Washington, DC Nov. 18, 2002 — With little to spend and more disabled civilian landmine victims as share of its population than almost any other country, Cambodia needs good friends. Fortunately, it has them in many places—including the musical world.
Last week singer-songwriters Emmylou Harris and Bruce Cockburn led a series of “Concerts for a Landmine-Free World” in the USA. The benefits are sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, a Washington-based NGO and co-founder of the international coalition that won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. The group has Cambodia high on its agenda, but also works in Vietnam, Angola, Kosovo, and elsewhere.
One of the centerpieces of the all-acoustic shows is the musicians’ endorsement of handmade silk goods made by Joom Noon (Khmer for “A Gift of Hope”). A Vietnam Vets landmine victim income generation project in rural Preah Vihear province, Joom Noon works closely with the Mekong Project Development Facility (MPDF), the multidonor small and medium enterprise (SME) initiative for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos managed by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
MPDF has lately been helping Joom Noon as part of a recent initiative to add business discipline to NGO projects that help Cambodia’s poorest gain sustainable economic opportunities. By adding IFC’s combined financial/business discipline and global development perspective to their equation, MPDF can make an important contribution to the scale and staying power of these grassroots efforts, says its Cambodia and Laos regional manager, Adam Sack.
“Resource constrained government institutions cannot meet many of the social needs of this country’s 12 million people, and a nascent private sector cannot currently create sufficient jobs,” said Sack, a former JP Morgan banker. “The needs are in part being filled by NGOs, and to fulfill our own mandate, we need to work with them, especially with technical assistance on strategic planning, marketing, management, and other key business functions.”
At the tour’s kickoff concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, Nov. 6, its guiding force, 10-time Grammy Award winner Harris, wore a stunning silver shawl handmade by Joom Noon amputees, just as she has at the other landmine benefits she has organized over the past the five years with big names like Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Nanci Griffith, and others. After some opening numbers, she told a rapt audience about her visits to the Joom Noon project and encouraged them to buy its colorful pieces as Christmas gifts as a way to help the survivors earn a living wage.
At intermission, crowds mobbed the table in the lobby where they were on sale for $50-$120 a piece, buying an estimated $3,000 worth that one night. Proceeds will be sent directly back to the project in Cambodia, just as they are from every tour.
Canada’s Cockburn, a passionate and compassionate commentator on hardship in the developing world, spoke before the show about his own June 2000 visit to Joom Noon. The difference he sensed in “the vibe” of its amputees who had gained a sense of self-dignity by earning money from silk production and that of the many others across rural Cambodia reduced to begging clearly hit him deeply. He said it left him committed to help create a market for Joom Noon products in the West by promoting them at the concerts.
“Emotionally, it was very uplifting,” said Cockburn, who has long traveled to many of the world’s poorest countries with groups like Oxfam, Save the Children, and others. Such visits, he says, are “a big part of my education as a human being.”
