Jake GoldbergJournal #1
David pulled his sagging black pants back up around is big belly and let out a hearty, “Hello, how are ya?” We arrived at his bar, Revolution, a little after 10:30 a.m. My four roommates and I had spent a night there earlier in the week drinking beer and contemplating the state of Cambodian NGOs. Colleen, one of my roommates and a fellow Social Enterprise Fellow, talked to us about the amazing experience she had going with David, the bar owner, and Isaac, a Cambodian-American medic, to the city dump. A few times a week they would gather up some ex-pats and tourists to go feed the children who lived at the dump.
There are about five hundred families living in make-shift shacks on piles of trash built up over the years. Every day they wait for the monstrous green garbage trunks to drop loads of trash next to their homes so they can sift through the pungent mess in search of recyclable items worth mere cents. They are poor, starving and outcast. Phnom Penh officials are trying to remove them from the dump; where they will go is of little concern. Thanks to people like David and Isaac, and an NGO school right next to the dump, some of these kids are getting a chance, a chance to live a life beyond the trash dump.
About ten people showed up to help David and Isaac that day. A waitress at the bar collected our donations, 100% of which went to the food we were about to buy at the market.
After buying 400 loaves of bread and enough fruit to match, we hopped back in the tightly packed truck and went on to the dump. Twenty minutes later we pulled up to the dump to find hundreds of children running after our truck and waving at us. A few of the kids were wearing school uniforms, most had tattered, old clothing. No one wore shoes. Apparently whenever shoes are donated, the families sell them for whatever they can get.
The operation worked as such: a few of the kids were chosen to get on the truck to help pass out the food. This was quite the honor. The rest of the children, and some older men and women, formed two lines. I stood next the truck, took the food from the small girl in the truck and handed it to whoever was next in line. Each person received one loaf of bread, four rambutans (a red, spiky fruit similar to lychees) an orange and an apple. The expecting mothers got mango. The kids were extraordinarily happy to receive the food. Most of them were shy and all of them were thankful, apparently unaware of how unfortunate their living situation is.
It was a fantastic experience to provide almost 400 people with food for the day, but it was heartbreaking to see that a society would let people live that way. I am still not sure how to feel about the whole thing. It is important to help desperately impoverished people, but it is confounding to realize that the relief we provide is short term. It is also confusing to think about how the kids feel about their situations. The kids are not consumed with despair as I imagine I would be if I lived in a dump—perhaps it is because they have no other life to compare it to and minimal awareness of how we, in the West, live. Working with the poor really makes me think about my life and life in developed nations in general. What is necessity? What is excess? What is one’s role in society? I live with the privileges of wealth and education in a country that rewards hard work and success; Cambodia just pulled itself out of a civil war and genocide, but still has miles to go to become a meritocracy. What does this have to do with the kids at the dump? I don’t know. But this is where my thoughts have led me, to generic questions minimally provocative and wrought with bourgeois guilt.
Journal #2
Yesterday, Sachit Shah, fellow classmate, and I visited Daughters, an organization that provides former sex workers professional training. Daughters employs about 60 women, mostly ages 17-25, who were trafficked for, or participated in, sex work in Cambodia. The women come to the organization, are trained for 4-6 weeks and then work at sewing, baking or making jewelry. Daughters, a nonprofit organization, sells the products in order to pay the women, staff and teachers; a lot of the sales are through their store, but Daughters hopes to sell specific items requested by retailers. I am working for PEPY, which is another nonprofit that uses revenue generation to support government schools and localized education initiatives. I am trying to help them sell a new product that is made by Daughters, The Hipster.
The Hipster is a moneybelt fashioned from khromas, which are traditional Cambodian scarves. My project with PEPY has three parts: find stores in Phnom Penh that will sell The Hipster, design a website for overseas shoppers and create a sales fulfillment plan for sales to the US. Sach and I are starting to find retailers in Phnom Penh with a little old-fashioned shoe-leather. We spent the first half of today walking around the ex-pat and tourist areas looking for boutiques that might be interested in purchasing the money belt. It was valuable to hear the input from store owners and hear their thoughts on appropriate price points. We received lots of valuable feedback: the money belt is easy to copy (there are no copyright laws or anything here) so we should add a logo; the price might be too high; consignment selling is much preferred to pre-ordering a set amount of Hipsters; there are some minor design flaws.
The other part of the project I am currently working on is the sales fulfillment plan, which centers on our distribution from Cambodia to the US and then to the location of the individual orders. Shipping from Cambodia to the US is no simple task. Finding a reliable exporter who can guarantee making it through customs is tough. I’m not going to bore the people reading this entry (whomever you may be), but we’re doing research on import and export laws and traditional distribution strategies.
Interestingly enough, I was just showing samples to a Cambodian woman here in the coffee shop where I’m working. Her older brother owns the hotel that is attached to the place and her younger brother owns the coffee shop. Anyways, she is very interested in the Hipster and had some good suggestions on selling and the design. She also told me her brother might be willing to help us sell the product here in his shop. Sweet!
Journal #3
I got back to the US three weeks ago and have continued my work from home; I use the word home loosely, as I have been in Washington DC, Delaware, and finally New York. My job here in the US is to help pitch the hipster.
My main role at this point is figuring out how to market the product and where to sell it. I am working with a friend from a PR firm and we have a few strategies. The first step is to build an e-commerce site which is in the works. After that, we are going to reach out to some blog sites as well as some celebrities. I am going to send the product to Angelina Jolie’s stylist (seriously) and convince her to wear it. Her son is from Cambodia and she is involved in a foundation that donates to Cambodian NGOs. It’s kind of ridiculous what these celebrities do. They get paid tens of thousands of dollars to wear a product, and then a weekly trash magazine, like US weekly, puts a picture in the magazine and gets paid to mention the product. Kind of crazy…
Yesterday I shopped the Hipster around to different boutique shops in New York; I don’t think I’m the best salesman in the world. Buffalo Exchange expressed mild interest and gave me the number to headquarters. Everyone else looked sort of confused.
