Human Resource (Mis)Management

CoDeC’s Director, Mr KimChoeun, called a staff meeting last weekend. He demonstrated some appalling HRM howlers:
He announced it the day before, and didn’t provide an agenda.
Staff don’t usually work Saturdays or Sundays (except sometimes at community workshops), so there was no consideration for peoples time or personal commitments, and they won’t be given any time back in lieu.
Mr KimChoeun started off by explaining that he wants CoDeC to achieve the new Cambodian NGO Good Practice Standards (a bit like Investors in People or ISO), and proceeded to read the guidelines out to us from his book for the next two hours. There was no discussion with the staff or planning of how it will be done.....
Then the staff had their annual appraisals. Each person was given a short form with some arbitrary criteria to rate, e.g. "rate yourself on timekeeping from 1 to 5". They took 5 minutes to complete this and handed it to their District Coordinator who endorsed it (although there was supposed to be some discussion with the rest of the district team)!! Mr KimChoeun collected them in for checking, and the next day told the staff to redo them as he wanted to see a range of scores and not just all 4’s and 5’s!!! When I think of the appraisal industry in the UK, and all the time, money and energy we invest in training for appraisers and appraisees....!!!!!! In some ways, I was quite taken with the simplicity of this appraisal "model", and CoDeC can at least mark off the box that says it has staff appraisal, but I think there will have to be changes next year!
Next, the staff were asked to write their job descriptions on another form. They apparently do this every year, and were given only 15 minutes to complete the forms, with no opportunity for reflection, discussion, reference to their previous job description or guidance. In the UK, it is the employer who decides what the purpose and responsibilities of each job is, so that the staff member knows what is expected of them. The CoDeC way is completely off-track!
I was quite frustrated at this meeting, as I do know about HRM and I could have helped Mr KimChoeun to do things better. However, he didn’t discuss his agenda with me in advance, he had pre-printed the forms and I couldn’t let him "lose face" in front of the staff by criticising his efforts at the meeting. Also, I had no translator to help me to communicate, as Tha was recovering from his motorbike accident. So....... I will have to make do with giving him feedback as soon as an opportunity arises (which may not be for weeks), and suggesting that we have a preparatory meeting prior to next year’s meeting! One good thing (for me) was that we sat at a table for most of the two days. We usually sit on the floor, so I was relieved from getting backache!

Rice planting season

The rural community is very busy at the moment planting rice. Most families have small plots of land where they grow rice for their own consumption as well as for income. Kampong Thom province is mostly very flat, and there are paddy fields as far as the eye can see, all divided into small plots. The schools are closed so that the children can work with their families. As I’ve cycled around the countryside, families have invited me into the paddy fields to give them a hand, but I’ve declined so far - I don’t think I’d be much help!

Tha has an accident

Eight days after his wedding, Tha came off his motorbike while trying to avoid a dog in the road. There were no broken bones, but he got a deep wound on his elbow requiring 10 stitches, a sprained ankle and lots of grazes and black bruises. He has had a week off work recovering, followed by a second week at home with his new wife, as there was no place for him to accompany me to a conference I went to in Siem Reap. Poor Tha... I think the monks got it wrong about how lucky his chosen wedding day would be. When he comes back to work, I will also have to tell him that VSO will definitely not be renewing his employment as my translator after the end of August, so he will have no job.

Tha gets married!

My translator, Tha, dropped a bombshell a couple of weeks ago, when he announced his plans to get married six days later. We didn’t even know he had a girlfriend! The girl he married was known to me, but she’d always been introduced in the past as his sister!! All very confusing...! Most marriages are arranged, but he and Chinda had known each other for 2 years and chose each other. I’m not sure exactly why there was such a rush to get married, but apparently the monks had told Tha that Sunday would be a lucky day for him! Five colleagues and I travelled the 50kms to Stoung by motorbike, while Bram and Rachel came by bus from Siem Reap. I got a chance to wear my new posh Khmer-style frock, but the glamorous outfits of Kaknika and Sopeap rather put mine into the shade (see photo of them with the CoDeC Director Mr KimChouen and Bram). Chinda and Tha greeted us at the entrance to the restaurant dressed in traditional Khmer clothes, but then for me things started to go downhill.... We were ushered to a table and given our meal straight away (11.00 a.m.); Rachel, being vegetarian, couldn’t eat anything! By 11.30 a.m., about half of the guests had finished their meals, so they got up and left. Chinda then changed into her jeans (so no photo of her!), and by the time our party left at 1.00 p.m. it was all over! It was all a bit of a disappointment; I had expected a ceremony, dancing and speeches. Fortunately, Tha and Chinda were quite happy with the proceedings, although they’ve now reverted to their previous lifestyles, with him living in a room in Kampong Thom and she living with her family in Stoung. People do lead very strange lives out here!

Ants

I hate them. They get everywhere, and are impossible to get rid of. There is a huge variety of ants here, including my least favourite, the big red biting kind. At work recently, ants cut our electricity off when a huge army of them ate through the fuse wire of the main switch. Then yesterday, I discovered a nest of ants living in the computer monitor in the office. AsI write this, I have ants crawling all over me. Yuk. My mosquito repellent doesn’t seem to deter the little beasts. I’m not very keen on crickets, flies and mosquitoes either….

Rain

The rainy season is well and truly here, with torrential downpours for several hours every day. It is a relief after the long dry and dusty season, and it is a little cooler... but not much! The rivers and paddy fields are all filling up fast, and there is a lush greenness everywhere. The rain is accompanied by fierce wind, thunder and lightning, and so much water falls in such a short time that the roads quickly become rivers. Nobody goes out in the rain; there are even “resting cottages” by the roadside for motorcyclists to shelter under. The rain seeps in under the doors of my house, but as I have a tiled floor this is not a problem. Last week, a couple of colleagues and I were in the covered market in Kampong Thom when a violent thunderstorm started. We were stuck there, so killed time by eating a sweet dish, but in the end we had to brave the weather. We bought 4 metres of plastic sheeting to shelter under and then waded through the stinking market sewage to get home. Hideous!

Parties and nieces

I have recently been to two parties at the house of my colleague, Kaknika. She invited myself and other CoDeC staff to share a very sociable meal called ‘cow going up the mountain’, so called because strips of beef (cow) are cooked on a conical shaped barbecue (mountain). Delicious and good fun, although all those burning coals inside a wooden house were a bit of a hazard! There was plenty of topping up of glasses and raising them for toasts: ‘Sokapeap laore’ (Good health!)!

The other party was to celebrate the birthdays of her 6 month old daughter and her two year old niece. Kaknika and her husband are raising the niece as their own daughter because the child's own parents (Kaknika’s brother and wife) have moved to another province. There is a lot of sharing in the upbringing of children amongst family members in Cambodia. The 5 year old son of a woman I know died last week from encephalitis, so she was given a niece to bring up instead.

Thank goodness these extended family obligations aren’t the usual practice in England, or I may have ended up with a greater role in looking after my own nephews and nieces! (Only joking, Tom, Oliver, Ben 1, Rosalind, Jessica, Freddie, William and Ben 2!!!).

Red pen heaven?

At the PCT in the UK, I became known as the Red Pen Queen because I was so finicky about correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. Cambodian peoples’ valiant attempts at written English are creating a big challenge for me. People who can speak fluent English here are still rubbish at writing. The following is a typical piece of translation by Tha, who is pretty good at written English in comparison with most:

Employee, who wants to take annual leave, has to fill in the form which request admin-assistant and then s/he could respectfully submit to Unit Manager at least two weeks before setting planed leave date. If anyone has missed or s/he doesn’t obey this workflow, the Unit Manager must monitor, scrutinize, and couldn’t allow if it is impacted on the project plans.

I can usually understand the gist of such gibberish, but I have great difficulty in then rewriting it into good English. It would be much easier to write from scratch.

Now that I understand Khmer structures better, I have a lot of sympathy for Khmer translators, as in their language there aren’t enough words or tenses, no punctuation, no gaps between words and no differentiation between singulars / plurals or genders. They also have the worst dictionaries I’ve ever seen, with numerous “English” words that look like gobbledygook to me, e.g. abaca, abaft, abapical, abasia, abattial, abaxial........ What?????!!!!!