Humbled

This spring, we piloted a ‘Home Visits’ program, aimed to familiarize our non-Asia-based staff with the reality of our employees in Cambodia and Laos.

Kathryn Doyle is DDD’s Strategic Planning Associate, based in San Francisco.  She focuses on how to measure and deepen our impact, and where she can get her next fix of sticky rice.

The wheels of the tuk-tuk spit gravel behind us as we jostled over unpaved roads. I’ve spent a lot of time in Phnom Penh but I’d never been out here in the far reaches of the city. To get there, we drove thirty minutes out of town, then down a long dirt road to a small community loosely congregated around a wat.

Behind the wat and attached school, we turned into a small labyrinth of unpaved roads, fingers of land jutting around a pond. Small houses, in varying states of construction, lined the roads. Children playing on mounds of gravel shrieked and waved at us, while grandmothers crouched in front of their houses just watched, bemused. I was with a staff member from one of our supporting foundations, my colleague Michael from San Francisco, and Socheat, DDD’s Phnom Penh Training Coordinator and our chaperone for the afternoon.

The tuk-tuk stopped and Socheat led us to the last home, where the road dead-ended. There was a scramble of activity in the neighboring homes as a family of six assembled to greet us.

Piseth*, a DDD operator, stepped forward and introduced himself in soft, serious English. He presented each member of his family—his mother, father, two younger sisters and younger brother. We smiled and clasped our hands together and nodded our heads. Piseth translated that his parents were honored we were there. His mother motioned for us to come in.

The family home was small, with one main, empty room. A chicken clucked in a corner, and a couple of dogs roamed freely. We could see right down the home’s only hallway, which seemed to spill into the pond behind it. The house was constructed of bricks in a raw red with fresh mortar pasting them together. An upper floor was half-built. There was no furniture or evidence of electricity, except for a large computer monitor, carefully wired up in the corner.

Mats were laid on the concrete floor for us to sit, while Piseth and his family crouched against the wall across from us. His mother shyly pushed a tray of bottled water toward us. I cringed, hoping this didn’t cost them too much but afraid to refuse the careful hospitality. With a language barrier between us and unsure of how to start, we all smiled at each other.

The point of our visit was just this—to absorb the place where we were and the people we were with. As management at DDD, we have all been drawn to our work by the promise of having an impact, but we often find ourselves far removed from it. These visits to DDD’s data operators’ homes jerked us back to the reality of our staff in Cambodia and Laos, reminding us of what life was like here—in this case, how hard it could be but how much better it could get.

Piseth spoke quietly, but looked us straight in the eyes. He didn’t smile, but wasn’t mad or sad—instead, it seemed he took himself very seriously because he had to. He explained that he is the main breadwinner for his family. His parents are street food vendors, and his younger sisters and brother are in school. Piseth wakes up before 5am to bike to work at DDD until lunchtime, and then helps his parents for the rest of the day so that his younger siblings can stay in school. (He insists on it.)

By night, he and his father slowly build their house. The family had been living in a squatters’ community in another corner of town, but were kicked out to make way for new development there. With their small compensatory stipend, Piseth and his family acquired the land and materials for the house. They finished building the structure, but are now out of money, so the rest—the bedrooms upstairs, the kitchen—has to wait until they could save more.

Between his work at DDD and helping his family, Piseth had to drop out of university even though he had a DDD scholarship to support his tuition. Socheat prodded him gently and Piseth answered wistfully that he hopes to go back once the house was finished.

After an hour of listening and asking questions, and then another few minutes of nodding thanks and goodbyes, we unfurled ourselves from the concrete floor, dodged the dogs and chicken, and stepped back out into the blaze of the midday sun. Piseth walked us down the road as we picked our way around construction refuse and back toward the tuk-tuk. We were quiet on the ride back, sweaty and humbled.

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Now back in San Francisco, it’s still easy to lose myself in Powerpoints and grant proposals. On a daily basis, it’s much easier to talk about metrics than it is to remember that right now, across the globe, Piseth is coming home from his second job and facing a to-do list much less manageable. But every time I do, his resoluteness hits me with a thud. I can’t reach for a brick and I can’t feed the chickens and I can’t hawk another bamboo tube of rice to help. But I can, and I do, attack my inbox with renewed determination, make this proposal a little bit tighter, push a little bit further.

*Employee’s name changed to protect his privacy.