Omprakash, East Asia

Hello from Southeast Asia! We’ve been on the road for nearly 3 weeks now and are having a great experience. Southeast Asia is a wonderful region to travel through, and working here is just as much fun.

Karla and I have been busy. We began our work in Cambodia – Siem Reap, to be exact. This town, home to the Angkor temple complex, also houses a multitude of organizations working with various marginalized groups, including girls and women, street children, and slum communities. We met with a  number of Omprakash partners here. All are doing outstanding work, each
provided us with useful feedback on their relationship with Omprakash.

After Cambodia, we flew back to Bangkok and immediately hopped an overnight train to Northern Thailand. We spent time in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, meeting with partners here who work with children and communities who deal with problems related to human trafficking.

In addition to meeting with existing partners to conduct quality control, we have focused heavily on helping Omprakash formulate a strategic plan for partnership outreach. Our plan has been to focus on utilizing “trusted networks” as mentioned in my previous blog. This includes making use
of our Monterey Institute network, developing partnerships with funding organizations such as Firelight Foundation, and connecting with larger development orgs like the Peace Corps. Through these connections we have reached out to contacts in roughly 35 countries, and perhaps more
through forwards.

We have also conducted some face-to-face outreach while here on the ground. We’ve met with a number of local organizations here, both in Cambodia and Thailand. The meetings have gone well and some of those potential partner orgs have even told us they’d forward the message on to others. We are now in Yangon, Myanmar and are looking to do more outreach here as Omprakash
doesn’t have any partners in Myanmar as of today. We have a great contact on the ground here who’s helping us reach a number of local orgs. Myanmar is an exciting place to be. It’s one of the fastest growing destinations for tourists and will likely become a hotspot for volunteerism as well, as the country continues to open itself to the outside world and visa restrictions relax.

Needless to say, it’s been a crazy ride. We’ve had a number of sleep-deprived nights and intense transportation experiences, including packing 8 people in a small Toyota taxi for 3 hours (during which the driver was sharing his seat with a passenger), sardine-packed minivan rides, pothole stricken
and flooded roads, and a flight on a propeller plane painted like a pink bird. There have been a number of communication mishaps, which are (of course) to be expected when traveling to remote regions. We’ve also happened upon some great local experiences, including meeting our tuk-tuk driver’s family in rural Cambodia and sharing a fresh coconut with them as well as being
guests during a primary school class in a floating village.

Though we’ve nearly finished our time here, we are looking forward to fun and productive last week. We’re hoping that we can establish some important connections so that Omprakash can begin working with Burmese organizations in the near future. It’s also exciting for us to have the chance to visit this interesting country before everyone else finds out how beautiful it is.