Gabor Karsai is not your average businessman. Originally from Hungary, Karsai settled in New York, became a real estate agent, and joined the Rotary Club in order to stretch his philanthropic muscle. After traveling to Southeast Asia on holiday, where he witnessed the sex trade firsthand, and then reading a National Geographic article on the Thai and Cambodian sex trade, he came back to his Rotary Club with a mission.
Karsai connected next with the Gainesville, Florida, chapter of Rotary International and a group of its members who had started their own organization in Cambodia to promote sustainability in its villages. Within this group, he found Richard Allen, the co-founder of Sustainable Cambodia, an organization located in the village of Pursat in central Cambodia, which helps villages become self-sustaining communities. Karsai helped Sustainable Cambodia get a matching grant through Rotary International. He said that what drew him to this particular organization was that it was fully run by Cambodians who made a decent salary and that every time he had to communicate with someone at the non-profit in Cambodia, “I’d send an email and I’d get an email back.” In other words, he appreciated their participatory development model and knew that the matching grant was being used and organized by the very people whose lives would be enriched.
Sustainable Cambodia takes this model seriously. Nothing is “given” to the villagers, but instead, the villagers must commit their time and labor to make the projects happen. The non-Cambodian staff typically provides training and nearly all of the first-year financing for the projects, but that amount of assistance is reduced over a three-year period once the villagers become more self-reliant. At the end of the three-year period, the quality of life in the village is dramatically improved and villagers have self-created resources in order to continue improvements.
The projects from which the Village Development Committee can choose include fresh water wells (usually the top priority), irrigation, gardens, alternative agriculture, a village school, a pre-school daycare center, vocational training, micro-loans and micro-businesses, and village healthcare. When the village realized that they needed a drinkable water source as an extension of their irrigation plans, the Village Development Committee came together with the Sustainable Cambodia staff and some well drillers to decide on the locations. In order to have ownership of a well, the families have to contribute 10% of their earnings back into the well projects, then The Village Development Committee contracts with a particular family for the maintenance of each well. The cost of each well is under $900 (U.S.), serves five to eight families, and sponsors of Sustainable Cambodia can help with donations toward a village well.
Susan Mastin, the Volunteer Director/Secretary/Treasurer of Sustainable Cambodia, explained the model to me from their U.S. offices in Florida. Mastin, a former educator, heads back to Pursat two to three times a year to participate in the newest project or just to spend some time in the classroom. She noted how Sustainable Cambodia began as a small school named after one of the founders’ mothers, Sylvia Laskey. The Sylvia Lasky Memorial School was then just a project that provided books, clothing, school supplies, bicycles, and English classes to approximately sixty children from the surrounding community. Today, the Sylvia Lasky School has grown to nearly 300 children and has two groups of older students who have gone on to the capital city of Phnom Penh to pursue advanced studies. “We’re seeing our young people just blooming. They’re problem solving, having points of views, and just expressing themselves more.”
This may be because of the children who are educated in the village and continue their studies elsewhere, 90 percent return to help with furthering village development. And it’s the diversification of the village’s programs that keep the villagers coming back. For example, thousands of families participate in the Gardens and Irrigation programs because of the emotional commitment by the all-Cambodian staff. Since half of the year in Cambodia is spent in drought, and the rest of the year the country experiences flooding, rice has been the only crop for centuries. The wells that are dug within the village help not only with clean drinking water, but irrigation for the dry season, and allow for fruits and vegetables to be grown year-round. This model comes full circle when the nutritional needs of families are met, which allows more time for adult literacy, community projects, and vocational training. Children are then in school and not out of the fields, which directs them toward a more prosperous future.
Sustainable Cambodia connected with Seeds of Change, which helps preserve biodiversity and promote sustainable, organic agriculture by selling its all-organic seeds. This allowed diversification of their vegetables and brought new cash crops to the daily market. Mastin was excited by the end result around the sunflower seeds they brought in to support the local bee colonies. “They said, ‘This is going to work.’ They just knew.” So now, the village became known for their model farmers and Mastin agrees. “When families have food available and enterprise situations, there is a connected community.”
They also looked to larger organizations, like Heifer International, who had already invented certain wheels in order to keep the community connected, which Mastin says is another success. “We set up opportunities [for the villagers] to give back [to their community].” In Heifer’s model, which the villages have mirrored, each family that receives an animal promises to give back to their neighbors by giving an offspring of that animal to the family most in need, which keeps the chain of giving going within the community.
Other villages are catching on to what is happening in Pursat. “There is an element of wanting to join,” says Mastin. “There are others who are ‘watchers.’ They want to see how it works first.” But once they are interested, it’s one village passing it onto another through a simple introduction workshop, which not only pleases the villagers, but helps sustain this country, which still feels the aftereffects of ethnic cleansing and war. And that is enough to keep Mastin smiling and coming back to help some more. “I am very aware of the gift that we bring to Cambodia.”
I’m sure Pursat, its villagers, and its growing children would agree.
