REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Rachel Louise Snyder
Silk is ubiquitous in Asia. For those of us who live here, it is something of a household staple: cheap, sometimes lovely, but not all that special. When you can buy it for two or three dollars a meter it becomes not just curtains, bedspreads, and pillowcases, but also gift wrapping, wedding invitations, shelf lining.
Chanta's silk is something else entirely. It is soft, where most silk is stiff. The colors are unlike anything I've ever seen, and certainly unlike what you find in the markets around Phnom Penh, Bangkok, or Saigon. They change with the light. In the charcoal gray, you can see blues and yellows; in the reds you see ochres and siennas.
I met Chanta in 2003 after a mutual friend told me that if I wanted to make something special from silk — something that I would carry with me for many years — Chanta was the person to call. Except she had no showroom. She had no catalogue. She had nothing, really, beyond a few contracts from overseas buyers. So one afternoon when she was in Phnom Penh, where I'd recently moved from Chicago, she asked me to meet her at the office of the Volunteer Service Organization.
The VSO was headquartered in a concrete house behind a metal gate with a tiny sign out front. We sat on a cane sofa with stained cushions in an airless, dreary room and she took a dozen or so silk scarves from a glass case. "The VSO lets me use this space," she told me. I didn't know what the VSO was. I didn't understand that Mekong Blue was much larger than this tiny little case, and I didn't know what Chanta had to do with VSO (I would find out later that she had a part-time job there) or what VSO had to do with Mekong Blue. It all seemed confusing, and a little sketchy.
But those few samples sold me. There was a dramatic, dynamic color I'd never seen before. I had her make me a bedspread. Then pillows. Then curtains. Then later, a few more pillows, and scarves. Eventually she moved beyond selling to expats like me.
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“I don't see myself as a savior or a chief or a director, because we help each other. I want to help other women to have a life like me.”
— Chanta Nguon, CEO, Mekong Blue
What I found interesting about her then, and what I learned from spending time with her in Stung Treng, was how she lived partly within her own business, within the making of her own dream, and partly within the world of foreigners and foreign aid so omnipresent in Cambodia. She spoke nearly perfect English, with a hint of a French accent, yet she'd never left Asia. She was elegantly soignée, with an authenticity that seemed implausible given that her formative years were spent either in a vegetable stall in Vietnam with her mother, or in a refugee camp with her husband. She smoked cigarettes with the nonchalant chic of an Ingrid Bergman. She was different than anyone I'd heard about in Cambodia, and certainly anyone I'd met.
When Chanta described Mekong Blue and the Stung Treng Women's Development Center, it sometimes sounded like a conventional business and other times like a nongovernmental organization. In Cambodia, there are thousands of registered NGOs — from 2,000 to 6,000, depending on your sources. Cambodia is commonly referred to as a beggar country, both by Cambodians and foreigners. It receives more than a billion dollars in aid every year from foreign governments and charities. With the exception of the garment industry, which makes clothing for Gap, Levi's, H & M, Adidas, Anne Taylor, Wal-mart and other western retailers (garments are 85% of the country's exports), there is almost no private manufacturing in this country. But the charity sector is booming.
Many of the charities do astoundingly good work. Others are wholly ineffectual. But there is an expectation of aid among the populace here that I've never witnessed anywhere else. Cambodian college students typically don't aspire to be doctors or lawyers or teachers; they aspire to be program officers for aid groups. It's as if aid were the end of the professional line in their country, not the beginning. As if aid, in itself, were the objective, rather than independence from aid. That this is a professional aspiration seems to me economically disastrous in the long run. What is missing is that crucial step between aid and private enterprise.
This is where I think Chanta has a real opportunity. Despite its remote location, Mekong Blue has all the makings of a successful private business. It has loyal international buyers eager to increase their orders, relatively dependable employees with a larger labor pool at hand, little to no negative environmental impact, and a strong sense of corporate social responsibility. But legally, SWDC is an NGO. It began with grants and continues to seek them.
“I don't see myself as a savior or a chief or a director, because we help each other. I want to help other women to have a life like me.” — Chanta Nguon, CEO, Mekong Blue
As I reported this story, I came to think that Chanta would be more successful if she ran Mekong Blue as a proper business. She has a growing and dependable customer base. Writing grant applications is labor intensive, and the money is never guaranteed from year to year. Why, I wondered, had she held onto the non-profit model?
I asked her this question over and over while I was in Stung Treng. Why not a business? Why an NGO? In a country where NGOs probably outnumber graduate students, why not be a model of the future? Of a time when economic sustainability could come from within, rather than from outside?
The answer came fitfully, over the course of a few days. First, I learned, this was the world that Chanta and Chan knew. They had spent their professional lives in and around NGOs, first in a refugee camp with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), then in Stung Treng with MSF and eventually with VSO.
But there was another, larger reason. Although the local government and the governor (who paid a visit while I was there) appreciate what Chanta is trying to accomplish, and stand up for her when the need arises, Chanta fears that the cost of running a proper business would just be too high. The cost, that is, of extortion and corruption. Of living in a country where the rules change with the political winds, and where people live in abject fear of those in power. A country with no Better Business Bureau, no meaningful consumer protections, no insurance against things going terribly wrong.
What Chanta fears for her business is ultimately what all Cambodians fear for themselves, for their families, for their livelihoods: the cost of living in a country with no rule of law. In this the Cambodian government has unwittingly done many NGOs a great service. It has made the country a customer for life.
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