March
21, 2013
Breakfast consisted of our new usual: a Poptart and
malria meds. We missed the bakery
in Auroville, but not the beds and showers. I launched right into editing, and Mouhsine and Minh had a
lot of work to do, so the four of us chilled in the room swapping internet time
as each of us needed it.
We had a noontime stove demonstration to film with
Mouhsine, so Matt and I headed for an early lunch at the restaurant that we had
our St. Patrick’s Day celebration in on the first night. I had some noodles and veggies, and
Matt decided to try out a Cambodian pancake. Imagine a giant, very thin omelet stuff with chopped ramen
noodles, ground beef and onions with a sweet spring roll-type sauce. It was actually pretty amazing, but
didn’t fill the syrupy-American-pancake-sized hole in Matt’s stomach.
Matt dropped me off at the hotel to edit and met
Mouhsine down in the lobby to head for a local restaurant where the stove
conference had set up a competition between the companies that were
attending. It was set up so that
they would all bring their stoves, and the cooks at the restaurant would see
them all in action and fill out surveys on them and write down how much they
would pay for each of them. It
sounded like the perfect thing to fill out our story for the clean cooking
stove forum in Phnom Penh. Not
much had really happened yet, so some friendly competition seemed like a good
thing.
Next thing I knew, Matt and Mouhsine were walking
back into the hotel room. It
hadn’t been twenty minutes. I told
them that I thought that was a pretty quick stove demonstration and was told
that it wasn’t something Prakti was interested in participating in. It would be one thing if it were just
the local people judging the Prakti stove, but Mouhsine felt like he would be
handing over two years worth of research and development to competing stove
companies, and felt like that wasn’t worth the information they would gather
from the locals. Apparently, there was quite the confrontation in a tuk-tuk
which ended civilly, but with Mouhsine and Matt on the return journey back to
the hotel.
It raised questions for Matt and I about the idea
of social business. Social
business is a relatively new term that describes a company that is set-up as
for profit, but provides a product or service to tackled a social issue. The values of the company are set in
such a way that it makes decisions based off of both profit and the social
impact – sometimes decisions that are in direct conflict with one another. Also, as a for-profit business, there
are other companies that are working toward solving the same social issue, but
depending on how and where those companies are operating, you wouldn’t want to
help them out with any developments you’ve made that could hurt your own
profits.
So, with the clean cooking stove forum, they’ve
brought together all these for-profit companies to work toward better
solutions, then run into conflicts between them because companies are
recruiting passionate workers from other companies and also wanting to hide
their trade secrets, but collect more information that others have figured out
with distribution and things of the like.
It seems like a nice idea to hold a forum like this, but from my point
of view (which holds little weight as an out-of-industry observer) this might
not be the best possible way to do it.
Or maybe the for-profit side is what would need to change.
Unreasonable holds the belief that only for-profit
business is the solution to the world’s problems. If people don’t make changing the world their day job, it’ll
always be second priority. Hanging
out with Unreasonable for so long and getting so deep into their program, I
can’t help but agree, but after seeing the stove forum conflicts, I’m thinking
it can’t be as hunky dorey as its made out to be. It’s great to work together until you start giving away
profits. The business world is a
complicatedly simple place.
Minh, Mouhsine, Matt and I continued our work day
in the hotel until the conference-wide stove demos happened at 4pm. This was set up so that people could
show off their technologies to one another at the conference. No locals were involved. Prakti decided to participate, but not
light up their stoves.
Matt headed out to film and found all kinds of
characters: characters in the variety of stove technologies, but also the
people who created them. Lots of
geeking out which made for cute video.
A couple stoves were malfunctioning, so we got some hilarious smoke
shots, and one stove, which used the heat energy to light an LED bulb, was
destroyed on camera by the demonstrator.
“Aw jeeze,” the demonstrator said quietly, “I’ve destroyed it. Yep, it’s destroyed.” He held it out on camera and it was a
little melted. Oh, stoves.
Matt and I had found ourselves affected by the
street food we’d been enjoying, so we decided to play it safe for dinner and
walk down to the pizza place near where we found out tool kit a few days
earlier. It was a welcome walk
after a long day of sitting and editing for me.
We ordered up the super bacon delight pizza, the
seafood cocktail pizza and some onion rings for a healthy change. Our entertainment while we ate was
watching the locals at the salad bar.
There were little soup bowls provided at a salad buffet, and the locals
would stand up iceberg lettuce around the edges, then begin loading the middle
with veggies and noodles, then stick long carrots on the outside to support the
lettuce. They would build up the
salad until it was three times taller than the bowl that it was in, then
carefully walk to their tables where they would serve a five-persona family
with the salad. We thought maybe
you pay $4.50 and only get one run through the salad bar, and that’s why they
had to make such epic salads. Or,
there’s some local competition and it’s all about showing off. Either way, it’s impressive.
With very full, greasy tummies we walked back to
the hotel to keep on editing. Matt
and Mouhsine stayed up until about 2am working away, and I faded out to wake up
early and finish the edit in the morning.
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