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.

·                            ·                             ·

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.

It seems fitting that it was on the beginning of Vassa, yesterday, that Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, was found guilty of war crimes. He was the head of the infamous Security Prison 21 in Phnom Penh, where an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned from 1975 to 1979, very few of whom made it out of the prison alive.

I asked Sopheap, General Manager of our Battambang office in Cambodia, what she thinks the sentence means to Cambodia?

“I was glad when this conviction was announced. I was born three years after the Khmer Rouge ended. I still cannot imagine what life looked like in those three years, eight months, and 20 days.”

Still, Sopheap raises the question whether the Khmer Rouge trial was worth the expenses: “I know that millions of dollars have been spent on the court for years. I wonder how different Cambodia would look, if that money was spend in the right development areas, such as education, health care, etc. I think Cambodians think differently about this matter, maybe some of them feel it is the right decision to have this Khmer Rouge tribunal, but many think the people who are found guilty are more guilty than it is publicly published, and many people ask why we have to spend so much money to find him guilty and take so long — when the KR leadership was so obvious.”

In this way, the verdict over Duch was long awaited in Cambodia, and thousands watched live on TV as the sentence was announced. The end of the trial is also the end of an era – a chance for Cambodians to put the genocide behind them and move on, with renewed determination to build a strong and peaceful future for their country.

It’s 5:30 AM… why am I doing this? I ask myself this question every day on my way to work. So often I wonder if I made the right decision taking this job 8,000 miles from home. Sure, my work involves my passion,–soccer, or “tae bahn” as it is known here–and sure, I interact with wonderfully pleasant Laotians who enrich my life in countless ways, but getting up before 5am every day sometimes seem like a sacrifice that outweighs every possible redeeming factor.

But this isn’t a blog post about DDD, my primary work—no, I’m talking about the second job I’ve taken on, as a player in Laos’s top professional soccer league on the Lao-American College team.

I know it is a cliché, but the life of a professional soccer player isn’t as easy as it seems. Yes, you do get to live like a rock star — audacious parties, attractive women, lucrative contracts and modeling cameos are all mainstays of the average professional soccer player’s life. The Lao football (soccer) league is just like this but…less. For example, Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid probably takes his weekly 300,000 USD salary to the hottest club in Madrid to buy champagne for everyone in the bar whereas I, moments after putting pen to paper on my $50 a month contract, headed to a bar where my coaches drank Beer Lao and sang karaoke to Thai songs.

Still, I decided to dedicate myself to my burgeoning professional soccer career—after all, Laos is probably the only place in the world with a soccer league whose teams are enough in need to seek my employ. For this reason, I resigned myself to waking up in the wee hours of the A.M. to run concentric circles around the parking lot of Laos’ main Buddhist Monastery, the That Luang. I tried to explain to my coach that no amount of Buddhist meditation would save my meniscus and knee ligaments from the pounding on the unforgiving surface, but my Lao is a “work in progress”, and I am as likely to have prophesied a zombie apocalypse as to have informed him of my swollen knees.

But after hours of sleep lost, miles of circles run and cases of Beerlao consumed, what did my dedication earn me? A swift kick in the tuckus and assistance in finding the door. Lao American College discontinued my services with the arrival of four Nigerians. League rules mandate that only four foreigners may play on each team… I was unlucky number 5.

However, I was determined to continue my career. So which team would I sign for now? Would it be MCTPC, team of Lao National superstar Lumnao Sinto? Or would it be for the perennial powerhouse that is Army FC? No… it was for Lao Football League cellar dwellers City Copy Center, the Vientiane version of a Kinko’s sponsored soccer team.

Eventually, the inevitable match between my old team, Lao American College, and my new team, the vaunted City Copy Center, took place. Surely I would make it clear to them that they had made a serious mistake when they terminated my contract. I would vindicate myself. My triumphant return would prove to all of South East Asia that Americans CAN play footy. But instead…I helped my team dribble our way to a trouncing 6-1 loss. Maybe I should stick to digitization.

When I first walked through the doors of Digital Divide Data’s office in Vientiane I found myself in what looks like any other bustling IT business. Computers line the walls and the operations floor is full of young computer technicians working away on data entry projects and digitization of books and newspapers, while managers are meeting about estimates and quality evaluation. But I know that what sets DDD aside from the thousands of other IT outsourcing companies in Asia is the organization’s social mission.

DDD employs disadvantaged youth in Cambodia and Laos, providing them with education, training, and real on-the-job work experience, so that they, after four years, are able to hold better jobs and provide for themselves and their families. While DDD in Cambodia partners with a French NGO for the work of identifying and recruiting the students who are most in need as well as qualified, DDD in Laos handles the recruitment of new employees without help from third parties.

When a new student applies for employment with DDD they are enrolled in a careful selection process where one of the key steps is an unannounced visit to their family home. Thongkham Soumaloun, DDD’s Training Coordinator, and I are on our way to our first family visit of the day when the tire blows up. Thongkham tells me that for this round of recruitment he interviewed more than 60 young Laotians and he aims to hire just under 40. Today, we are visiting five families; the first one is the family of a 23 year-old girl named Noy.

Once the tire is repaired we continue for another 45 minutes before we end up in a small village. All the houses in the village are on stilts, mostly built from bamboo and wood. There are no road signs or house numbers, so the only way to find the right house is to ask around. Not long after we arrive in the village the girl’s mother shows up to greet us. She has already heard of our arrival.

We sit down at a table downstairs, shaded by a few trees and Thongkham pulls out the evaluation form. Do you own or rent your house? Rent. Do you own or rent your land? Rent. Average annual income? $700 USD. I go inside the house to take a few pictures for documentation. Key furniture? None.

We also ask if the girl has any siblings and if they are in school. It turns out that the student’s brother is already employed at DDD in Laos. This is a key piece of information since it is part of DDD’s selection criteria to only accept students from families where other immediate family members are not already employed by DDD. Because her brother is already employed by DDD she doesn’t qualify.

We finish the questionnaire and ask for directions to the next house. It is another long ride on dirt roads. We get on the motorbike and set off and I yell to Thongkham over the noise from the engine and wind: “It’s too bad, they could really use some help”, and he responds: “But her brother is already making a salary and sending money home to his family. There are other families who are not as lucky.” He is right, and we continue on to the next visit.

Correction: Chhavy’s father did not serve as an officer in the army under the Khmer Rouge. During that time he worked as a peasant, and after the fall of the Khmer Rouge he joined the Cambodian People’s Armed Forces (CPARF). The CPARF were the armed forces of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, established primarily in response to the security threat that the CGKD forces, including the Khmer Rouge, presented.

***

Like most of our employees in Cambodia, Chhavy is a daughter of the post-genocide era in Phnom Penh. She graduated from DDD earlier this year and now works to improve the future of some of Cambodia’s least fortunate children, and she dreams about starting her own business.

Chhon Chhavy was born in 1981, two years after the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had fallen. She was the first of five children. Her parents lived in Kandal province and, like most other Cambodian families, they suffered under the Khmer Rouge, but they survived and avoided being split up or separated into different work camps.

After the Khmer Rouge years, Chhavy’s father joined the Cambodian People’s Armed Forces (CPARF). “When I was a child, I didn’t know about my father’s job. When you are a child, you don’t understand about those things. I would just always be happy to see him when he came back after being away for so long.” says Chhavy. As an adult, she has asked her father about life during the Khmer Rouge and the following decades. He says it was a difficult time and that he never wants General Pol Pot to come back. “No one in Cambodia wants that time to come back.”

Chhavy worked for DDD as a data-entry operator for five years and just recently graduated to a job outside DDD. She now works as a librarian at Hagar International, an NGO that rehabilitates female victims of trafficking in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. She notes that although her daily work is very different, DDD and Hagar International are similar organizations: They are both helping marginalized Cambodians to build better lives.

At Hagar, more than one hundred children use the library and attend the impromptu English and IT classes Chhavy teaches. She says her new job is gratifying because she can help point the children in the direction of a better future. “I didn’t know about this problem in Cambodia before I came to Hagar. Sometimes the parents sell their daughters because they are so poor. I want Cambodia to get rid of this problem.”

Chhavy also has entrepreneurial dreams: She wants to use her experience from DDD to make money so that she can start a small business with her brother.

Thanks in part to Chhavy’s financial support; all of her siblings have been able to study in university. Her brother has become a veterinarian. “In my province, everyone has animals everywhere that are not taken properly care of. When the animals die, the farmers sell the meat in the market and people get sick. I want to provide medicine for the animals, so that people don’t get sick.” explains Chhavy. Right now she is gaining work experience at Hagar and talking to people who have their own businesses so that she can learn from them, before she moves on to realize her dream for herself and her family.

“I think my parents are good parents. They made sure all their children got an education so that we can get good jobs. I want all the children in my country to be able to get an education. And I want peace in Cambodia.”

These were some of the observations heard during our annual management retreat as part an activity called “Open Space.”  The activity (also called an “unconference”) gave DDD managers the opportunity to raise the issues they felt were most important to tackle as we began to develop our annual business plan.

Managers from Phnom Penh, Battambang, Vientiane and New York pitched topics to their peers to create 15 different discussion sessions.  The discussions were rich and lively.  The topics ranged from “Improving the Experience of Entry Level Operators” to “Quality Monitoring and Automation”.  Managers demonstrated a keen understanding of DDD’s mission, and a passionate commitment to improving what we do. Many of the groups attracted a diverse set of participants representing several different teams across DDD—though some of these managers don’t normally have reason to collaborate, the discussion topics illuminated shared interests and unexpected synergies. Facilitators took detailed notes of the conversations for follow up and volunteers from each session stood up in front of the room to report the takeaways of their conversation back to the full group.

Open Space gave our managers the opportunity to raise concerns and make suggestions about how DDD can improve how we do business and better achieve our social mission. The chance to speak up to propose topics, to talk with peers about the issues that concern them most, and to report back to the full group was enormously empowering, and inspired all of us to action.  For many of our staff, it was the first time they spoke up about their own ideas in front of a large group of colleagues. It’s now up to DDD’s senior management team to decide how to integrate these ideas as they set priorities for the coming year.

What was the outcome?  Open Space teams made recommendations such as:

•    Include more interactive activities in DDD’s English courses: skits, conversation, practice with native English speakers, extracurricular study tours, etc
•    All DDD staff should spend time working in entry level operator jobs.
•    Increase the number of Alumni activities and events that allow graduates to share their experiences.

About Open Space
Open Space is a way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired and productive meetings. Over the last 20+ years, it has also become clear that opening space, as an intentional leadership practice, can create inspired organizations, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity.  In Open Space meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance, such as: What is the strategy, group, organization or community that all stakeholders can support and work together to create?

The Young Leadership Program addresses a critical gap in today’s training for future leaders: The purpose of the program is to provide an experiential course which ultimately uses the inputs of relevant business practices to make a positive impact on society. The program provides experiential leadership development by combining a week of classroom-based learning (Module 1) — comprised of intense debate and discussions with well-known leaders from HSBC, Siemens, Sonepar etc — followed by a week of on-site work on a real-world project (Module 2). The goal is for your team to identify a business idea and capitalize on it to create either an investment opportunity or a business plan. We put in an average of 14-16 hours per day to complete the program objectives.

I was lucky to have a lot of opportunity to give my input from the perspective of a social enterprise. Particularly, I emphasized a major lesson my job has taught me: how critical our everyday decision making is, and how deeply it can affect the people and society around us. Since most of my teammates in the program came from a corporate background, my presence in the team did bring about a different perspective. Of course, I took this opportunity to share our experiences from DDD with everyone. Many of the participants had never heard of social enterprise before, but became interested in making our model part of the business plan we were developing.

During Module 2, we met up with many local government officials in China. We found that there were too many policies and regulations working against establishing a non-profit organization due to the Chinese economic system. Therefore, our initial business model changed from a social business model into two models: The first model is a commercial model that will use its profit to pay annual royalty fees to our second (social) business model in order to achieve the program objectives.

At end of the program, we completed the business plan on time and presented it at the investor conference. We were congratulated by our Chinese partner for our ability to come up with new ideas in such a short time, and they promised to look into adopting our ideas in order to achieve sustainability in their current business expansion.
During the reflection at the end of the program, I concluded my participation with appreciation of the GIFT Institute team, and I of course thanked my sponsor,Ms Annie Chen, who funded my trip and program cost in Hong Kong. I also requested that the GIFT Institute look into giving more opportunities to our local managers in DDD Laos and Cambodia to attend this program in the near future. I am thankful for the opportunity to participate in this program, and I appreciate that DDD encouraged me to learn more about leadership and to share our DDD stories during this two week program.

Lessons learned:
Diversity – I was assigned to a diverse team that consisted of people of more than 10 different nationalities, industries and backgrounds who were to accomplish the tasks set. Our openness to the views of others was tested. Diversity of the team was crucial for the team’s growth and development.

No passivity — Stepping up to be a leader is the key to success and self-realization; failure to do so, on the other hand, will not help me or my organization. An open mind and a high level of intellectual curiosity were essential to get the most out of this program. I learned to be more engaged and to always find a way to be effective.

Ability to communicate – Understanding the participants’ individual ability to communicate was really important in order to ensure that we were not weakened by language barriers during the program. It was clear that when the session was conducted in English, the native English speakers tended to be very dominant on the floor and most Chinese speakers remained quiet. This situation changed as we went to into Module 2, where most of the sessions involved Chinese speakers from the government and local companies. Suddenly the quiet Chinese participants became lively and participated in every debate and took the lead in all of Module 2. Some native English speakers suddenly became less dominant, although there was a translator who worked with us in every session. During the reflection, some of the English native speakers admitted they had felt insecure in most sessions and apologized to the Chinese participants for being ignorant during Module 1. It was interesting for me to observe these things, and the team was really great in acknowledging this lesson.

While growing up in France, my elementary school friends and I always dreamed of going back to Cambodia one day to help my parents’ motherland. When I first learned about DDD four years ago from a BBC article, I was awed by the social impact of the organization. I immediately contacted the CEO Jeremy Hockenstein to ask how I, of Cambodia origins, could best utilize my skills to help Cambodia.

When I first left Paris for Laos in December of 2007, I found myself in unknown territory, and really did not know where this new challenge would bring me. After I came to Laos, and met so many people from all over the world, with so much energy, passion, and enthusiasm about achieving one common goal–to help the disadvantaged–I realized that no words can describe DDD’s social impact throughout Cambodia and Laos.

While I first started at DDD doing capacity building on a short-term contract and now am IT Regional Director, I realize that I have learned as much from my DDD peers as they have learned from me. When I see the operators coming to work every day, I must admit I am humbled by their will and courage to continue their education and work so hard to attain a better future.

At DDD, we often say in English that the organization is a stepping stone for the young disadvantaged of Cambodia and Laos. There is no literal translation for this phrase, so in Khmer, they say that DDD is a crossing bridge for a better future. I am told in Khmer and in Laos that Tip means miracle. I do not know if I will be performing miracles here in Cambodia and Laos. But one thing is sure, with DDD, we will definitely be making a difference in this world.

In April, I represented DDD at the third annual “Taste of Southeast Asia” fundraiser for Khmer Legacies.

Khmer Legacies is a terrific organization that builds video histories about the Cambodian genocide from the perspective of survivors. The organization enables the younger generation of the Cambodian diaspora to interview the older generation of survivors. The archive is then used as an educational tool to deepen understanding about the Khmer Rouge genocide for researchers, students, and the world.

It was this process of interviewing her own family that led Socheata Poeuv, the founder of Khmer Legacies, to uncover a labyrinth of painful and shocking memories about her family.

Socheata was born in a Thai refugee camp to Cambodian parents who fled the Khmer Rouge. She was 22 when her parents revealed to her that her older sisters were in fact her first cousins (whose parents perished under Pol Pot). Her older brother was actually her half brother – a child who survived her mother’s murdered first husband. Spurred by curiosity to delve deeper into her family’s story, Socheata embarked upon a personal video project. This would become the ground-breaking documentary “New Year Baby.”

The fundraiser was elegant and extravagant. Delicious Asian treats, conversation and Beer Lao (my favorite!) abounded. But just below the surface of the fancy evening gowns and epicurean buzz emanating from this Chelsea loft lie the not yet healed wounds of the generations affected by the Cambodian diaspora, still coping with the pain of fleeing their homeland amidst untold atrocities.

Addy: A police man or a soldier. It is not a popular job here, but there is still a lot of competition, because they are government jobs, which means a permanent position and stable income.
Thipkesone: I wanted to become a doctor, but I couldn’t pass the test to get into the university.

Where did you grow up, and what is your family like?

Thongsouk: I grew up in Viengkeo Village. My family is very poor and has a very difficult life. All my siblings only finished high school; they didn’t have a chance to study further. Now they work in the factories and restaurants, at very low paid jobs.
Odai: My family is poor. We tried to get a loan so I could study at the university, but we couldn’t. We also owe money to all our relatives.

What did your family say, when you told them you were going to work at DDD?

Odai: They were very happy and proud of me, because I will be able to finish school and take care of myself. I will generate income and support my family.

What is the best thing about working for DDD?

Thipkesone: It is very different than other places. Here you get a chance to get real experience, and the other half of the day you can go to school.
Addy: The best thing is that I can improve myself and have a better life. Now I have access to healthcare and other benefits in life.

What are your plans and dreams for the future?

Thongsouk: I study accounting at college and I want to become an accountant. Because DDD invested in my career I have job opportunities now.
Odai: I am going to IT school and I want to be an IT manager. I have built my experience and general knowledge at DDD.

What do you think your life would be like if you didn’t work at DDD?

Thongsouk: I think I would be weaving at home with my mother.
Addy: I would still be working at the gas station, where I worked before I joined DDD.
Thipkesone: I would be at home with my mother, selling dried food in front of our house.
Odai: Before I came here, I worked as a waiter. It was very low pay. I can’t imagine my life without DDD.