one country, hundreds of governments

On the first Friday night of each month hundreds of expats (i.e., white people) assemble in a bar named "Elsewhere" to drink and carouse and be seen. In any western city, the scene would be completely unremarkable, a typical gathering of 20- and 30-somethings looking for escape/entertainment/sex/love via the usual social lubricant: alcohol.

But the party is very remarkable, because Elsewhere is not in New York. It is in Phnom Penh -- which must be the NGO capital of Southeast Asia. Nearly everyone at the party is, in some way or another, probably living in Cambodia to try and do good. Watching do-gooders flirt and drink and then jump into and couple in a bar-side pool is odd, to say the least. But when it's all happening in a swank French colonial-style house with a plush yard protected by high walls, and when virtually all the Cambodians in sight are moto-taxi drivers standing just outside the property's gates, the scene grows surreal, even shocking.

It is an informal NGO industry party, a collective release (both therapeutic and indulgent) by a small army of people who must be very frustrated by their line of work. I know I would be.

Name an NGO, it's here: from World Vision International to the World Health Organization to the World Wildlife Federation, from Norwegian People's Aid to Kampuchea for Christ International. Every member of the "UN Family" is represented here, all part of the world's biggest bureaucracy. Hundreds of local and international NGOs you've never heard of compete with missionary zeal (some literally) to remake this broken land, "building capacity" by empowering "local stakeholders." Hundreds of young, educated and unattached westerners move to Cambodia to donate their time to help this country shed its awful recent history.

The only silver lining to thirty years of war is an endless stream of donations flowing into a country that, thanks to the Khmer Rouge and the film "The Killing Fields," has nearly become synonymous with genocide, poverty and "a good cause." Cambodia is full of the world's do-gooders.

It was odd to realize - in Sri Lanka, just after the December 2004 tsunami - that charitable development is an organized industry like any other. Competition for funding is intense and the services provided to the needy must be packaged and sold to donors -- who effectively act as customers buying a product (new primary schools, AIDS prevention, cleft lip operations) they can trust.

To borrow corporate language to describe NGOs is not to denigrate their value. It's only to recognize how NGOs halfway around the world from Americans - who will probably never visit Cambodia - bridge the distance to ensure their survival. Without stable income, how can any organization complete its mission?

But often I wish all of Cambodia's foreign NGOs would lower their overhead costs by pooling their budgets and programs together. Centralized, coordinated infrastructure building! No redundant programs, needless competition and unseemly flag waving! But wait a second - that would essentially turn the NGOs into...a government. And Cambodia already has one of those, and it barely functions.  

The Cambodian government can't stand on its own. Wandering Phnom Penh's quiet streets south of Sihanouk Boulevard, which are lined with the signage of NGO headquarters, it's easy to remember that 50% of the Kingdom of Cambodia's annual budget is provided by foreign governments and international donors such as the World Bank. And it's easy to think that Cambodia has not one government, but hundreds - that each NGO functions as a tiny fiefdom offering piecemeal salves to a people who rarely feel the presence of their country's official government.