Cambodia Calling: Visitors from San Francisco

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Visitors from San Francisco

Dale is here to visit Riverkids and her friend, Karen and her 13-year-old stepson, Alex, have come along, visiting Cambodia for the first time. Karen and Alex are from San Francisco and Alex had major culture shock when he first arrived. It is the traffic and the smell of pee when he first got out the airport. The traffic can be intimidating and even traumatic, motocycles everywhere, fighting for space on the roads, together with SUVs (I’ve seen two Hummers in the last month), sedans, cyclos, tuktuks and people. Alan and I took Alex and our two dogs to Hun Sen Park for a run yesterday, afterwhich we walked to our favourite pub, the Happy Phnom Penh Pizza, which has one-for-one draft beer for USD1 during happy hour, half the price of the FCC. Alex was getting stressed by the traffic and was glad to reach the riverside. It was about 6pm, peak hour, and it was not pleasant to cross the main streets at all.

Alex and Karen spent two months in Singapore, living with Jimmy and Dale and their four adopted Cambodian children. They like Singapore (Alex notes Singapore is among the top five wealthiest nations in the world and believes Suntec City to be the world’s largest shopping mall, while Karen admires how clean and well-run the country is). Singapore *is* unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, but some travellers dislike it for precisely that reason, complaining it is bland, like any other city in the world. One guy has described it as “Disneyland with the death penalty”. Singapore is clean and green and I do miss the clean streets where I don’t come across a sanitary towel now and again. It has a convenient public transport system which I miss. I also miss the aircon and tree-lined streets. Alan often remarks how beautiful Phnom Penh could be, just by doing little things, like not allowing cars to park everywhere on the pavements.

Alex is a really sweet kid who spent all morning of his first day in Cambodia taking photos of Riverkids which he will upload on a new blog about his travels. He also has a big heart and went with Dale and Karen to a baby orphanage and plans to return when he is 15 to volunteer at Riverkids for a couple of months.

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THE BLOOM MANIFESTO

1. We believe in the right of all people to a decent life, free of poverty and with access to education

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WHAT IS A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE?

A social enterprise has as its central objective, a social or environmental purpose, and not the obsession with profits. Yes, of course we want to be profitable, but it is so we can hire even more people in unfortunate circumstances, and offer them a shot at a better life, and not because we want to "increase shareholder value" or for the sake of lining our personal pockets. In fact, the only foreign staff (and founder/funder) does not get a salary from Bloom.

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So please, before you ask us to discount our bags, remember that we are not a minimum wage factory; we are a social enterprise. If you want a cheap factory-made bag, Bloom is not what you are looking for. If you agree that workers (where-ever they are--Singapore, Germany, France, the US) should always be paid fairly and are not here to produce goods and services at low wages for the profit of big business, then please consider Bloom. Bloom bags are all hand-made by our small team who spend our working hours dreaming up and making bags.

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WHO WE ARE

Bloom is a social enterprise established in Sept 2006 with the intention of providing fair-paying jobs to abandoned, widowed and divorced Cambodian women. Bloom is not a factory. We are a small workshop of nine people who work closely as a team to produce original, quality handmade bags made from recycled rice and fish feed bags.

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