The more she pursued her mission in life - to reach out to others - the less she began to spend on herself. Daniela Papi tells Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary how getting involved with charity helped her distinguish between imperatives and indulgences.
Daniela Papi counts every penny she spends on herself. She prefers living in Siem Reap province, Cambodia, than in New York, her original home.
When she wants to treat herself to a manicure or a pedicure, she visits a modest parlour in Siem Reap where for the equivalent of Dh10 she gets roughly the same services she would if she paid five times the sum at a high-end beauty salon in Manhattan.
She'd sooner opt for riding a bicycle than driving a car and quite enjoys grabbing a bite from a small roadside restaurant than spend a lot of money and time on a sumptuous three-course lunch at a posh restaurant. It's not because Papi is a miser or can ill afford an expensive lifestyle.
She opted for this new lifestyle after she spent five years in the Far East where she realised the value of every dirham and how even a small sum could make a huge difference in meeting the educational, clothing or housing needs of the poor.
“My experiences helped me get a reality check on life. Today, I think twice before splashing $700 on dinner because I know that that kind of money would be enough to run a teacher's training programme in Cambodia for three months! As a child, I felt I had way too many clothes in my closet, complained the loudest when for instance the air-conditioning was not cool enough. But now I know my place in the scheme of things and the power [one has] to effect change,'' says Papi.
Papi was in Dubai recently to raise money in tandem with the Dubai Cares Foundation. The foundation has been helping Papi build schools in Cambodia and sending volunteers from the UAE to lend a hand in her innovative project called the PEPY Foundation (Protect Earth and Protect Yourself) in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
The BEE Foundation
An economics graduate from the University of Notre Dame, Papi became interested in reaching out to the less privileged after she signed up with the BEE Foundation to teach the English language to non-native speakers sometime in 2005.
The BEE Foundation (Bicycle for Everyone's Earth) is an innovative environmental project in which volunteers on bicycles ride into the far-flung provinces of Japan to educate people.
Bicycling around various provinces in Japan, she gained valuable insight into the country and its people. She also found that it gave her quite a panoramic view of the people and their living conditions. It was a great way to explore, and she felt she had made a definite contribution teaching English to a host of students in the country.
After her month with BEE, Papi decided to take the concept to Cambodia as well. Accompanied by five friends she set off to Cambodia. They spent five weeks teaching in schools and orphanages across the country. It was a wonderful experience, she recalls, but her experiences also made her realise that teaching alone was not enough to improve the condition of the people in the region.
What was required was to provide enough incentives and teaching aids to those who imparted knowledge. Thus was born the PEPY Foundation.
Papi's next step was to create projects which would help realise her dream. She launched a tour company called Pepy Tours which organises volunteer and adventure travel in Cambodia.
There is also a unique programme The Pepy Ride, which invites volunteers from around the world to make their contribution in terms of money as well as extend their helping hand in teaching, construction and other activities at the Cambodian schools through responsible travel. These trips combine adventure travel with rural development education.
So instead of sending a donation to an organisation, volunteers get an opportunity to ‘‘go where their money goes'' – to experience life in Cambodia, meet the beneficiaries of their donations and actually see how every penny is used to bring happiness and literacy to deserving people.
Initiating change
“A small group of people can change the face of the world. I realised this in Cambodia. During our first bike ride in 2005 in that country we raised enough money to build three schools.
“But when I started living there I realised building a school was not the solution. We had to find ways of keeping the students at school and reducing a high drop-out rate and absenteeism. We had to get the teachers better trained so they could handle their responsibilities in a professional manner.
“Children drop out of school because they may not have the time or the means to attend school. Some of them may have to tend the paddy or watermelon fields. For instance, a pre-teen boy could be the bread winner and head of a family responsible for looking after his orphaned siblings, and sometimes grandparents as well.
“Teachers in government-aided schools are paid $30 to $50 per month which is hardly a subsistence wage. Most teachers struggle to make ends meet, as a result their attendance becomes erratic. It was important to pick out teachers from within Cambodia who understand and empathise with the students and also impart cultural values to their wards. So we decided that instead of building new schools it was first important to improve access to quality education and offer incentives to those who attended schools.
We wanted people who could think and feel for the students. I realised that we needed to work with the people of the country to effect long-term changes,'' elaborates Papi.
As she talks earnestly and passionately about her project, she appears far more mature than her age and one is forced to wonder what would compel a young educated person from a privileged background to trade in a good career and comfortable life in the West for a spartan struggle in a country with a different culture.
Papi, who is totally in love with Cambodia and its people, says it is the thought of being able to touch the lives of so many people. “I think once you find something you really like to do and see the potential it has for change, it gets addictive. In 1998, I went on a study abroad programme to Chennai, India. I was young then and visited leprosy patients and felt so uncomfortable that I told myself I'd never return to India.
Then I went on another project for Habitat for Humanity as a volunteer to Nepal. This was followed by a trip to Vietnam and later to Japan and I began to become part of the reality and it became less like I was looking into a box. Sometimes, it is easier to see the wide disparity in the distribution of wealth when you leave your home and country and it is easier for me to do something about poverty in Cambodian than to take responsibility in my own country.
Areas of improvement
“Besides, I chose education because I felt it was a cause that existed long before I arrived on the scene, would continue after I left and what I was doing was simply accelerating development and progress in that sector,'' says Papi.
Once the goals were clear, Papi and other members of the PEPY Foundation began looking at the areas of improvement. “Our two aims were to aid rural communities in improving their own standards of living with better access to quality education. We decided to invest in local teachers, fund literacy and teacher training programmes. If we found someone who was fabulous at teaching maths, for instance, we decided to pay him fairly well and get him to teach and train our teachers.
“We began to provide rice and oil, part of their staple food, to teachers to keep them in class.''
The ruse paid off. Instead of the dwindling 40 per cent, teacher attendance rose to 90 per cent.
Once this was done the members of the PEPY foundation had to ensure children did not drop out. Family members had to be cajoled, books had to be ordered, food had to be distributed to attract students to attend classes regularly. “I recall this little bright boy in Seam Reap who suddenly dropped out of school. I went to visit him to find out the reason and found that he was selling watermelons from his field to tourists so he could earn enough to feed his family.
“But he told me that whenever he was not busy or making a sale, he would keep repeating every lesson he had learned in class in his head so that when he returned to school, he would be able to pick up the thread. I was touched by his diligence,'' says Papi of one of her numerous experiences interacting with children of her school.
Dubai Cares Foundation funded the construction of three more schools and Papi thinks this support will go a long way in helping her achieve the goals of PEPY Foundation. The PEPY Foundation has already constructed four primary schools and two lower secondary schools.
The substantial and steady contribution of the PEPY Foundation has made tangible inroads in the educational systems of Cambodia. Their largest primary school called the PEPY Ride School with over 540 children has become the benchmark for other government schools.
The love for learning is something that PEPY Foundation is inculcating in all children by carrying out several integrating programmes in many other government schools in remote areas. Providing laptops, computer education, uniforms, bicycles, water filters for better hygiene, teacher training programmes are some of the action-oriented schemes undertaken by the foundation to create a grassroots revolution in education in Cambodia.
The analogy of one lamp lighting a thousand and those thousand lighting a million is very much in place here, and slowly bringing about the changes this society requires.
For more information log on to www.pepyride.org
