Book | Towards Restoring Life

Told by Meas Nee with Joan Healy as listener and scribe–First edition Printed Phnom Penh Cambodia July 1995

–Broken trust and lost dignity

Meas Nee was born in 1957 and now works to restore rural Cambodia. His parents' village, Choeuteul was about 150 km south east from Phnom Penh and about 10 km from the Vietnamese border. People lived in peace with Vietnamese soldiers passing through the village to South Vietnam their town every once in a while. He grew up hearing bombing and shelling from Vietnam since when he could remember.

He began to live in the war at his age of 13 as the attempt of King Sihanouk to adopt an official policy of neutrality in the Cold War has failed. The ousted King had become the commander of Khmer Rum Dos, the liberation army. Whereas the new government–the Khmer Republic under Lon Nol was forcing all the government employees to be trained. Nobody did not know who to support, nor who to trust.

Khmer Rouge regime was very crucial and unfortunate to Cambodian modern history. According to Meas, people lived like animals–only thinking about food and have become extremely passive. He admits that he had had a habit of not being able to decide anything for a long time. People, even family members denounced each other to death just to survive through the regime. Even today, the fear of betrayal still remained. Trust and dignity could not easily return to any of villages. Meas believes that the corruption is connected with aforementioned problems.

–What can be done
Meas Nee suggest NGOs not to start with projects but learning what people's strengths, problems and wishes are. These are strong people who survived through harsh time. He emphasize that one can think of where to start only by learning from people especially because each village is different from one another.

Meas Nee also suggest a novel definition of participatory project: Do not invite people to meetings, but get invited to their meetings. He believes people know the problem and the solution better than anybody else, but they are need somebody who start listening. Once things are heard, people naturally start discussion about problems and getting together in bigger and bigger groups. Eventually people would start initiating projects and need help from NGOs and authorities.
We tent to start creating project and involve people into the project. They will work as long as they are paid, but the project will not be sustainable–they won't take ownership. This approach will take more time but stay longer, and evolve.

–Learnings

• Don't start with project: Start listening and learning people's strength, problems and wishes.
  
• Let them talk, give enough time: People need more time than you expect to be able to work as a community. Trust, dignity and active attitude take a long time to return to the community
  
• Unlike Europeans, Cambodian people do not like to confront people of different opinion when they are having conflicts.
  

* Special thanks to Mikko Ahlström who has got us this book. He joined the trip to Cambodia with the group of students of the course, City in Crisis. He has been very agile in taking photographs of Cambodia's today and helped the team in very many ways.