Buying cakes and sodas for a party in an orphanage in Cambodia with a very limited budget

Résumé du document

In November 2006, I went to Cambodia for 2 months as a volunteer for a French NGO called ASPECA Enfants d'Asie. I spent more than one month in one orphan center in Battambang in the north west of Cambodia, not far from the border with Thailand. My principal mission was to conduct an audit of the orphanage, to give French and English lessons to children from 5 to 21 years old. We were two students from my university in France. The girl with whom I went there spoke a little Cambodian but she was not fluent. We had a total budget of $400 to spend for the center. The last week, it remained $85 to spend for the orphanage. We planned to use this money to finance the organization to arrange a party for our departure. We fixed the amount around $70 for the food (target point). This might be a huge sum in Cambodia but there were around 110 children in the center and including the members of the staff, we had to buy food for more than 120 people.

Extraits

[...] On the one hand, he was right: if you negotiate for cramas (Traditional silk craft in Cambodia) at the market, it was less common for food. But if we know that we could negotiate, there was a good reason. Indeed, we were at the end of the week. The market will be closed the day after so the seller would maybe throw some of the fresh food to the dustbin. I was thinking about all the small cakes which have been freshly made. [...]

[...] So finally, we found a compromise at a price of $80 but with no collaboration in the future. This was between our walkway point and target point. It corresponded to our first BATNA but this one was higher at the end of the negotiation ) Analysis of the strategies used by both sides The strategy used during this negotiation may be summarized thanks to the Dual Concerns Model below 3.1 Relationship & Outcome concerns At first, we thought we would not have further negotiation in the future with that bakery seller. [...]

[...] I spent more than one month in one orphan center in Battambang in the north west of Cambodia, not far from the border with Thailand. My principal mission was to conduct an audit of the orphanage, to give French and English lessons to children from 5 to 21 years old. We were two students from my university in France. The girl with who I went there spoke a little Cambodian but she was not fluent. We had a total budget of $400 to spend for the center. [...]

[...] We had also planned to buy 7 chicken and 3 kilograms of potatoes for preparing the meal. The seller proposed to us to make a deal with his brother who was selling chicken, meat and vegetables. The negotiation occurred in 2 parts. In the first part, we were 2 French against the 2 Cambodian sellers. In a second part, we were 5 people involved: one of the oldest students in the center came and was a kind of intermediary or even mediator. [...]

[...] Indeed, the baker knew that we had a deadline so time was running out and was not our ally. It would have been difficult to hide this fact to the seller! We had to show confidence in bluffing and to insist on the fact that we were students really short with money. Also, our strategy was to always react with surprise. Evolution of the negotiation To t1 to t2 (Step dead lock We continued the negotiations over a price of 100$, which was far away from our target point. (Our target point was around 70$). [...]