer language skills

The overnight guard who works 6pm until 6am at the apartments across from us plucked up the courage to speak English to me the other day. He told me that during the day he went to school and that he was in grade 10. He is 24, which is one year older than the woman my research colleague met last week, who dropped out of grade 7 to get married. In Cambodia, these two probably aren't even outliers. 

Gordon

Where are the Khmer Rouge now?

The forest was burning right up to the other side of the road just a few metres from where we were sitting drinking beer with former Khmer Rouge soldiers. The licks of fire were slightly transfixing, aided by beer in the afternoon and a conversation in a language which I don't fully understand. But then my head snapped around as I heard the Khmer words for Khmer Rouge and realised that this conversation might get interesting.

When I first arrived, I was intrigued to find out what happened to all of the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Were they able to live normal lives, or did they have to hide their pasts, or was that impossible and they were outcasts of society? Drinking beer beneath Preah Vihear temple, I was beginning to find some answers.

We were introduced to these former Khmer Rouge soldiers by a lady who has trained and supported hundreds of mid-wives over the years, but before that, as a young girl, she was running around with a machine gun fighting for the Khmer Rouge. The men that we were drinking with also appeared to have left their past behind them as they were now soldiers in the Cambodian army, and one of them was a celebrated artillery gunner.

Part of me finds it strange to think of former Khmer rouge soldiers going back to normal lives,  bringing up families and doing every day jobs, but maybe there should be some distinguishing between those who were involved because they may have grown up in Khmer Rouge areas and those who led the regime and took the decisions.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal is currently considering what will happen to those who led the regime, and whether they are responsible for decisions that meant 2 million died. The Tribunal was set up to try five people: Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith and Kaing Guek Eav (Duch). Duch was the head of the S-21 prison (Toul Sleng) and has already been convicted and put in jail. The case of Khieu Samphan (Head of State) and Nuon Chea (Dep Secretary of the Communist Party) finished last Wednesday with a judgement expected next year.

We went to the Tribunal and heard part of Khieu Samphan's defence, which went something like this:

• He only joined the Khmer Rouge because he was scared that the then King would kill him and he didn't really believe in it all
• He didn't have any power over the "zone" commanders therefore he has no responsibility for the deaths of nearly 2 million people
• When the Khmer Rouge came into power, the country was already starving meaning mass forced migration to rural areas was a sensible policy
• He didn't actually really know how bad everything had got
• He never lost his temper at home (witness statement from his wife)

There are unlikely to be any more trials because the current Government does not want them and there are parts of Cambodian society that do not see the usefulness of spending millions of dollars on it. Part of this feeling is because the country has so many other needs, and also partly because those on trial are old.

However, there is a third reason; a desire to stop talking about it because of the emotions it can stir, especially given that some former Khmer Rouge middle to top leaders are now prominent in the Government. The Prime Minister, Chair of the Senate and President of the National Assembly were all Khmer Rouge commanders before defecting in the late 1970s and helping to overthrow them.

But the view itself has some legitimacy as Cambodian society must find a way for Khmer Rouge soldiers and Khmer Rouge victims to co-exist, and this requirement for co-existence between perpetrators and victims was a question in my mind before I came.

Perhaps surprisingly, it should not be assumed that the Khmer Rouge is universally hated, although they certainly are by many. When Ieng Sary died, he was accorded a hero's funeral and had lived for many years in opulence and freedom. The Khmer Rouge retained support even after 1979 and controlled parts of Cambodia until 1998. It seems that the notion of co-existence may not be right, as it implies that there are two separate sides living in the same space, when actually as the Khmer Rouge came from Cambodian society, it returns to it as well.

Gordon