Work

A lot of you have been asking what I do and have been unsatisfied with my short parenthetical replies, so I thought I'd write a little more about it for whosoever might be interested.

I work at a Cambodian NGO called Development and Partnership in Action in their Development Education and Advocacy Unit. The organization works on rural development issues, and the unit I work for does mostly capacity building, awareness-raising, and government lobbying on issues on natural resource management (communal forestry and fisheries as well as illegal logging and encroachment) and extractive industries (oil, gas, and mining, both mitigating the impacts of and transparently managing the revenue from). My title has just this week been revealed to be "Communications Advisor." Who knew? So apparently that's my focus, and I'm getting business cards to confirm it.

What I actually do in that capacity is a little bit less clear, and I don't detect much of an overarching theme in my assignments, but recently it's been a lot of power point action. My boss will appear at my desk, on, say, Tuesday morning to inform me that he's been invited to speak say, Friday afternoon at (insert very important conference or other event here) and he wants me to prepare his statement. Upon further questioning, I usually learn that "statement" means power point presentation, and "Friday afternoon" means Thursday morning. It's hard to communicate those things on round one, I understand.

Anyway so then he will summarize the content of said statement/power point as, for example: "responsible mining in Cambodia", or maybe, "Chinese investments in the Mekong region". The topics are always interesting, but for someone with absolutely no background in responsible mining, Cambodia, Chinese investment, or the Mekong region, it usually takes me a while to figure out what exactly he wants to say. He's not great at deciding that himself, or maybe he is and he just won't tell me, so we stick to the tried and true method of guess and check: I research a little bit and put something together, he looks it over and it helps him realize what he actually wanted, and I make the necessary changes/start from scratch from a whole different angle. Inefficient? Oh, alright, I guess you could say that. But at least my work involves playing a guessing game a daily basis, which I bet yours doesn't.

Other than reading my boss' mind and translating his thoughts into power point form, I also edit documents that my coworkers have written in their best English, which, though very good, often involves sentences so awkward and nonsensical that they just make me giggle. I'll send some examples next time they come around. And other tasks include (I'm consulting my work plan to make sure I don't miss anything): taking minutes and preparing reports of English language meetings, editing and updating the content of the website (dpacambodia.org -- really needs to be updated), writing articles for the newsletter, attending conferences and bringing back copies of the reports presented and a handful of free pens, and, at some undisclosed point, conducting a training for my coworkers on "Media Protocol", my long-time area of expertise. That should be interesting.

So I think that covers it. Overall, it's a good gig, and I love that this organization is trying to play a role in pressuring the government to behave itself, to stop awarding land concessions of land that people already own, to resist siphoning off all the revenue from extractive industries for themselves, and to maybe not bulldoze every tree in Cambodia and build a dam on every river, and then poison the fish just for good measure. It's good work, even if I sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

On that note, it's 5:30 on a Friday. What am I still doing here?