Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned in the USA

By Daniela Papi

I just got back from the US.  Spanning two worlds that are so different, where I am perceived so differently can be confusing for the brain.  I can’t decide if I prefer to do my visit to the US in one big annual chunk, as I used to, or in more sporadic bursts of other-worldness as I seem to be doing this year.  Anyway, this was a long trip.

In over a month in the US, I contributed greatly to my carbon consumption and deducted greatly from my bank account, visiting family, friends, and PEPY supporters across North America.  I also contributed to my knowledge and inspiration accounts as I learned from many people on my journey, and I wanted to share some inspirational quotes and experiences I had for this month’s lessons learned section.

One of the highlights of my trip was joining the Adventure Travel World Summit in Quebec, Canada.  There were many great speakers, but a few highlights worth sharing were Jeff Greenwald’s speech where he basically said:  *Tourism that changes OUR lives, makes us better people and opens up new worlds to us, is what many of us have been selling.   But, that’s no longer good enough.  We now need to look at travel as a way to positively improve the world around us, not just ourselves. * Jeff’s organization “Ethical Traveler” aims to spread these messages and includes 13 tips for the Accidental Ambassador to help us all become more responsible travelers.

Another speaker I really enjoyed at the ATWS was Dr. J. Wallace Nicholas.  Who wouldn’t love an ocean conservationist who is now studying neuroscience and has dedicated his life to protecting sea turtles?!  His speech was inspiring, describing how it hurt him to watch his two daughters fall in love with nature, as he knows that their hearts will be broken.  He said we all MUST fall in love with nature, though, and help our children do the same, so that indeed, when our hearts do break, we have the will to fight back against all those forces that are destroying our planet, and help future generations still have something to fall in love with.  His organization, Ocean Revolution, is working to create a revolution to protect the 71% of the earth which is covered in water.  He gave us each a blue marble to pass on to someone else to spread his revolutionary message.  (Consider yourself marbled – pass it on!)

On my first day back in the US, I attended The Feast, a collection of inspiring people with a collective will-to-do-good fueled by inspired do-gooders presenting their ideas and knowledge in TED-like short presentations.  Oh, and it is run by “creatives”, a term that always sort of makes me jealous to hear.  I want to be a “creative” – I think I’m pretty creative! – but in the new form it seems to have taken it refers to artists, musicians, web designers, etc – i.e. people whose stick figures look and sing a lot better than mine do.  Anyway, the creatives running the show, Mike and Jerri, are pretty darn deserving of the word, and they get 10 points for putting on an energy packed event. 

I listened to a talk by Elizabeth Scharpf, which had me nodding the whole time… SHE gets it.  More than any other group I have heard about, I think the design and concept behind SHE (Sustainable Health Enterprises) is an exemplary model of how social enterprise should be done.  SHE is a lesson learned in and of itself.  All of the development lessons I have learned are wrapped up in SHE: a program designed around community needs, local ownership and buy-in, use of locally available materials, capacity building/training/education as a key component, community components designed to be economically sustainable. . . they have it all.  Elizabeth reminded me of this lesson: stop, listen and look around.  The needs and solutions are both in front of you, if you don’t push past them with your preconceived notions!

Meeting Daniel Epstein from The Unreasonable Institute at The Feast reminded me how important names can be.  Who WOULDN’T want to attend The Unreasonable Institute with a name like that!?  (Pssst, they are accepting applications right now!)  If they had named it the “Learning Center for Responsible and Successful Social Venturing”, I might have been less inclined to yell, SIGN ME UP at first glance. 

I also had the pleasure of meeting Rafe Furst at The Feast, as he was my “Micro-Sponsor”.  In other words, I only had to pay a little bit to join the conference and he paid a lot to help me get there.  Mike and Jerri matched us up with our Micro-Sponsors based on our interests, and I was reminded of how important it is to live a life you believe in through speaking with Rafe.

The final speaker at The Feast, Brian Bordainick was by far the most enjoyable speaker for me to watch.  Not because it was the most flashy or “creative” or unreasonable even, but because it was honest and heartfelt and fabulous.  A story he told, which really resonated with me and many other entrepreneurs in the room I’m sure, was one I have and will tell many times.  Brian, who began working in a hurricane damaged area in New Orleans through Teach for America, had been appointed the Athletic Director at a school, though little to no sports facilities or budget were available.  Step by step he began a project called The 9^th Ward Field of Dreams, aimed at creating a multi-million dollar sports facility in this hurricane damaged area.  One day, as he was walking through the halls, depressed about a donation that had fallen through or annoyed at the barriers he was coming up against, he grumbled about how nothing was working out and he might as well quit, and one of his football players came up and put his arm over his shoulder and said “Baby, ain’t nobody told you to start this to begin with!”

Nearly everyone in the room laughed.  Anyone who has started something that sometimes feels like IT’S driving YOU, who has started a company or a business or a project and felt so overwhelmed by it that sometimes they wish they hadn’t started it, would laugh at this, because they know that feeling.  They also know that Brian, like each of us, quickly came around to realize that, despite the frustrations and struggle to perfect that which we are striving towards, doing something you believe in beats doing something less inspiring for someone else’s gain any day. I got back to Cambodia a few weeks ago with my head full of new ideas and my inbox full of unread messages.  The transition back into either of these two opposing worlds is always tough, but I have been reminded over and over again of Brian’s quote as hey, ain’t nobdy told us to start this to begin with anyway, so we had better be enjoying it and making our time worth while, because no one else will!  I’m grateful to our amazing team here who constantly remind me that this is indeed where I want to be and that, if we keep working hard and learning the lessons presented to us, we can indeed make our work worthwhile.  Happy Thanksgiving, and thank YOU for being a part of why we do our work!

OLPC: The $100 laptop DOES have potential

This is a post Daniela Papi put up on her "Lessons I Learned" blog which describes her impressions of the potential of the XO "$100 Laptop" as well as some information about PEPY's XO program in Cambodia.

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When I first read this post by Alanna Shaikh, I was too busy to write, so I passed it on internally to all those at PEPY, because I know that so many of us would disagree with her. I can’t see the comments on the page, because maybe they have been hidden, but supposedly there are many others who felt the same way, including a post by Nicholas Negroponte. I hope they will be republished soon, so that we can all see them.  (Oh!  I found the reply by NN – “Wait and see.”  Rock on, Nicholas!)

I would have agreed with Alanna on some points a few years ago. Many of our current staff or visiting donors did, before they arrived here. The post is clearly written from someone who is looking at this idea “computers in the developing world” from a theorist standpoint, reading the media available to her written in her developed country of choice, and who has not had much (or any?) interactions with these computers in the areas where they were designed to be used. In effect, she’s saying bananas don’t taste good and are of no use to humans when eating those she bought in her local 7-11, having never tried one off the vine in Honduras.

I understand where she is coming from. I have shared her opinions in the past, and still share her opinions when it comes to what appears to me to be wasted non-applicable technologies being introduced in a non-sustainable way. I see where she is coming from, but I still think she is very wrong. Perhaps if she were here, her opinions would be different. She and I might agree that buying computers and solar is surely not “sustainable” for Cambodia, that teacher training or support to get increased government action to improve education would be better uses of money. We might agree that the computer is in its nascent stages and there is a lot to be improved. We might agree that a great TEACHER is the best way for kids to learn, and a green machine can’t replace that. But if she came here, she might change her opinion that these green things can’t, won’t and aren’t changing the world because indeed, they already have.

Here is a reply I wrote to this blog but since the replys don’t seem to be showing, I’m putting it here:

Note: For anyone using XOs out there: we had someone come in and do a research project on our XO program who helped to match the Cambodian curriculum with XO programs and come up with learning ideas. If you want to learn more about this, contact us at PEPY www.pepyride.org

 

I think this is a very myopic view on the potential for change OLPC has started. If you had looked at the Apple2e computer I used when I was a kid maybe you would have only seen the basic programs I was using and not see what is possible today. We use the OLPC laptops in Cambodia and when I look at them in use, I see my Apple2e. It’s very basic now in some ways, but that’s the point. It’s opensource. The people in the places that are using these can, will and are developing better and better programs for it.

I have been to the schools the Negropontes sponsor in Cambodia, which was our impetus to apply for laptops through the give-one-get-one program. Spend a day in one of their schools, and I guarantee you will change your mind, at least in terms of the potential for change, based on these tools.

If there was no word “laptop” in the name, they would have gotten a lot less press, but naming it a “learning tool” would have been a more correct choice and perhaps saved them a lot of criticism. It’s not a “laptop” meant to replace what you and I are working on. It is a tool for kids to guide them through their own learning – when their teachers don’t show up, when there is a huge disparity between levels in one class, when there are too many students for one-on-one instruction.

I don’t agree with Nicholas Negroponte that any child can pick one up and know how to fix the inside. I do agree with Alanna that, for the best learning environment, you need a great teacher or ideally facilitator, but that is the same for anything you are learning. I have seen in our students and the other OLPC programs we work with in Cambodia, that these tools are inspiring children to lead themselves into areas of education that they are not given access to in their normal government classes.

The word “lesson plan” is evil in the constructivism world of Papert followers and the child-led learning model of OLPC. The laptops didn’t come with a “how-to” guide. This was not an accident—it was planned. I agree with Alanna that for most people who have been spoon-fed their knowledge all their lives, they are not capable of making the leap and learning on their own. In a place like Cambodia some of the most educated young people I know are used to that: they teach themselves all they want to learn via the internet. We have found those people make great facilitators for the program and we don’t follow all constructivist methodologies in our classroom, in fact we brought a researcher in to observe and analyze lessons our teachers had developed and to turn those into “lesson plans” (gasp!).

If you really believe “But it’s not going to change the world, or even affect it all that much.” you have not made all of the connections to all of the ways it already HAS changed the word. It has some of the newest technologies in environmentally friendly parts, screen visibility in bright light, battery life, mesh-technologies, etc etc… and all of those things are ALREADY changing the world as others take them and continue to improve upon them.

Here in Cambodia, there are groups of young Cambodians who meet regularly to translate OLPC programs into Khmer. The new versions we just got have Khmer script and we are now using Scratch in Khmer as well. Walk into a classroom where we work and see older students teaching younger students how to read Khmer via the animated Khmer testing program they designed themselves, and you will change your mind a bit. Talk to our computer teachers, young Cambodians who taught themselves how to use the XOs, and yes, they will tell you there is a lot they don’t understand, but they are effecting change. You can’t see that from your office, but I can see it here. It’s just the start! Each new version of the XO we get is better and better and will continue to be.

If you want to learn more about what we are doing with Scratch on the XOs or about the “lesson plans” our team developed to match the Khmer curriculum, contact us at PEPY www.pepyride.org

Voluntourism101

The PEPY team has been working to develop a new site called Voluntourism101 to share effective practices and lessons learned in volunteer tourism. As we have been too busy getting our new PEPY Tours website up, we have not yet gotten to Voluntourism101, but it is coming soon!  In the meantime, we want to present our initial ideas for effective voluntourism practices in a self-check format.

The document is now downloadable in PDF format. It is designed to serve as a self-check tool for the those working in the voluntourism sector. Indicators which provide proof to answers to the guideline’s questions can be tracked as well as next steps to move towards improvements in the areas where the operator is looking to improve.

Volunteer Tourism Effective Practices is designed for tour operators who are looking to or already are incorporating volunteer projects into their trips. Additionally, we hope it will serve development organizations, volunteer tourism participants and community members in helping to identify and engage in impactful volunteer projects. We gathered research, input and experience from many people working in the areas of voluntourism, development, and traveler’s philanthropy to create this guideline and are grateful to those who have contributed their input. This is a working, living resource, meaning that we are continually seeking feedback in the form of opinions, experiences, lessons learned and anecdotes relating to the outlined effective practices, as well as responses to the design and content of this guideline.

We welcome feedback and ideas for improvement!

Click here to download the self-check tool.

"Lessons I Learned" - A New Site Focused On Our Learnings!

Lesson Learned: If the donors are driving (especially if they are blind!), you are bound to crash!

by PEPY Executive Director, Daniela Papi

The ideas we are sharing with our “Lessons Learned” section are not new,  there are whole books written on these topics, but they are new lessons for us, lessons we have learned first hand over PEPY’s initial four years in Cambodia.  We wanted to write a few of these lessons down so that we can share some of our insights and hopefully highlight some of the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ behind the decisions we make.

In our last “Lessons Learned” article, we discussed how NGOs are commonly rated, some of the flaws we see in those systems, and ways in which we can vote more efficiently with our donor dollars. We also talked briefly about asking more of the NGOs we work with in terms of information and transparency.  This leads into some grey areas: what is the line between a donor asking more of their NGO partners and a donor “driving the bus”?  When donors are driving, especially ones who are not on the ground to experience the impact of their decisions, are projects more likely to crash and fail?  In what we have seen in our time in Cambodia, we believe yes.  Yes, indeed.

As mentioned in the previous post, if a granting body puts strict restrictions on how the project is done or sets their own metrics for success without input from those on the ground, it might end up demanding a process that is less efficient than it could be or results that are impossible to achieve.  In other words, by their own actions the granting agents are often limiting the impact of the dollars they donate.

Some Examples: