Travels in the Riel World

The idea of outsourcing is no longer new, and most people take for granted the fact that many manufacturing and service jobs are now being done from abroad. But the outsourcing industry has added a new wrinkle in recent years - that of outsourcing personal tasks. Yes, one can now find a math tutor, a researcher or even a personal assistant abroad, and particularly in India. Two recent stories in the NY Times discussed the topic.

An excerpt from the first article:

Adrianne Yamaki, a 32-year-old management consultant in New York, travels constantly and logs 80-hour workweeks. So to eke out more time for herself, she routinely farms out the administrative chores of her life — making travel arrangements, hair appointments and restaurant reservations and buying theater tickets — to a personal assistant service, in India.

Kenneth Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strives to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen. The tutor is in India…

The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.

The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations.

They foresee an array of potential services beyond tutoring and personal assistance like health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills and more. Such services, they say, will be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.

And from the second story:

In the latest twist on the information-age truism that technology is making the world even smaller, entrepreneurs in India are trying to build a new market for the offshore services they offer: helping small businesses cope with even the most mundane day-to-day tasks.

Thanks to Indian companies like Brickwork India and GetFriday, even sole proprietors can have personal assistants to conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give them a wake-up call and tell them to get some exercise — all for as little as $15 an hour.

A woman in New Jersey who works for a health care company used the new services to investigate trends in pharmaceutical marketing. An entrepreneur in Toronto used them to build his Web site. A Web designer in Louisiana has them search for images he can use. A builder in Tennessee uses them to get statistical reports on vacant lots before he buys them.

What’s the difference between urban life in Los Angeles and village life in Italy? I found this interesting nugget in a recent story about an LA woman who now lives part-time in her family’s ancestral village in Italy. The paragraph is an apt description of the differences between two different ways of life.

She still lives in Los Angeles — how does a day there compare to a day here?

“In Los Angeles, everything you do, you do alone and in your car, ” Ms. Paolantonio says. “Here I don’t leave the house without somebody saying, ‘Where are you going?’ I went outside the other day, a neighbor, this ancient woman dressed completely in black, comes out. She usually takes half an hour to kiss me a thousand times. I don’t understand a word she’s saying. She’s cooing at me, like a little dove, cooing.”

The world of the business expatriate is not what it was a decade or two ago. The destinations are different, the cultural challenges have changed, and new business skills are needed for success abroad. That’s the opinion, at least, of this interesting article in Time magazine, which focuses especially on executives who work in China and India.

The expat gig used to be a cushy one for U.S. executives of a certain level: jet into Tokyo or Paris, tuck family into American schools and clubs, slide into fully established local office as the bigwig from headquarters. It was more of an exotic detour for loyal lifetimers than a slingshot into directorship for the young and ambitious–but who cared?

Somewhere, perhaps in Tokyo or Paris, that old-timey expatriate still sips his midday martini at the foreigners’ club. But in the rough-and-tumble markets of China and India, a new generation of expats–they prefer “global executives,” thank you–haven’t yet had a chance to sign up for membership. They’re too busy chasing local talent, adapting to a wildly different culture and riding phenomenal growth in markets vital to their companies’ futures…

The U.S. expat population has leaped over the past five years, according to experts, in large part because of growing delegations to China and India. And yet the two emerging giants remain famously tough for Western executives to navigate. In a 2006 survey by GMAC Global Relocation Services, they are cited among the three most difficult locations for expats (the third is Russia). Corporations are learning that these 21st century markets require a new kind of expat.

What are some of the cultural and business challenges now faced by expat executives in these Asian nations?

The right leader in China and India, for many companies, is someone with the drive and creativity to manage what often feels like a start-up. The highest hurdle is usually building a local workforce from the ground up in savagely competitive labor markets…

In India, Leonhardt has to wage a full-court recruiting press. Candidates might receive dozens of offers, accept them all–then simply show up at the one that’s most appealing. Leonhardt estimates that as many as 3 in 10 accepted hires are no-shows on the first day of work. “It’s pretty frustrating, as you can imagine,” he says.

Employers there thus use what’s called a keep-warm strategy, in which newly approved hires are plied with informational packets, calls from executives and even small gifts for their parents … before their first day of work. Appealing to workers’ filial loyalty is so critical in India that some employers fly parents to headquarters for visits, and at least one is said to offer parents free Internet service. Target competes by offering health insurance to workers’ parents.

Once a team is in place, expat bosses often have to reinvent themselves as managers. Lin Chase, 44, arrived in Bangalore in January 2006 to head Accenture’s research and development lab. “I come from a culture where people love a plan,” she says. “The plan is God.” Not in India. She would step away from meetings confident that a plan was in place and wait for its execution. And wait. And wait. “It happened so many times that finally I changed my whole style,” says Chase. “I talk to my team every day, ask them how it’s going. I spend a huge proportion of time chasing people for commitments they made to me, but now I see it less as chasing than as a relationship.”

The demographics of Europe are changing - driven not only by local birth rates or by immigrants from outside the continent, but also by European citizens who are moving to new countries in search of more promising job markets. One of the most striking immigration stories in recent years has been the number of young Polish workers who have moved to Britain and Ireland. Interestingly, though, as this recent article in Time magazine notes, while some observers predicted several years ago that numerous Europeans would move from poorer to richer countries, the result of this movement has been more positive than anyone had imagined.

When Poland was admitted to the European Union, politicians across Europe viewed the prospect of Poles moving into their countries with xenophobic disdain. In 2005, Philippe de Villiers, leader of France’s Euro-skeptic Mouvement pour la France, darkly warned of the “Polish plumber and Estonian architect” triggering “the demolition of France’s social and economic model.” Before the E.U. admitted 10 new members in 2004, populist fears of unwashed hordes stealing jobs from locals led most of the old E.U. countries, including Germany, Austria and France, to seal their labor markets. In the end, only three of the E.U.’s then 15 countries–Ireland, Britain and Sweden–opened their labor markets in May 2004.

As feared, Poles poured into Britain and Ireland, but rather than undermine local economies, their enterprise and skills have helped the British and Irish economies remain robust. Conversely, unemployment is higher in France, which turned Poles away, than in Britain, where they were welcomed…”It’s been a fantastic success story,” said Jonathan Byrne, a senior executive at the Bank of Ireland, which has conducted extensive market research on the new arrivals. “Economically, socially, in every way, it has been a positive experience for our country.”

For Ireland, especially, the experience has been a particularly interesting reversal of history.

For generations, Ireland had to export its underemployed to foreign shores, particularly the U.S. They were not always welcome for the very same reasons that the Poles were feared. Now the Celtic Tiger has reversed history: Ireland’s modern diaspora has been returning home to a robust economy infused by immigrant Poles. It’s a welcome, and welcoming, place for both.

Sure, Italy has Rome, Florence and Venice. It has Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. But Italy also has the Cinque Terre, a slighty lesser known region on the country’s western edge, where five colorful villages hug a rocky coastline and are linked by a stunning trail system. Barbara Bodengraven recently hiked the Cinque Terre with her husband and wrote about the experience for the Boston Globe.

We had come to Cinque Terre to hike the Blue Trail that hugs the cliffs and rocks along the Mediterranean just north of La Spezia and south of Genoa. The trails were created hundreds of years ago by hardy peasants who trudged from one remote town to another to work the vineyards or trade their wares. Ten years ago the five small towns of the Cinque Terre and the trails that link them were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site…

We set off with two bottles of water and a couple of bananas and chocolate bars in a backpack. We took the twisting cobblestoned streets that led to the sea and a glorious flat section of graveled trail along the cliff edge leading to the town of Corniglia. The most heart-stopping moment along this stretch was a short suspension bridge. I hesitated only a moment before clutching its swaying railings and plunging across with eyes closed. An hour later we stared up at the 365 steps that led from the trail abutting Corniglia’s railroad station to the village above where we would pick up the trail toward the next town of Vernazza.

I’ve hiked the same trail, by the way, and while it is certainly a workout, I don’t remember it as being quite as frightening or heart-stopping as she describes. The views, on the other hand, are that spectacular and will take your breath away.

In the Japanese culture, loyalty and conformity have long been valued traits. This is especially true in the relationship between workers and employers, where nonconformity has long been frowned upon. In recent years, though, Japan has seen the emergence of a new phenomenon - the whistleblower. According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor:

It’s not easy for an individual to call attention to illegal or unethical behavior in the workplace in any culture. But in Japan, where conformity is seen as a virtue, it can be especially difficult.

When officer Toshiro Semba revealed that his bosses in the police department were forging receipts in order to wine and dine on the public’s money, they took his gun away. He was decreed too emotionally unstable to carry a weapon – a humiliation, he says, designed to corner him into quitting. For 500 days, he was ordered to sit alone in a tiny room at the Ehime Prefectural Police…

Whistle-blowers like Semba have been especially solitary in Japan, where conformity and respect for hierarchy are venerated as tradition. They have been labeled as traitors. But that attitude is gradually changing. As Japan modernizes, people increasingly see themselves as individuals and consumers, with a duty to speak up against wrongdoing…

Whistle-blowers have been rare because Japanese companies, even major ones, are run like families, and individual workers don’t see themselves as hired by contract as do American workers, says Koji Igata, business administration professor at Osaka University of Economics. “Whistle-blowers are seen as eccentrics who’ve turned on their parents,” he says. 

Happy U.S. Thanksgiving!

Familes across the U.S. are sitting down today for a traditional holiday meal. Boris Fishman, though, recently had a different sort of Thanksgiving meal - in Xalapa, Mexico - which he wrote about for the NY Times.

You’re going to be part of an experiment tonight,” Justo Fernández Garibay said. “We couldn’t find chestnuts for the stuffing, so we’re using macadamia nuts.” I was about to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner at the Posada Coatepec, a beautiful inn owned by Fernández’s family on the outskirts of Xalapa, the state capital of Veracruz…

Thanksgiving in Xalapa — I wouldn’t have thought twice about it in the “gringo ghettos” of San Miguel de Allende or Ajijic. But Xalapa is in the mountains, about five hours east of Mexico City, far from the usual tourist and expat circuit. After traveling extensively throughout the country, I hadn’t expected to have turkey dinner, let alone one with such worldly touches as tortilla rounds with potato purée and coal-cured sausage, a mille-feuille of salmon and cranberry sauce infused with orange zest.

Fishman writes not only about his meal, but also about the city of Xalapa.

It seems to take cues from neither Mexico City nor the colossus to the north (Thanksgiving dinner notwithstanding). There are few American brands on the shelves, only Mexican pop on the stereos blaring from storefronts, and the tabloids manage to do their work without ever mentioning Britney Spears. If Xalapa looks to any one place, it’s Spain, the mother country to which many of the area’s families trace their lineage.

Or, if you want to learn more about the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., including its traditions and origins, you can check out this wikipedia entry.

There is a business story in Newsweek magazine that is an interesting read - it sheds some light both on the workplace culture of Google and on the need for corporations today to employ individuals who understand globalization and other cultures. The article focuses on a unique training program that Google has devised for some of its brightest young hires.

There are no computers in the tiny village of Raagihalli, located 30 miles outside Bangalore, India. Overseas visitors seldom venture down the unpaved roads that lead to the 70 or so threadbare huts surrounded by fields vulnerable to the trampling of elephants. So it is fair to say that cultures clashed with the arrival of the Googlers—young masters and mistresses of the Internet, armed with stratospheric SAT scores, computer-science degrees from top universities and some of the most coveted jobs of their generation.

This past summer a group of 18 Google associate product managers (APMs) were circling the globe on a training trip, seeing firsthand the humble, unwired ways of life experienced by billions—including the vast majority of Indians who are more familiar with crop fields than search fields.

…the APM program, which seeks brilliant kids and slots them directly into important jobs—no experience necessary. Surprisingly, Google trains these young execs, knowing many will leave for other jobs in just a few years. Halfway through the two-year program, the APMs travel to foreign Google offices to network with fellow employees, learn about regional markets and soak up local culture.

The story follows the APMs on a 16-day visit to four cities in four countries - Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China; Bangalore, India, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

A few months ago, I linked to a unique story about females in Thailand who had taken up kickboxing. Now, it seems, according to this Associated Press article, young women in Afghanistan are trying to shatter more gender barriers by taking up the traditional sport of boxing.

The boxers belong to a new generation of Afghan youth, challenging stereotypes that persist five years after the fall of the Taliban. They train in a room in Kabul’s main sports stadium, a venue for public executions during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.

Boxing is helping them gain confidence and self-respect, the girls say. Their goal: to be Afghanistan’s first women’s boxing team.

“Many people are trying to stop us from participating in sports by saying it is not good for women,” said Shabnam, 15, who uses only one name.

“But I think if you are interested in doing something, you should avoid listening to what people think about you. Sports is a way out of violence for Afghanistan.”

There was a fascinating article recently in Time Magazine, called China’s Me Generation.  It was about twentysomethings in China and how their lives have been transformed by a growing economy and China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse. Interestingly, while many of these young adults have more career choices and disposable income than ever before, they are also a largely apolitical generation to this point and are happy to let the Communist Party continue to rule the country so long as their lifestyles keep improving.

An excerpt from the story:

Six friends out on a Friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang–big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup–starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese, so you don’t have to worry about language.

Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight. While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding (”I must have fallen a hundred times”), the relative merits of various iPods (”Shuffle is no good”) and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China…The talk turns to China’s online-shopping business before it is interrupted by the arrival of razor clams, chili squid and deep-fried grouper.

The one subject that doesn’t come up–and almost never does when this tight-knit group of friends gets together–is politics. That sets them apart from previous generations of Chinese élites, whose lives were defined by the epic events that shaped China’s past half-century: the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression.

The conversation at Gang Ji Restaurant suggests today’s twentysomethings are tuning all that out. “There’s nothing we can do about politics,” says Chen. “So there’s no point in talking about it or getting involved.”

There are roughly 200 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that its becoming. China’s twentysomethings are the drivers and chief beneficiaries of the country’s current boom: according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse First Boston, the incomes of 20-to29-year-olds grew 34% in the past three years, by far the biggest increase of any age group.

And because of their self-interested, apolitical pragmatism, they could turn out to be the salvation of the ruling Communist Party–so long as it keeps delivering the economic goods. Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country’s Communist rulers. “On their wish list,” says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, “a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy.”

The term guanxi refers to the time-honored way of doing business in China by cultivating relationships. Anyone who works in China or with a Chinese company eventually has to learn about guanxi.  This week, Business Week magazine has an article about the practice of building relationships with the Chinese and discusses not only the traditional meaning of guanxi but also more contemporary ways of networking in China.

Loosely translated, guanxi means “connections” and, as any China veteran will tell you, it is the key to everything: securing a business license, landing a distribution deal, even finding that coveted colonial villa in Shanghai. Fortunes have been made and lost based on whether the seeker has good or bad guanxi, and in most cases a positive outcome has meant knowing the right government official, a relationship nurtured over epic banquets and gallons of XO brandy.

Now, like so many things in China, the old notion of guanxi is starting to make room for the new. Businesspeople—local and foreign—are tapping into emerging networks that revolve around shared work experiences or taking business classes together. Networking that once happened in private rooms at chichi restaurants now goes on in plain view—at wine-tastings for the nouveau riche, say, or at Davos-style confabs such as the annual China Entrepreneurs Forum held annually at China’s Yabuli ski resort.

It’s fairly common in Latin cultures for young people to remain living at home until they get married. But with young adults now marrying later, and with the cost of first homes rising, some Italians believe this tradition has gotten out of hand, to the point where it could affect the country’s economy and future demographics. You can read more in this story in the Christian Science Monitor.

To many Italian moms, it does not make a difference if the child they are kissing good morning is 3 or 30 years old. But to the government, it does – and officials want young adults booted out of the parental nest.

“We want the bamboccioni to move out,” Finance Minister Tommaso Padoa Schioppa recently said, using a term that evokes grown babies still attached to mamma’s apron strings.

With fewer job options than their American peers and less generous welfare benefits than their European counterparts, nearly two-thirds of Italians between the ages of 30 and 34 are still sleeping in their childhood bedroom. Besides fostering stereotypes of spoiled youths, that figure has serious consequences for the country’s demographic balance. Without a house of their own, the young stay single, delay starting a family, and depress the country’s birthrate, already below replacement levels…

Now Italy’s center-left government is proposing a ¤999 ($1,431) yearly tax credit on rents for people ages 20 to 30, hoping that will encourage young adults to start living on their own and start a family. But experts say the measure, though encouraging, is not enough to undo cultural and economic factors keeping young men and women at home.

The 1960s, says Mr. Schioppa, produced a generation of parents who are letting their kids enjoy freedom without giving up the comforts of freshly washed linens and homemade lasagna.

“Young Italians have found a new formula for la dolce vita,” writes journalist Beppe Severgnini on his popular blog, “Italians.” But, he adds, it is also a matter of “unconfessed egoism of the parents,” who encourage the kids to stay at home as way of postponing the solitude of retirement.

Interesting essay in the recent issue of Time Magazine. Carla Power examines a key difference between Western and Muslim societies, notably that Westerners are uncomfortable with public prayer while Muslims are uncomfortable seeing bare skin in public. She writes:

Reams have been written on the differences between Islamic and Western societies, but for sheer pithiness, it’s hard to beat a quip by my former colleague, a Pakistani scholar of Islamic studies. I’d strolled into his office one day to find him on the floor, at prayer. I left, shutting his door, mortified. Later he cheerfully batted my apologies away. “That’s the big difference between us,” he said with a shrug. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”

At the nub of debates over Muslim integration in the West lies the question, What’s decent to do in public–display your sexuality or your faith? The French have no problem with bare breasts on billboards and TV but big problems with hijab-covered heads in public schools and government offices. Many Muslims feel just the opposite.

As my friend suggested, Westerners believe that prayer is something best done in private, a matter for individual souls rather than state institutions. In the Islamic world, religion is out of the closet: on the streets, chanted five times daily from minarets, enshrined in constitutions, party platforms and penal codes. Sexual matters are kept discreet…

So here is a sweeping generalization, but perhaps a useful one: Western societies are cultures of personal revelation and exposure, while Muslim cultures are traditionally structured around protecting honor and propriety. On our shrunken planet, the two codes bump up against each other, throwing the other into relief.

Should Puerto Rico be considered to have a North American culture, because of its relationship to the United States? Caribbean, because of its location? Latin American, because of its Spanish colonial heritage? All of the above? Regardless of the answer, it’s an intriguing island. Paul Schneider recently wrote about his experiences there for the NY Times. He found himself especially fascinated by Old San Juan.

Today, Old San Juan is a place of narrow cobbled streets and blocks of well-preserved colonial architecture where you can glimpse a microcosmic vision of the entire post-Columbian history of the Americas, from the essentially medieval mayhem of the early European invasion to the madcap Nuyorican partying of the 21st century.

Though it’s not in exactly the same location as Ponce de León’s original settlement, that hardly matters: it is the restaurant-, nightclub- and museum-packed heart of what is arguably the most vibrant city in the Caribbean, not to mention the most exotic urban setting Americans can get to these days without a passport…

Old San Juan is not a big area, seven blocks by six blocks, give or take a few, with tiny streets cobbled with distinctive glassy, bluish cobbles that mostly came during the 18th century as ballast in ships bound for the Indies. On back streets, big wooden doors set into pastel walls give way to Andalusian-style courtyards, and narrow second-story balconies are sometimes festooned with plants.

Each block has its own flavor, some congested with cars or tourists, some filled with interesting shops, some seemingly almost forgotten.

In what can only be a good sign for the future of education in this country, recent years have seen a significant increase in the number of American university students who participate in a study abroad program.

According to an article in the International Herald Tribune:

There is a consensus today, much like the one about science and math studies after the launch of Sputnik 50 years ago, that globally fluent graduates are essential to American competitiveness. International exposure, whether study, volunteer work or internship, has become a must-have credential. With the new demand — the number studying abroad is twice that of eight years ago — what was once an add-on has become big business. About 6,000 programs send students to more than 100 countries.

Not only are more students going abroad, but they are also doing it in more creative ways.

… for a generation whose life is calibrated by a multicolored spiral daily planner, just being abroad is not enough. They want to do more than study a language; they want an experience that complements their stateside curriculums.

University of Chicago students can meet a civilization core requirement by attending a 10-week program taught by its own faculty in Mexico, China or India. Half of last spring’s graduating class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts studied abroad — many in fields like engineering and science, whose rigid course sequences once kept them home. W.P.I. students are tackling projects like creating wireless security systems or flood-prevention plans in places as far afield as Limerick, Ireland, and Cape Town, South Africa.

Additionally, they are searching out more exotic destinations. Such as Ghana:

For a student at the University of Ghana in Legon, a palm-graced suburb of Accra, a dinner might involve fufu — mashed casava and plantains in a soup of peanut butter and tomatoes — from a local “chop bar.” Electricity is not a given. Nor is running water. Students might have to fetch buckets of water to flush the toilet and wash clothes. Forget sleeping in. They rise at 5 a.m., when the chaos and din begin: loud music and evangelical preaching, through megaphones. The “Challenges of Living in Ghana” handout from the University of California advises bringing earplugs.

The country, and its flagship university, have become a newly popular destination for studying abroad: about 300 American students, representing dozens of campuses, take classes at Legon.

Are the nighttime dreams that we have influenced by the culture in which we live? That seems to be the intriguing suggestion in this recent article about dreams.

Nightmare content also shifts over time and across cultures. A young man in 21st-century America might not mind the occasional bawdy dream, but for St. Augustine, the fourth-century Christian philosopher, “sexual dreams were nightmares,” said Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher and visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. “He considered them threats to his faith.”

Cultural specifics can also tweak universal themes. Dr. Bulkeley and his colleagues have found that nightmares about falling through the air are common among women in Arab nations, perhaps for metaphorical reasons. “There’s such a premium in these countries on women remaining chaste, and the dangers of becoming a ‘fallen woman’ are so intense,” he said, “that the naturally high baseline of falling dreams is amped up even more.”

Now that Argentina has followed Chile in electing a woman president, some observers are wondering if this portends a new era of female political power in South America.

Here in the land of machismo, where leaders were long supposed to conform to the standard of the strong-armed military man in epaulettes, a rising wave of leaders is working on a new 21st-century cliche: la presidenta.

The movement started at South America’s southern tip, where Chile elected Michelle Bachelet president last year. Argentina followed this week, choosing first lady Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as its first elected female president…

The gender-specific rallying cry now seems poised to spread north. In Paraguay, outgoing President Nicanor Duarte is backing former education minister Blanca Ovelar as his replacement in next year’s presidential election. And in Brazil, many political observers say that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seems to be grooming his chief of staff and former energy minister — a woman named Dilma Rousseff — to carry his party’s torch when his term ends in 2010…

But the possibility that she could become one has South Americans confronting a prospect that just a few years ago would have seemed utterly impossible: a continent where the majority of the population is led by women.

Interestingly, though, while South American women are achieving success in the political arena, they have not been quite as successful in the business world.

According to the World Economic Forum’s ranking of 116 countries in terms of gender gaps, opportunities for women in South America still lagged behind those of women in many other parts of the world in 2006. Argentina ranked 42nd in terms of equal opportunities for women, Paraguay 65th, Brazil 68th and Chile 79th, according to the survey.

But in terms of political empowerment for women, Argentina jumped to 23rd on the list, ahead of the United States and Canada.

The temples of Angkor in northern Cambodia, and particularly Angkor Wat, are one of the more spectacular sights in the world. Stephen Brookes and his wife recently visited the temples, but they bucked conventional wisdom by journeying to Cambodia in the middle of the monsoon season. Brookes wrote about the experience for the Washington Post.

We’d come to Cambodia to see the famous temples of Angkor, those magnificent ruins that make up one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Asia, if not the world. And we’d come in July — in the heart of the monsoon, which sensible people had told us was pure madness. Wait until the dry season, they said, when the skies are clear and you’re guaranteed as much sunshine as you can handle. Go during the long, wet summer — when more than 50 inches of rain falls — and you’re certain to get stranded in your hotel, swatting at mosquitoes and hoping you don’t come down with malaria.

But we were here to test the contrarian idea that the monsoon might, in fact, be the best time to see Cambodia. Because the truth is, even though it rains almost every day — sometimes in torrents so thick you can barely see — it rarely lasts more than an hour or two. And the effect is usually refreshing. The rain clears the air, washes away the dust and cools down everything. The landscape turns lush and fragrant, colors take on richer hues and, instead of scorching tropical sun, you get constantly changing light and spectacular sunsets…

We weren’t completely alone, of course. Two elderly monks in saffron robes passed us, and a few Korean families peered intently at each other through digital cameras. But it was easy enough to avoid the tour groups as we made our way through the temple. We climbed higher and higher up the narrow stairways, over the wide stone terraces, past the churning friezes and delicately carved celestial dancers. It was eerily quiet — the loudest sound was the cry of birds in the jungle — and the huge temple spread out below us, infinitely ancient, evocative and remote. We sat in silence, letting the sweep of the centuries roll over us.