Exercises in Green Thumbery

After visiting so many incredible homestead gardens across Cambodia over the past two months, I started to crave a little garden time back at my apartment in Phnom Penh. My own green thumb is quite inexperienced; last summer I grew some basil, chives and a tomato plant, that latter of which only yielded two tiny fruit. But with a great deal of enthusiasm from my roommates, planting season has begun in our home. We've potted a few flowering plants, along with several herbs and are even trying for a fruit tree. With rainy season in full force and a plethora of greenery to now call home, a troop of giant snails have moved into our garden space!

What IS empowerment?

Sometimes things in development are foggy, specifically the jargon. There are a lot of terms that pop up in proposals, mission statements, and reports that carry a lot of weight among development folk, and a lot of time and effort is spent developing these phrases in order to pinpoint a very specific concept. My last semester in graduate school, I read a WorldBank report on "quiet corruption," a term coined to speak about corruption that occurs at the frontline of development programs in education, health and other sectors. Often when people speak of corruption, we imagine powerful men in big institutions, counting giant stacks of illegitimate money. I remember reading this paper and knowing exactly what this "quiet corruption" looked like (nothing like the stereotypical type), what detrimental effects it can have on a health system, and how the root causes are so vastly different from what we typically think of as corruption (the causes aren't as cut and dry as greed and hunger for power, it's often about lack of support and adequate compensation). It was a challenge I had seen time and again in different settings, but had never thought about in such a structured manner. So sometimes, jargon in development can help to clarify and categorize things, and maybe allow for better solutions to certain problems.

And while I honestly believe that these terms are always developed with the best of intentions, sometimes they end up being just plain confusing. Sometimes to the point of hilarity. What IS capacity building? What does it MEAN for a program to be sustainable? And currently, my own professional challenge: What IS empowerment??? A friend forward me a link last night on exactly this fogginess, and while it made me chuckle it also reassured me that I'm not alone in my frustration. Compiled by the development economist, Will Easterly, the AidSpeak Dictionary lists the main buzzwords in development, along with a tongue-in-cheek definition offered up by various people working in the development sector.

Some are pretty amusing:
“experienced aid practitioner” : has large number of air miles in account

“field experience” : I can’t bear DC anymore

“innovation” : we’re sexy, you want to be associated with us

“sustainable” : will last at least as long as the funding

But it was this one that hit too close to home:
“empowerment” : what is left when all the quantifiable variables give non significant results

One of my main projects at The Org is to identify how The Program may lead to improved women's empowerment among participants, and how this in turn may lead to improved maternal and child health and nutrition outcomes. Sound straightforward? Nope. As it turns out, "empowerment" has become quite the hot topic in development, with funders excited to support programs that foster "empowerment," and therefore, organizations excited to define components within their programs associated with "empowerment." But the task of actually studying "empowerment" for one of these organizations is really, really tricky.

First, back to my initial quandary, What IS women's empowerment? Conducting a brief literature review on the subject (well, 14 pages single spaced...) revealed that academics are also somewhat at odds over what to call it (you say autonomy, I say agency, etc.), but that most agree that empowerment relies upon the idea that a process of change occurs, whereby one moves from a state of disempowerment to a state of empowerment, and that this process occurs through human agency (Malhotra, 2002). The ability to become empowered is therefore dependent on the ability of an individual to make choices, and through this increase in ability to make choices and the act of choosing one becomes empowered. Which is especially interesting when you think of how many programs talk about empowerment as something they will provide ("This program will empower women/adolescents/minorities/etc"), but really empowerment comes from within an individual and can not be created by an external force. This all seemed pretty straightforward, until I starting digging deeper...

Next quandary, What leads to empowerment and how on earth would you measure this? This literature on this was a bit more discouraging. Most scholars argued that given the very definition of empowerment as a process of change in human agency over time it may not even be possible to measure empowerment; since it's a process one has to measure at several points in time, and since it's a change indicators will also evolve over time so one may not even be able to use the same indicators at each measurement! PLUS, it's argued that empowerment indicators are entirely context specific (what looks like empowerment in NYC is not what empowerment looks like in Cambodia), so it's difficult to standardize empowerment and compare levels of empowerment across regions. Sigh.

Despite this, The Org and I are going to try. I've identified some interesting indicators for empowerment, am finalizing the research tools, and beginning next month the data collection will commence. Because so much of this is exploratory, part of the process is finding out not only how The Program relates to women's empowerment, but also what are the appropriate indicators to measure it in this setting. I'm excited to see what we discover. And despite AidSpeak Dictionary, maybe just maybe, these empowerment variables will be significant.

Reference: Malhotra A, Schuler SR, and Boender C. 2002. Measuring Women’s Empowerment as a Variable in International Development. Gender and Development Group Working Paper. World Bank.

Birthday in Kampuchea: Cooking Class

A few weeks ago, I celebrated my 28th birthday in Phnom Penh. It happened to also be the birthday weekend of several other friends here. In NYC, early September was always a parade of birthday parties and festivities as well, leading me to believe that I either tend to gravitate towards other Virgos, or there really is just a larger proportion of New Year's Eve babies out there than most of us realize. :)

This birthday was absolutely lovely, and it was fantastic to share it with some great people I've met here. Some highlights included a delicious chocolate cake prepared by my roommate, a fantastic (vegan!) khmer dinner with friends, watching a friend who works in water-sanitation present on parasites at "Nerd Night" (a event in Phnom Penh where nerdy, curious people come together to watch peers give 20-slide, 20-minute presentations on the topic of their choice), and my purchase of a glorious, comfy muu-muu for sleeping. I even got a dollar off because the vendor found out it was my "special day." But maybe the best part of this day was the incredible outpouring of birthday wishes, updates and hellos I received from friends and family. I miss you all so much and hearing from you was such a treat.

As a birthday gift to myself, I enrolled in an all-day cooking course, to master the art of cooking khmer (or to at least understand some basics). Bright and early at 9am on a Saturday, two friends and I began the day with a market tour; our cooking instructor lead us through the maze of stalls, stopping here and there to introduce us to all the leafy greens, bright fruits, edible flowers, tubers, chilies, noodles, dried/smoked/fermented meats, and more. At one stop, we tried more than 3 types of basil (each tasting distinctly different) and one unique herb, fishwort, that actually tasted.... fishy.

After our market introduction, we gathered all the necessary provisions for our lesson, and headed to the cooking school: a rooftop classroom equipped with stove top stations, cutting boards and gigantic wooden mortars and pestles. For the next 5 hours, we chopped, ground, marinated, tossed, and steamed our way through four delicious dishes. First up: fried spring rolls filled with taro and carrot. My only prior experience with taro has been in bubble tea form, so I was pretty excited to see how the cooked root vegetable tasted. Our instructor ran a tight ship, and any spring roll not rolled in perfect formation was rejected for frying; we later found out that a perfect roll was not only aesthetically preferably, but prevented oil from entering inside and kept the stuffing fresh and light, rather than mushy and oily.

Second up: fish amok. This is one of the first dishes I had in Phnom Penh, and is a Cambodian classic. Essentially, it is a coconut-milk based curry with fish, and prepared by steaming everything inside a banana leaf cup. Making every part of this dish by scratch involved grinding up kaffir lime rind, galangal (looks like ginger, but a more mellow biting flavor), lemongrass, garlic, turmeric, shallot, and red chilies in a mortar and pestle until smooth, adding coconut milk to this kroeung (a traditional herb paste made of these 7 ingredients), and marinating tiny chunks of fish fillet in this curry sauce so the flavors are absorbed. Next, you fashion a small cup out of fresh, young banana leaves and about five toothpicks. Our instructor's expectations for his pupils' performance on this task, like the spring rolls, were high. We each struggled to manipulate the stiff leaves and flimsy toothpicks, and probably went through four or more iterations of a cup until one was deemed satisfactory for fish amok. This tiny cup was then filled with our curry and set in a steamer for 30 minutes. During this time, we sat around, sipped Angkor beer with our instructor, chatted about food and life in Cambodia and then... we ate! Fish amok is one of my absolute favorite things to eat here. It's a lighter coconut curry than most, and the steaming process keeps the flavors bright and the fish texture very lovely.

Third up: banana bud salad with chicken. This delectable, raw salad's main ingredient is the bud of a banana tree, which is sort of like a tender husk. We finely julienned a few leaves of the bud, along with red pepper, coriander, mint, and basil, and added shredded poached chicken breast. We topped it off with crushed peanuts, lime juice, and a dressing of fish sauce, red chili, garlic, palm sugar and more lime juice. The banana bud is probably most similar to cabbage in texture, but the flavor is very neutral, with just a hint of sweetness. Another definite winner.

Last up: sticky rice and mango. This has long been a favorite food of mine, and for some reason I held fast to the belief that sticky rice is difficult to make. I assumed it involved at least 1-2 special piece of kitchen equipment that I would never own, involved a long and arduous cooking process, included coconut milk and perhaps other ingredients not readily available in North America, and a very special type of rice. I was only correct on one of these assumptions, and only partly. Cooking sticky rice does require a certain type of rice, but I wouldn't necessarily call it special; it's simply a more glutenous type of rice that becomes, well... sticky during cooking. So, we just added this rice to boiling water and let it cook. Easy peasy. While we were waiting for the rice to stick-ify, we chopped up some mango and prepared a finger-licking delicious sauce of palm sugar, butter, and coconut milk. This is perhaps the most easy and delectable dessert I've ever made. All in all, a day well spent!

Khmer amazes again...

I've been plugging away at my Khmer language skills over the past few weeks, and after 3 lessons I am now able to (sort of) direct tuk-tuks, make purchases in the market, and enter into conversation -but I'm still at a loss for what to say beyond, "How are you?" All in all, my progress has been slow but steady!

I don't know if Khmer will stay with me beyond my time in Cambodia, but it's definitely left an impression on me in terms of how interesting languages can be. I mentioned in a previous post how much I loved the vocabulary of Khmer, and how words are often compounds of smaller words. When you are learning vocabulary, it's easy to focus on just memorizing the words, but the real enjoyment comes when you actually begin to understand the meaning of each part.

Here are a few of my recent favorites:

chol chet = to enter the heart (to like)

- So when you say you like something, you are actually saying that this thing enters your heart. Swoon!

kit luy = think of money (the bill)

- So when you request the bill at a restaurant, you are requesting to "think of the money." And when something is free, it's "ot kit luy," or "don't think of the money."

Finally, one of my new favorite (and very useful) words is: chngan (delicious)

- I love this word simply because it's so fun to say. It's very nasal and you don't open your mouth much say it... so it's actually kind of similar to when I say, "Yuuummmmmm!"