Expats and Do-Gooders

One of our goals as project mentors is to be evangelists for SEALNet and use our time here to build relationships with people in the community. While the project leaders focus on their particular mission we have taken it on ourselves to try to talk about the broader goals of the SEALNet organization. We are looking for sponsors or people who may be able to assist in the future. We also want to see who is doing what here as possible partners for future projects. It's a lot of fun, we just get introduced to the most interesting people in town and talk to them about what SEALNet does, what our project is doing and hear about their organization and what it's like to work in the region.

There’s probably no more than two degrees of separation between any two foreign residents of Cambodia. As we met one person, they would offer to introduce us to someone else. Even if those two people only met one it would be enough to arrange a meeting.

Christy works for the social entrepreneur group Hagar. Their office is located in the Swiss consulate because the founder is also the Swiss Consular to Cambodia. Christy, an American, met him while working for the UN in Switzerland and she has been with the group for two months now. They take sex workers and abused women and give them employable skills. First they train them in how to be an employee with things like the importance of being on time and showing up to work regularly. They also have a number of enterprises they can work for to earn a livable wage. Their flagship program is a catering business that serves five star hotels. Their profits are funneled back into the training programs, shelters and medical care. After five years of operation they are already planning on expanding to Thailand, Afghanistan and Laos. We had a great conversation about social entrepreneurship, the different models of it out there and the difficulties in implementing an experimental model.

Directly from Hagar we went over to the Scan Hotel, which is where I had stayed last year. On that previous visit I had briefly met with the owner Eric, who seems to know a lot of the interesting people of Phnom Penh. He’s also the one who introduced me to temple painting. His hotel is really cool with art all over the place and cool professional clientele. He seemed genuinely interested in what we are trying to accomplish and eager to help however he can. He will try to get us meetings with potential resources, I am hoping he will hook us up with a killer deal on next ear’s project.