Just the Beginning

My name is Philippe Morel and I studied Asian Studies and Japanese at the University of British Columbia. I graduated in 2010 and spent the last two years living, volunteering, and working in the Philippines and Vietnam. I didn’t become interested in microfinance until I went to Vietnam and so while I was working there as an English teacher I decided to get involved with a microfinance NGO as a volunteer. The NGO is called Microfinance and Community Development Institute and I will write more about them and the microfinance situation in Vietnam in the following posts. I want to use this blog as a place to show some of my research and get some feedback from other people who are into this kind of stuff.

While I was living in Vietnam I used to wake up every day at six AM and start my day with my own “Vietnamese” breakfast (I thought it was real good) and talk to my girlfriend over Skype. I would then take the bus up to West Lake to volunteer. This is an approximation of what it was like getting to “work” every morning.

The alleyway that led to the maze of smaller alleyways which eventually lead to the office was surrounded by dog restaurants. I have mixed feelings about eating dogs but seeing all those hacked carcasses of dogs displayed on the street was kind of a crappy way to start the morning. The older Vietnamese guys enjoying their dog stews and washing it down with some vodka would at least give me a wave as I walked past. I would then “work” at the office for a few hours and leave after lunch (which they so kindly provided for me). I would then head to my other workplace and prepare my English lessons for my evening classes. I would also intersperse this with meeting some nice Vietnamese ladies to practice my Vietnamese. That was my Monday to Friday and then I had a full day of kid’s classes on Saturday and Sunday which made everything else in my life seem easy. I don’t know how kindergarten teachers can do this day in and day out. All in all it was a tough schedule

I was brought into MACDI to help them develop microfinance based tourism program. I wrote another article about that here. I helped them make some marketing tools and translated them into Japanese but there really wasn't enough work for me to do. I spent most of my time researching about microfinance on the internet. I thought that even if they didn't give me a lot of work to do I wasn't going to waste my time. There was apparently though a misunderstanding between my boss at MACDI and I and she thought I was insufferably lazy for not accomplishing enough. I didn’t even know what work I was supposed to be doing and so we stayed at this impasse, unable to bridge the gap. During a night of drinking I let my English flat-mate convince me that the volunteering was a waste of time and so I quit the next day.

I do regret not having a successful volunteers-ship but these things happen. I volunteered in the Philippines for 8 months and met scores of other volunteers while I was there. Idealism can easily be squashed while volunteering at a typical NGO. The problem is that most NGOs are continually strapped for cash and their employees are over-worked. They always want volunteers to help with the workload but the adventurous volunteer who wanted to deliver 30 babies a day out in the slums of Mumbai will probably get stuck doing photocopying for a good 4 hours a day. That’s just how it works. *A note on volunteering: Avoid those companies that require you to pay them for the opportunity to volunteer. It’s a scam.

MACDI itself is a great microfinance institute working hard within the binding constraints of the Vietnamese regulatory framework. I will write more about them later. I found a video from the BBC and the lady they talk to who (even if the BBC offers no explanation of who she is) was my boss. She’s a very capable lady, very competent. I’ll leave it at that.