Interview with Mr Meas Nee, Village Focus, Cambodia

'Restoring life in villages is like working with a computer. To install a new programme, you have to understand the capacity of the software.'

Meas Nee is director of the Cambodian organisation Village Focus. His organisation focuses on indigenous people and cultural preservation.

Meas Nee has always been intrigued by social cohesion in rural communities. ‘I was born in a small village (300 people) in the southeast of Cambodia, near the border with Vietnam and the Ho Chi Ming trail. The Vietcong was visible there, and after the war it left a structure that was weak.’

Shortly after the war Pol Pot came into power. ‘I lived in the town through the entire ordeal. After the regime, there was no social structure left in my village or anywhere else in Cambodia. In that regard Cambodia differs from the other countries in Southeast Asia. Every institution of society had to be restarted but the people were still passive in the beginning. I decided to write a book about it.’

His first book titled: ‘Towards restoring life in Cambodian Villages’, and was published in 1995. ‘You cannot easily change the damage caused by the war, or caused by the systematic breaking of relationships, or the loss of dignity. That is the focus in my first book. The subject has been on my mind ever since. So in fact I’ve been reading and thinking about Civic Driven Change long before this programme with Context came into being.’

In July 2009 he implemented the case study in Cambodia, during a workshop with about 30 people. ‘We worked in small groups of people. We discussed a lot, not only in classes, but also during the evening. We were located in a very rural area and stayed in small huts. During the days we walked across the rice fields. I experienced that it was fruitful to stay with them. People now trust us more.’

‘The workshop doesn’t provide citizens an incentive. But it does rearrange their village history. It’s important to let people tell their story. If people learn to tell their history, they can look at the future.’

Mr Nee gives an example of what happened after the Action Learning Case Study. ‘Shortly after the workshop one of the committee members called. He told me that the citizens tried to get an official title on their land. That’s important, because sometimes they left their land unused and asked the government for more land. Now they try to resolve their own problem by making the land more productive. They are more actively involved in their own community.’