Back to the airport - flying Singapore Airlines again with such cute cabin crew - I mean the females! The only complaints were an intermittently crying (building up to screaming) child and a guy across the aisle who had a persistent phlegm-laden cough accompanied by spluttering, sneezing and deep, rattling nasal snorts as he dispersed germs around the cabin - if I come down with Avian Influenza, I’ll know where it came from! Another of my pet peeves is people persistently wrestling with newspapers (especially the broadsheet variety), for a while there it sounded like a forest fire….
I stayed overnight ‘in transit’ - a hotel actually inside Changi (Singapore’s massive airport). Some genius developed Singapore as a flight ‘hub’ (the world’s sixth busiest international airport) and it must bring Singapore millions every year in visitors, flight charges, fees, hundreds of shops paying rent, refuelling hundreds of aircraft; and employing what must be thousands of locals - just the taxation income alone must run into millions. Changi serves over 100 international airlines flying to some 200 cities in 60 countries, handling about 5,400 airline arrivals and departures every week and over 42 million passengers a year (that's more than 7 times the size of Singapore's population), and over 40,000 square metres of commercial space. ….I go through so often: every now and then; I think I live there!
Arrived in Hanoi just after noon on Thursday, March 31, and was collected and driven to my client’s apartment, which is located quite close to his training centre.
Let me give you a very brief background about my amazing client …. Jimmy Pham. He lived in Australia for some years, and then went back to Vietnam. He started a small sandwich shop to assist the high number of orphaned and homeless children. Jimmy evolved his enterprise named KOTO (an acronym for Know One Teach One) which takes about twenty of these kids at a time accommodates and feeds them and teaches them English, life skills and hospitality training (kitchen, waiters, front office). At the end of the 2-year course, they have sufficient skills to get good jobs in top hotels and to manage their own lives and finances. It’s a truly wonderful organisation. They arrive as shy, deprived, unskilled children who look at the ground, with no future, and leave as assured, confident, skilled and capable adults; it’s an amazingly rewarding enterprise. If you want to know more, or feel like participating: http://www.koto.com.au/
I was ready for ‘work’ on the first day, but the staff insisted that I ‘rest’ after the flights! Still, I convinced them that I’d like to, at least, see the training centre: an impressive facility with full training facilities, plus genuinely friendly and charming students and staff.
My brief was to see how the operation worked for four days, then to travel to Siem Reap in Cambodia to investigate and formulate a feasibility study to evolve into a business plan to enable the same concept to become operational in Cambodia and help their hundreds (probably thousands) of homeless and deprived Cambodian youth.
Of course, one of the first challenges with every new assignment is getting to grips with identifying who-is-who and matching their positions with the names of the people one is to be involved and working with. Compounding the complexity of the situation is that most of the names are totally different to the usual range of ‘western’ names. Plus, of course, they put their family name BEFORE their ‘first’ name….
It’s common courtesy to remember names and faces, but when you are rapidly introduced to a plethora of people, it can become challenging to recall them all correctly. While I’ve been doing these volunteer assignments, I would have been introduced to over 1,000 owners and staff (and, I would boastfully suggest that I’ve helped them all in varying degrees). I’ve told my daughter that, if I die at home in Perth there would not be many people locally who would turn up to any funeral because I don’t actually know too many people there - I know more people in south-east Asia and on Pacific islands.
I been there a few times, but it was just slightly unnerving in Siem Reap to be so often addressed by locals: “Hello, Mr Bevan, do you remember me?” This comment could be from hotel staff to tuk tuk drivers.
I’ve probably told this story before, but…
I told a hotel staff member I was training in Tonga the old saying to ‘never assume’ because it makes an ass out of u and me = ‘assume’. Several years later my daughter was visiting me when I was living/working on Niue and we travelled to Tonga nearby. We were walking down the main street of Nuku’alofa when a truck drove past and a guy lent out the passenger’s window and yelled: “Hey, Bevan - never assume”.
When you have been in a deep sleep and as consciousness returns, do you ever wonder for a few seconds just which country you are actually in…?
A noticeable difference between Vietnam and previous recent assignment locales has been the sight of western faces (both resident and tourist) - something I’m not usually used to.
Ha Noi has some major avenues (such as past the mausoleum where the late Ho Chi Minh lies in state - and periodically goes on a holiday for a revarnish, or wax and polish). But there is a maze of narrow streets infested with a plethora of buzzing motorcycles. Some streets are one-way but that does not necessarily mean that the traffic is all going in the indicated direction.
To cross a street: the theory is to ignore crosswalks (because vehicles ignore them as well) and just walk into a stream of traffic and hope they dodge around you. Adding to the mystic of the exercise is that looking into the traffic flow and playing dodgem with vehicles coming at you in a one-way street does not allow for motorcycles merrily bowling along but going in the opposite (wrong) direction!
When driving a vehicle or a motorcycle, the accepted method when coming to a cross street (whether you are turning or going straight across) is to just look straight ahead and merrily proceed, hoping that someone will stop to let you in, rather that hit you. At the few dual-lane roads there can be a concrete barrier dividing the traffic lanes - but motorcycles in particular, just drive on the wrong side of the barrier and cut across the traffic flow as the lights are about to change. Oh yes, and the traffic lights display a count down indicating when the lights will change.
The international vagaries and variety of Immigration and Customs procedures continue to be mysterious. On the flight into Vietnam you are given a form to fill in - there are two sections that are pretty much duplicates and you are left to assume that they relate to ‘arrival’ and ‘departure’. On arrival, they look at the form and hand the whole thing back to you. On departure, they look at it and, again, hand both sections back to you - then you fly away with the document/s!
In Cambodia: you are given immigration and customs forms on the aircraft to complete. When you arrive at immigration, there is another form to apply for a visa. There is a long curved desk with 15-20 officious-looking, seriously-uniformed, seated immigration staff all lined up. You hand over the paperwork and fee (US$25) to the first guy who does something or other and hands the passports and paperwork to the next guy - and on it goes hand-to-hand to the last guy who whacks a variety of rubber stamps over the forms and passport and hands it to the next guy who calls out the relevant name. Then you take all that and proceed to the next guy at a separate booth who checks it all again and whacks stamps in the passport.
Having completed that hurdle, you get your completed customs form and luggage reference number ready for presentation - only to find that there is actually no one on duty and you just wander through and throw away the customs form!!!
This assignment was something different from the norm. After four days in Hanoi looking at the client’s operation, I travelled to Siem Reap, Cambodia to do the Feasibility Study. I was supposed to be accompanied by someone from the client’s office, but that did not happen. The rationale behind our volunteer organisation is that we assist and train personnel (‘train-the trainer’ is the credo and basic rationale) and we are not supposed to act as unpaid consultants and just complete tasks for our clients. It did not particularly bother me, but, consequently head office were concerned that I was basically working by myself - with great assistance from the Cambodia In-Country Manager
I was staying at the same hotel I’d advised in February, 2009. The receptionist greeted me by name, with a huge grin and a double-handed handshake. When I asked to fill in a registration form, I was told: “YOU do not need to do that”. Next morning a pretty young gal on the staff (that I admit I did not immediately recognise) said: “Welcome back, Mr Bevan; I miss you every day.” OK, you probably have to make some allowance for translation, but it was still a lovely sentiment? Other staff that were not necessarily there when I was, quickly cottoned-on to who I was and would address me by my name…it’s a comfortable feeling to be able to do that in hotels throughout the Pacific region and Asia.
The owner had converted the top floor (2nd), which was roofed but was open on one side, into the restaurant; which was great - with a view over the pool, gardens and countryside. Until: there was heavy tropical rain accompanied by strong wind…interesting to watch people trying to eat their breakfast while fighting to hold an umbrella - which was trying to turn inside out!
I wanted to look at a restaurant that was for sale in Siem Reap as it seemed ideal for my client’s requirements; so I contacted the estate agent and he promised to pick me up at the hotel to show me. Bruno was a solid, rather Germanic-looking gentleman but was actually French (interesting contradiction right there?). After a chat, we walked out to the front of the hotel and he proceeded to mount a motorcycle - now, us volunteers are not really supposed to travel by motorcycle because it somewhat upsets our personal insurance company. Then Bruno put on what looked like a copy of a German army helmet, he looked just like a WWII German tank commander and I wondered when a Panzer division was going to turn up and trundle through the traffic….?
A week into the assignment, I travelled with the volunteer agency’s In Country Manager (Bruce) to Phnom Penh - he was to do his thing and I was to talk to people and the government. Bruce hired a car/driver and we shared the cost - going up and back we were the fastest vehicle on the road - the driver was good, just took a few ‘risks’. It was coming up to Khmer New Year when the country virtually closes down - some organisations for the entire month of April. Phnom Penh becomes almost deserted and the usually insane traffic reduces dramatically as thousands of people head to their home villages for New Year. I caught up with a former hotel client of mine and met some helpful folks doing their thing for the country - but the government departments were just blatantly unhelpful! This attitude is in spite of the glowing references to support new business enterprises featured in the country’s promotion! We left the day before the official beginning of New Year, the traffic was visibly reduced in town, but on the road out to the countryside it was heavy (like the Friday of a long weekend!). Insanely overloaded vehicles were endemic…
A former client of mine in Siem Reap kindly offered to set up a meeting with a high government official (whose title I’d better not mention!) to help negotiate the maze of paperwork (there are over 100 licenses, permits, etc from 14 different ministries to consider). Negotiations were going fine until the official realised that he was dealing with a charity and there would not be a present in a plain brown paper bag (that’s a euphemism in case you missed it) and negotiations promptly ceased.
Here are just some of the regulations to register an Association….
- Five copies of the Application Form for registration.
- Two copies of Permission letters, issued by the municipality about location of the office.
- The CVs of at least three Cambodian founders, including 4x6 photographs (attached with copies of their Khmer ID cards or birth certificates).
- Five copies of the Statute of Local Association with directors’ signatures.
- Five copies of the Structure of the Local Association.
- Five copies of a map of the location of the office.
- Four 10x15 photographs of the front office (2 landscape and 2 portrait; 2 of the office and 2 others with house owner and director taken together in front of the office).
- Four copies of the Office Lease Agreement attached with family certificate of the house owner; or 5 copies of permission letters indicated that the house is used as an office free of charge.
Don’t you love the one about having a photograph standing outside the office with the owner of the property. That seems to highlight the fact of people doing deals to lease (or even buy) a property and not dealing with the actual owner; paying a deposit, investing in improvements and then being evicted!
There is a massive amount of rampant construction being perpetrated throughout Cambodia (especially in the major cities) but astute cynics (probably correctly) claim that most of it is basically money laundering. Hotels are popping up everywhere, but some may not actually be interested in being hoteliers. There are giant projects that are ostensibly ‘Korean’ investments but are also probably giant washing machines for ill-gotten gains.
The range of vehicles is broad, but small motorcycles predominate (conveying entire families). There are ancient open-backed trucks with no cab or doors, the ‘dash’ in a load of spaghetti wiring, a muffler is extraneous and the driver sits in the open incongruously wearing a motorcycle helmet. At the other end of the scale: the Land Rover used to be the vehicle of choice for the affluent, but then a prominent person bought a shiny black Lexus - now Cambodia is the ‘land of the Lexus’ - they are everywhere!!!
An inconsiderate monk in a village near the hotel where we were staying had the audacity to die. That precipitated days of chanting (by some dude who could chat continuously - he must have been breathing through his ears, or anus) and discordant ‘music’ (inflicted by cymbals and sawing on a three-stringed ‘weapon of mass-destruction’). Of course it was all highly amplified - and commenced every morning at 5.30.
What is it with the predilection to amplify everything these days? On my usual morning walk I have music gently wafting out of my iPod Nano through ear pieces; but when I encounter others wearing ear-pieces, I can hear THEIR ‘music’! In countries with karaoke rooms where if you whisper you could be heard across the room, they still have microphones and amplifiers!!! And don’t get me started on mobile phones - what makes people think that we want to hear their conversation?
SO - I’d finished this assignment early (as usual) and head office agreed that I could return home about three weeks early. I was booked for another assignment in Dili, East Timor; but then I was asked if I’d do a quick (2 weeks) one in Honiara, Solomon Islands. SO - I’ll be home a few days, then to Honiara, home a few days, then to Dili.
Some photos on …. https://picasaweb.google.com/BevanLibya/KOTOHanoiAndSiemReap?authkey=Gv1sRgCKfekfjxurq-wQE#
Click on slideshow…