Michael Short: Bronwyn Stephens, hello.
Bronwyn Stephens: Hello Michael.
MS: Welcome to The Zone. Thank you very much for your time. This is an unusual instalment of The Zone; it is the first time that I have ever followed up on something so directly, and in this case it is a very special follow up because I went with you and some of your collaborators for two weeks to Cambodia in September, and I thank you and Rotary for facilitating that for me.
The follow-up is to a Zone we did last year with Rithy Lay, whose family was slaughtered during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and has, after being raised by Buddhist monks, sought to help rebuild his country. He is doing it in some very practical ways, and you are involved in that. Let's start at the beginning, please. How did you come to be involved, and how did you come to have this passion for helping out over there?
BS: As a Rotarian, I was involved in leading a schoolies alternative tour to Cambodia, and Rithy was our guide. On the last day of the tour, Rithy invited me to come with him to a community that he had become involved in through being an interpreter for a telecommunications company. The people there were in a desperate situation and he needed help from others, financial help to assist them.
MS: This is the village of Bosalla.
BS: Correct.
MS: Can you describe the desperate situation that he and then you found there?
BS: When he first went there, he found people dying of cholera and typhoid fever. There were people with dengue fever and secondary pneumonia. When he took me down, there had been people that had died the week before, and they were really all in a pitiful situation.
There were people starving. There were people close to death with terrible diseases. I was due to return to Australia the next day in preparation for Christmas, so the contrast to being in that situation in Cambodia in a village where people are unable to help themselves and then coming back to the tinsel and glitter of a Melbourne Christmas was quite profound.
MS: I want to talk a little bit in a moment about World of Difference, but let's follow up on some of the stuff with Bosalla that you were just talking about. People should know also that you are a very experienced nurse, so the medical situation there was something you had insight into and you could see that things could be done. What has happened?
BS: Initially we came back to Australia and involved our rotary club and started sending emergency food aid. This was required for 12 months. While that food aid was being provided, we put in water systems, we provided dams for irrigation, safe drinking water through filtration, agricultural training and basic medications.
Now, 2 1/2 years later, the people have not had emergency food for about 18 months and they are happy and healthy growing their crops and having safe drinking water. The people have not got cholera and typhoid fever. They do still get malaria, but we provide mosquito nets and that has reduced it a lot.
MS: I, as I said in the introduction, spent a couple of weeks over there in Cambodia and the first week was predominantly down in this village about which you speak. Another thing that has happened there, and it has just opened, is the school. Can you talk a little bit please Bronwyn about that element of the work that has been done?
BS: In the community of Bosalla and surrounding villages there are 500 children. For them to attend school it is about a 15 km journey over the rice fields or a dusty potholed road. They have precious little to eat anyway, and drink, so to travel that far to school walking is impossible. All of those 500 children are illiterate, as are the adults.
So we felt as a secondary measure, after they were happy and healthy, too then educate the children. Using the collaborative efforts of Rotarians and other people, we were able to raise the money to build the school. It opened on 1 November with 500 children attending.
MS: We will point people to the website and Facebook page, where they can have a look at the evidence. I have enjoyed only this very morning looking at the video of the school in action. Can you talk a little bit about World of Difference and the financing of the projects – how much you've spent, what you're doing over there, and from that, too, could you then tell people who might be interested in helping you or being involved how they can do that?
BS: Certainly. The thing that Rotary enables is for people to join the organisation and take an idea to the club, and if that is embraced by the club and other clubs it can become something like World of Difference, which is a project which takes people to a developing country, shows them well-run projects they can get involved in helping, but also shows grassroots areas of need, such as Bosalla, where they can really make a difference.
It works very well as a schoolies alternative trip for students. It works very well for a community group of friends or colleagues. We took a group of ophthalmologists for example, who did sight testing. But being a Rotary project, it is totally administered by volunteers. There are no paid staff and it is truly a volunteering project.
MS: How much has been spent?
PS: In Bosalla around $200,000 from the initial emergency food aid through to digging three dams, providing all of the agricultural equipment, a few homes, and now we are in a global grants situation where $130,000 is going to finish that community off by providing economic measures including silk weaving, mushroom farming, pig farming and, of course, teacher training and some student supplies for the school.
MS: How many people, you mentioned Bosalla and surrounding villages, and there is the school and the other elements, how many people have been helped?
BS: 800. That is the total. Cambodia is in an unusual situation because of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge - most people in the population are children and young people. That is why it is so weighted: 500 children within a community of 800 people. I guess, Michael, I should also say that when we first went to that community the average life expectancy was only 45 years of age and half of the babies died at birth. There were no people with any literacy skills.
MS: What are the changes now? I was struck when you and I walked alone through the village across the river and you had not been there for some time and you were doing what was effectively a medical round of the village. And I remember the look on your face and the smiles that you had and the pleasure that you had at not encountering the degree of illness and medical difficulty that you thought you might.
BS: Yes. That community across the river is sometimes inaccessible because there is no bridge spanning the river and I have actually only been there twice before. The first time, really every person was terribly unwell and we had to take six of them to hospital. They were really at death's door.
So to now find them well was very gratifying, because over the times that I have been visiting Cambodia I have gradually taught a local guy to administer medications basically from a protocol that Australian and Cambodian doctors wrote for me and he now is keeping those people healthy. I was just delighted to find that that training has been effective and the contrast over those 2 1/2 years is just amazing.
MS: The biggest barrier to development in Cambodia, the biggest barrier to change in Cambodia, is corruption. It is everywhere, as you know. What has been your experience of corruption?
BS: I find it interesting how easily I actually just accept it. It is just so pervasive in every transaction that you make, be it negotiating at the market for a loaf of bread or paying a taxi driver through to even just relationships with people in the village. It is just accepted, and I don't find myself thinking too much about it, because it is just such a part of life there that you have to almost collude with it at the moment. I do believe that education of the young people will change it in their generation. They are not so accepting of it, and the ones that go to school are becoming educated into the ways of the world.
So I have got hope that this generation may be the start of the end of corruption. But at the moment we just have to work with that. I try very hard to drop down underneath the layer of bureaucracy, NGOs and the government. We just worked directly in the communities and try to bypass those other layers, because that is where you can get very caught up in corruption and pay a lot of money in bribes.
MS: So you have not encountered it at the institutional level. It is more at the cultural level and it is a barrier but not an insurmountable barrier, obviously from what you've been saying earlier, to getting stuff done?
BS: At the local level it is more a negotiation, in a way. It is an extension of that barter process that is throughout Asia. I did encounter it twice. Twice we sent shipping containers with Australian donations to Cambodia, and it cost as much in what they call 'tea money' as it did in shipping costs. So we have actually abandoned any future plans at the moment for shipping containers.
MS: It has obviously been a learning process for you and your collaborators, of which there have been many from around Melbourne, including doctors and teachers and others. It has been an interesting learning process getting stuff done.
BS: Yes. We are very fortunate that Rithy is really on the ground with our best interests at heart in Cambodia, because culturally I think it is very difficult for Westerners to do anything very effective over there if they are trying to deal directly with businesses and government institutions. Rithy bypasses all of those problems for us.
MS: Do you ever get concerned in any way that by, as you put it, colluding with this situation at the level that you need to get things done that that might in some way contribute to or perpetuate the problem?
BS: I guess, yes it can, but the alternative is unthinkable because the alternative is not to help. That is just not possible. We have a moral responsibility to help one of the poorest countries of the world and their citizens. And if that means colluding a little and paying a little more for things, I guess I just do it.
MS: Speaking of doing it, there is an expression associated with this that if you have done well, do good. And one could add that even if you haven't done so well, do good anyway - because you get more out of it than you put into it, so it is enlightened self-interest. And this goes back to people helping you, and your schoolies alternative, which is a great thing for young people. But do you want to talk a little bit, Bronwyn please, about that notion of relativity, that we really are privileged and have already won the lottery just by being born here?
BS: We sure have. We are the luckiest world citizens to be born in Australia, and I think that with that comes responsibility to not ignore other world citizens and if we have got the wherewithal and capability to help in any way, we should. People say to me sometimes there will be another village around the corner, why are you busting your boiler to help when there will just be another one? I do not think that is a reason not to help, and if you can help one person it is better than helping no-one. We do have a big responsibility.
MS: How did you feel when we were over there together at the time that Australia did the deal with Cambodia on asylum seekers?
BS: I find it a really complicated issue. Certainly, Cambodia is ill-equipped to look after even its own citizens. It has no systems. It has no order in society. It has only got to rain a small amount and Phnom Penh is completely flooded and that is the capital city. So why they should or could take responsibility for other world citizens, I just have no idea.
MS: It was a bit jarring, wasn't it; at least I found it very jarring to have one of the wealthiest countries in the world doing a deal with one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world to handpass some of the most marginalised, desperate and vulnerable people in the world. It just did not feel right.
BS: Cambodia is pretty pleased though, because they will get 1 million dollars per person sent there. So they have got an incentive, haven't they, and it is quite outrageous.
MS: It is, and I think Australians and taxpayers should feel that it is not a particularly efficient and effective use of funds, let alone a humane and ethical one.
BS: Our taxes at work.
MS: One of the things I find interesting to hear people talk about, and it is really apposite to what you have been doing with World of Difference, is the notion of turning points in life. One can identify, with hindsight, turning points sometimes and sometimes one can fill them arrive; you know, you can feel something happening and you can help create an opportunity. Can you talk a little bit in this context about a turning point or turning points in your life?
PS: Well, most certainly Rithy introducing me to the people in Bosalla was a turning point in my life. I had been to Cambodia before, I had been president of our Rotary club, and I thought that I was committed to helping other world citizens, but until I actually met the people in Bosalla and saw their plight, I really didn't know what helping was all about. And when I came home all I could do was cry.
I kept talking with Mark, my husband, and it was just on my mind totally. So it was a turning point, and I guess in the last 2 1/2 years since I met the people in Bosalla it just consumes me. Every time I look in a shop window I think about the people there - and they are not so far away, only an eight hour flight away - and how they live.
MS: That turning point came after another turning point, because you had spent a career in the medical world, entrepreneurially and giving care to people in our community. And you did well out of it. And then that stopped. Can you talk about that turning point?
BS: My husband and I ran a small hospital in Cheltenham that offers day surgery to patients. And I was trying to reduce my hours from 60 a week down to more like 30 hours and just become a clinical nurse again instead of running the business. Unfortunately I stuffed it up completely and ended up walking away from the business that we had built up and had been my life really for 12 years.
There was a lot of grief, and I was quite in a situation where I had lost my definition in my life, I guess. I just didn't have a reason to get up in the morning. And it was only a couple of months later that I found myself in Bosalla. It is just amazing how life's twists and turns are unpredictable but seem to happen at the right time sometimes.
MS: Do you think it was meant to happen?
BS: Yes.
MS: Do you believe in destiny?
BS: Yes, and I'm a Christian and I believe that I was put in that place at that time. Because if I had been put in that place 12 months earlier, with my career the way it was and my other life commitments, I don't think that I would have actually experienced it the way that I did. I may have been able to walk away from it. But perhaps because I was in a different headspace I responded to it.
MS: And you needed it; you were lacking purpose.
BS: Yes, I was. And I would add that perhaps it has given me a lot more pleasure and definition than I have been able to give in Cambodia.
MS: That is the thing that so many people have said to me in The Zone. And I have experienced myself the same idea by getting involved. It is very sustaining and nourishing and works for everybody when it works properly.
PS: I wholeheartedly agree and you meet some very good people along the way.
MS: There was a really interesting group when we were there together and I could see and feel the benefit to them and the benefit that they were providing to others. Do you find it hard to sort of keep it all together with different people coming in and out, or do they all actually add up to something that is giving it momentum?
BS: Sometimes things start and are wonderful - such as Sue with her sewing machines, donating them in the village community and teaching the ladies to sew. They are now embracing another project called Days For Girls, which is wonderful. Sometimes people come in and try things and they are perhaps not really suitable and they just drift away, but at least they have had a go.
But it is just lovely to be a facilitator to connect people from Australia with communities in Cambodia and to see where it leads. Rob has just come back from leading a schoolies alternative trip. He came to Cambodia two years ago, and this is his third trip back and now he is a tour leader. Things like that are very gratifying.
MS: What is the hardest thing you have ever had to do?
PS: I knew you were going to ask this question Michael, and I have thought about it long and hard and I think that there have been hard things and I could perhaps identify them. But really life is a joy, and I would prefer not to talk about the hard things.
MS: That is a great answer, and is a very valid answer. There is no wrong answer to that question. And it is a hard question, I acknowledge. Bronwyn, I wish you very, very well. And I thank you again for the things you have given me in terms of experience and understanding.
BS: Thank you so much Michael.
