I immersed - and I loved it!

by Shuchi Vyas (United States of America)

Making a local connection Cambodia

In 2015, I spent a month in Siem Reap, Cambodia with Build Your Future Today (BFT), a nonprofit started by a former Khmer Rouge prisoner, Sedtha Long, a passionate leader. BFT uplifts communities around the Angkor temples. I helped build a fundraising and communications plan. I ventured to the field and learned about their program, and immersed - something I felt was missing in my former nonprofit roles. During a visit to a remote BFT village, a large number of kids had developed skin infections. A volunteer nurse, Katrina, pulled out her supplies and started treating them right away. At the end of that week, Katrina came into the BFT office distraught. Those kids and about half of those in other BFT village schools had developed impetigo, a highly contagious skin infection. The weather was unbearably hot and they sat huddled together on school benches, there was a risk of it rapidly spreading to all the kids. "I need soap," she announced. Well, how much? A LOT. At least a bar for each kid in all the villages. That is about 200 kids in a dozen schools, so 2,500 bars of soap to start and then a monthly refill for… forever. The aim was to inculcate the habit of using soap to prevent this from happening again. Since they came from poor families, washing with soap was an added expense, a luxury. The villages were a few hours outside Siem Reap, along dirt roads . They were also 25 miles from the nearest health center, which meant in case it got worse, getting care was going to be a difficult process. While BFT actively provided health education, including hygiene, it was going to take time for the message to turn into action. Being from the 'international development field', I read and spoke about hygiene challenges in the developing world, and grants available to mitigate them, but never imagined myself faced with this problem first hand. Who was going to give us a grant, and quickly? I dropped everything to find soap. Other volunteers at the time were working on projects that they abandoned. I had a plan: We would contact local hotels for soap donations or funds. Siem Reap was a small town with many tourists, surely we would be able to get soap. I would also start reaching out to organizations that made soap donations. We got started, but to no avail. The organizations were based overseas and shipping costs were astronomical. Many organizations did not respond. Volunteers that had gone to the hotels had little to no response. It was off-peak season, so they did not even have discarded soaps, and there were hardly any tourists to appeal to around town. Meanwhile, Katrina was figuring out remedies. I spent a Saturday volunteering with Touch a Life Foundation, a one-person operation run from the founder, Mavis Ching's home. She prepared, packaged and delivered meals to the poorest of the poor living around the temples. Upon finishing the day's tasks, I mentioned our impetigo problem and Mavis was quick to pull out much soap from her home. Eventually she would end up collecting more soap for us by rounding up her friends in town. This was our first soap donation that would help us begin with the most affected. At a talk in town, I met a woman from an NGO and mentioned the impetigo problem, since at this point I was obsessed. She immediately offered to connect me to an organization called Eco Soap Bank, the vision of talented young folks aimed at serving organizations in situations like ours. And they were based IN Siem Reap, which meant the soap was also IN Siem Reap. How I hadn't come across them on my own during my online searches, only the SEO Gods know. Within three days we had been connected and we filled a tuk-tuk and the soap was eventually transported to the schools. After I left Siem Reap, John, one of the volunteers, wrote to me about the several next batches that had been transported. Slowly, together we were eradicating this terrible disease… with a potentially bottomless supply of soap. Yes, someone was going to give us a grant, quickly!