After a weekend in Siem Reap, I actually had to turn around, come home, pack my bags again and head down to Takeo. For those who may remember, Takeo is where I did my pre-service training before moving to Banteay Meanchey to be at my permanent site. The new volunteers have already arrived in Cambodia (it is hard to think that I am no longer new!) Because I am on the Small Grants Committee, Peace Corps asked us to go down to talk about PACA activities. So for this blog post, I wanted to talk about the importance of sustainability and community-led development. And then I will dive into the rest of my week. (Also a lot of this comes from the PC website and things that Alma and I wrote, so I hope there is not a copywrite issue, this comes from Peace Corps.)
PACA stands for Participatory Analysis for Community Action. The activities that volunteers do within their first couple of months at site includes the “Daily Routine Activity” (surveying people about what they do throughout their whole day to see when they are busy and not), “Community Mapping activity” (to see where places are in their community), and the “Monthly Calendar Activity”(this looks at when there are specific holidays, when it is hot and cold, when it is farming season, etc.). There are more activities for other posts, but for Cambodia, these are the main 3. Overall, these activities are supposed to help volunteers get to know their communities better, especially because in the first 3 months you feel kind of lost and out of place. I conducted the Daily Routing activity and the Monthly Calendar activity with the teachers at school and it was actually a fun experience to get to know them (and also learn that people are busy 99.9% of the time. The overall idea of PACA is that it is an outline/a way to analyze the community in order to see “community needs” and see where a volunteer could conduct a secondary project. (Side note that Alma and I talked about is that we don’t like the idea of “community needs” because that sounds like a community is deprived of something, but you should also focus on what the community already has and things like that too, with development, don’t just look at what a community “doesn’t have”).
The steps for PACA are Develop Relationships, Discover, Dream, Design, and Deliver. I will briefly break these down/ Develop Relationships are the activities I mentioned above. You do activities and you start to get to know your community (also known as community integration). Community integration in general is super important for a PCV because that makes you feel more at home. Like I think my community integration went well and I feel like a true staff member at my school but I am also super close with my co-teachers and my host family. Discover is diving deeper into thinking about key things within the community (this is just an extra step to develop relationships in my opinion). Dream is thinking about a secondary project alongside your community partner. I put this in italics because I will dive into this later. You as a volunteer are not “dreaming” alone about a project because you are not a person who has lived in the community for awhile. You are facilitating the “dream” for your community alongside your community partner (for me my community partner is my school director). During the “dream” part, you do a Project Design and Management (PDM) course with your community partner and you both learn about project design and management. Honestly, before PDM, I knew nothing about project design and management because I have never done that, but my school director knew a lot because he has conducted multiple development projects at our school. Anyways, that is all to say this is community dreaming (will dive into this later). After dream, you Design. In our case this means, design the project, write, the grant, submit the grant, etc. A boring step, however super important (and now my key job for the Small Grants Committee because I am constantly reading the grant applications of my fellow volunteers). After design, you deliver! Deliver, aka build the thing (or conduct the activity, etc.) But with deliver, there is a sustainability key (which is super important). As a PCV, you are only at your site for 2 years. Your project wants to continue well past that (which is also why this needs to be a joint community led project). You don’t want to build something just for it to deteriorate (literally and figuratively) once you leave and so when you deliver, you are also setting up things in place to make sure the project stays alive (for example at my school we are starting basketball teams with the basketball court, which needs to make sure the teachers who will coach the teams will continue to coach after I leave).
As a quote from the PC website:
“The Peace Corps approaches development as a process of partnering with communities; strengthening individual and collective capacity; and using available resources, knowledge, and skills to achieve locally defined goals.”
These are the principles from Peace Corps as well:
“Community-centered: We work alongside counterparts and community members to catalyze community-led change.
Process > product: We believe that how we make a difference is almost more important as what measurable impact we make.
Grassroots solutions: We listen to and leverage practical solutions to address community-defined priorities.
Long-term impact > short-term gains: We strive for lasting relationships and impacts, not quick fixes.
Participation and inclusion: We engage diverse and under-represented stakeholders in all phases of the development process to foster equity, access, and ownership.
Capacity strengthening: We engage as partners in mutual learning, knowledge exchange, and skills transfer.
Sustainability: We leverage existing strengths and resources in the community to support sustainable outcomes.”
All of that is to say that, this is supposed to be coming from the community and you are a cog in the bigger machine of things. I think a lot of people don’t think about this with development, and it is important to think about community-led development which will go beyond just the presence of the volunteer. Also, all PC projects require the community to raise 25% of the funds for the whole project to ensure community buy in. If anyone would like to talk about this further, please reach out to me because this is actually something I think about a lot (and also why the Small Grants Committee critically looks at grants to make sure they are sustainable).
On Friday, we went down to the training site and presented about PACA (which all of the description is above). I actually remember when I learned about PACA last year and at the end of the presentation, I was so overwhelmed. I did not even want to do a secondary project. Now look at me, chairwoman of the Small Grants Committee and currently raising money for my basketball court project (which you can still donate to on the Peace Corps donations website!) All jokes aside, I remember the presentation being super overwhelming and so Alma and I (she is my fellow SG committee member as well as fellow BMCer) totally redid the slides to make it clear, less nerve-wracking, but also inspirational to hopefully get the trainees excited to go to site! As emphasized above, as well as how we emphasized during the training, Peace Corps is conducting community-led and sustainable development. AKA this does not mean “project thought of and conducted by Alex” but instead of”project thought of and conducted by community and Alex helps write the grant to get the money and put some things in place”. And I think this is why I was overwhelmed last year during this presentation because I was thinking about projects I wanted to do at my site. I was thinking “oh a library because I like to read” (well first news flash is that my school already has a library). But this was an idea that I wanted, not taking into account what the community wanted, so when doing PC community development (and development in general) it shouldn’t be what you want but it is what the community wants. Once I learned that it is about the community, I slowly became less overwhelmed. My school director proposed having a basketball court, and yes I am a big helper with the set up in the basketball court, including raising money (please please donate!!), it is him who is driving the project and it is the kids who want to play on it. Just things to keep in mind.
Also here is the link if you still want to donate :)
For the weekend, we got to hang out in Phnom Penh before going back to Takeo on Monday. On Saturday, I did a lot of work on a couple of different projects I am working on (mainly Small Grants Committee stuff) and then around 2 o’clock I decided that I needed a change of scenery, so I went to a rooftop pool! Fun fact if you find yourself in Phnom Penh, many rooftop pools are “free” (even if it is tied to a hotel) you just have to buy food (hence “free” in quotation marks). I ended up meeting a new friend at the pool and this turned into a chain of meeting new people who live in Phnom Penh. We had an awesome/fun night, including going to a drag show (my first drag show in Cambodia as well as my first drag show ever). On Sunday, I found myself back at the same coffee shop doing some more work, and then later got dinner, went shopping, and got drinks with a girl who I met at a Peace Corps staff member’s wedding. (I am making friends left and right!) So I would say overall it was a successful weekend.
On Monday, we went back to Takeo and observed the new volunteers work on the PACA activity project. Overall, the volunteers actually did a really good job conducting the project and most of the groups had very thought out activities and presentations. I think my favorite one was a group that let their students draw a community map, but they also let them draw “dream” places they wanted in the town. As well, the group let the students present their maps and I could tell the students were super engaged! After observation, I had lunch with my old host family that I had during training. They have a new volunteer at their house now and so her and I had lunch with my old host family, which was nice. Then I had to head back to the city and then I headed home on Tuesday (couldn’t go home on Monday because it is a 6 hour bus ride and PC has a strict no travel after dark policy in Cambodia, so I got to enjoy the AC in the hotel room for one more night).
I got back home and went back to regular teaching for one day. We are wrapping up the school year, so this consists of a lot of irregular days and many exams for the students.
Also side, side note, I and my bike totally fell over on the highway. I was biking home from school (and the wind was blowing like crazy) and I accidentally drove too close to the curb/rain gutter thing and my tire slipped and my bike fell over. I caught myself/slid on my hands (so yeah I had some rocks in my hands) and I also scraped my leg. The nice people at the side of the road restaurant asked if I was ok and I asked “can I wash my hands” because it was a dirt/blood combo on my hands. After that I biked home and had to wash the rest of it off. (also I think I sprained my wrist because it hurts to move but oh well). I hate the helmet I have to wear but I tell you that helmet saved my face from hitting the ground in the same spot where I fell off of the swingset a couple months back. I need to stop making these clumsy mistakes!
Resources:
Basketball Court Donations!: https://www.peacecorps.gov/donate/projects/pp-24-303-007/
Information about PACA and the definitions for this slide: https://www.peacecorps.gov/what-we-do/our-mission/our-intercultural-approach/participatory-analysis-for-community-action/#:~:text=Our%20approach%20to%20community%2Dled%20development,-It%20all%20starts&text=The%20Peace%20Corps%20approaches%20development,to%20achieve%20locally%20defined%20goals.
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