(The Nishimachi Internationalist Autumn 2010 Vol. 46)

Interviewed by Kit Pancoast Nagamura

As a child, Debbie Krisher-Steele '78, like many girls, wanted to be a princess when she grew up. That didn't quite pan out in the way we normally think of princesses. Instead of floating around in a pink gown, she is now a working mom whose fulltime job focuses on making the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every day. While there were bags of diamonds in her life, during her years working for Harry Winston (2003-2007), she traded those gems in to work for her father, Bernie Krisher, as Vice Chair of American Assistance for Cambodia. These days, Krisher-Steele crowns herself with good deeds, and as she puts it, finds in the people she helps "diamonds in a different setting."

American Assistance for Cambodia (AAfC), Bernie Krisher's brainchild and the focus of much of his life's work, encompasses numerous projects, including the building of schools across the country to restore what intellectual genocide by the Khmer Rouge destroyed decades ago. Bernie has overseen donations to create 500 schools in Cambodia to date, and adds to this astonishing achievement a hospital center, scholarship programs, commercial stimulus efforts, and projects to ensure that girls—all too often shunted to unsavory occupations—get sent to school instead. The scope of his organization, with its nearly 1.5 million dollar annual budget, is as vast and complicated as any realm, and Debbie needs to know it inside and out.

Luckily, Krisher-Steele's upbringing, while not precisely royal, was filled with the kinds of exposure and training befitting a young ruler. "Because my father was the Newsweek Bureau Chief in Tokyo and he was involved in stories across Asia, Indonesia and Cambodia, he took me along to these places, and I got exposed to them from early on," she remarks. "We had dinner parties at our house almost every night, with all kinds of dignitaries from overseas. Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda would drop by, as well as all sorts of political people," she adds.

For her negotiating skills and recognition that speaking foreign languages is essential, Krisher-Steele credits her mother, Akiko Krisher. "My father can be rather, um, pushy," Debbie observes with a humorous tilt of her head, "but my mother would take what my father said and turn it into the most elegant polite [Japanese] language and so he always got a positive response or answer. She wasn't all that visible, but definitely without her, he could not have done half the things he has done."

There's a breezy and charming aura to Krisher-Steele—she's pixie height, with a broad quick smile and thick short hair that opens like curtains on the stage of her eyes. Only when she stops laughing do you glimpse the fierce intelligence behind those eyes and sense that she's a natural leader. When I ask her what shifted her princess dreams into humanitarian impulses, her expression intensifies. "As I was growing up," she explains, "there was a lot going on, such as the Vietnam War, and later on Cambodia's civil war, when the Khmer Rouge took over. My father was a journalist and so he was involved and I learned about it from him. I never imagined then that my work would be in Cambodia, but a seed was planted that could have sprouted, or not."

The seed took off like kudzu. In 1979, Krisher-Steele was completing ninth grade and the culmination of ten years at Nishimachi International School when boat people from Vietnam landed in Japan. "The Japanese government wouldn't give them asylum," Debbie recalls. "My father, because he was a refugee himself during World War II, felt like we should do something. He had been saved by people in other countries as he was escaping Nazi Germany, so he thought we have to help political refugees," she says.

Not knowing what else to do, Debbie and her father approached Miss Matsukata to discuss the Vietnamese being held in a detention center. "She arranged for us to visit, " Debbie recalls, "and there was one boy there who was about 16 but looked like he was 10 because of malnutrition. Miss Matsukata's prestige made it possible for us to have that boy come to Nishimachi for a week or two and we thought he'd be placed in our ninth grade class. But he had had no education during the war. They tested him in math and he had no math ability. So they put him in the sixth grade with Mr. and Mrs. Clark [Bob and Sandy] and he just sort of shared space there. His presence, though, gave us all a big wake-up call. I thought, 'Whoa, this is what happens when you don't have an education.'" Debbie found herself moved by Miss Matsukata's flexibility and broadmindedness, and motivated to get learning, fast.

After finishing high school at the American School in Japan, Krisher-Steele took her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Back in Japan by 1989, then 25, she landed a job working for the Chair of the Japan Socialist Party (now the Socialist Democratic Party), Takako Doi. At this time, Doi was nearing the height of her political popularity and was actively pressuring the Diet to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women. "She was a 'human-rights-nik' if I can say that," Krisher-Steele enthuses. "It was she who made it possible in 1985 for a Japanese mother to pass down citizenship to children; before that time, citizenship in Japan could only pass through from a Japanese father." The constant flow of important people—from political prisoners to Nobel Peace Prize winners—made Doi's office an energizing place to work. Debbie recalls that "Doi was the hot thing in Japan and she was such a star. I got to interpret at her meetings, and I was in there with heroes, people who risked their lives for important things. Every day was an inspiration." Though Doi had virtually no money and lived in the Diet dorm, "which looked like a jail" Debbie interjects, she impressed Debbie as being honest and generous. "She paid us with all kinds of goods instead of money, like Kobe beef—she was from Kobe. She also gave me an idea of what a real career could be like."

During her yearlong stint with Doi, Krisher-Steele met the head of Human Rights Watch. After obtaining a master's degree in East Asian studies at Stanford, Debbie applied for and was granted a Luce fellowship, and worked for Human Rights Watch for one year. This was followed by a Monbusho scholarship at Waseda and travel connected with first the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and then Radio Free Asia. While in D.C. with AFL-CIO, Debbie met her husband, Doug, and the two were married in 1999. Their son, Adam Lincoln Steele ('17), was born a year later.

But before much of this, in 1991, Krisher-Steele had accompanied her father on his first return to Cambodia since 1965. The experience shocked Bernie, Krisher-Steele recalls. "He saw a devastated country completely torn apart by civil war," Debbie says. "Phnom Penh was a ghost town and it was a flashback for him of what happens after a Holocaust. My dad reflected on how his family left Germany in 1936 and they went from France to Portugal to America, helped by sympathetic people who were not Jews. Had it not been for the kindness of strangers, he would never have gotten to where he was and he felt now it was his time to give back to a country, though it was unrelated to him. He was in a position to give and he was going to give to them." From this was born American Assistance for Cambodia.

In March of 2007, Debbie began working for her charismatic and now famous father, whom she sometimes teasingly calls "Papa-razzi." She claims the experience is "24/7 wonderful." However, she is quick to qualify this, admitting that, "the problem working with a family member is that it is 24/7. There's no such thing as a holiday, and there's no real time off, because you feel like you can ask your family member to do anything at any time."

There are also challenges inherent in the life of a working mom that make Debbie's childhood princess dream morph into something more like an amalgamation of Martin Luther King meets Pele the goddess of fire: "Of course I don't have enough time for myself," she laments. "I haven't found a happy balance yet. I dream, yes—I have a dream!—of going to a remote place where there's nobody and just being by myself, maybe a hot spring somewhere on top of a mountain? Yeah, a volcano!"

But something about Debbie makes it clear she'd melt the volcano, and come rushing back to ground level faster than a lava flow. Her passion for the work she and her father share is palpable. "There's always something great that comes in from Cambodia," she raves. "We hear from a girl in our Girls Be Ambitious program that her house has burnt down and the family has lost everything. We quickly write the donor who is supporting her or has a school in that village and they say they'll send 1,000 dollars. That's enough money to rebuild her house, plus extra. That kind of quick reaction to something tragic and life-changing, being able to fix it, being part of that is good. Stuff like that happens almost every day, so that's very gratifying."

With a mere 13,000 dollars from a donor and matching funds from the Asian Development Bank, AAfC continues to build schools in Cambodia, much like the one Nishimachi International School started in Kirivorn in 2001. The beauty of the idea is that the schools are self-sustaining because the Cambodian Ministry of Education dispatches its own licensed teachers to the school, to instruct the national curriculum, and the village is meant to maintain the school's physical plant. "In fact, a donor can donate 13,000 dollars, and just walk away," Debbie says. "Or they can add other things, like a computer program with a computer teacher. That then gives the school added value, because usually it's the bright kids who go to the computer classes, where they will be taught English and computer skills. This also affords the donor an opportunity to interact with the students if they can't visit frequently." When asked about the priority of an Internet connection in a country where just getting enough food is a challenge, Debbie says of the computer classes, "we find the really motivated kids there, the ones that want more for themselves than what the curriculum offers. This is where we find those unpolished diamonds. We take them on and then we polish them."

Debbie's narrative of AAfC's ultimate goals, which sound much like those set out by the Fulbright foundation, make it clear what they plan to do with the brightest of their diamonds. "We're really first and foremost rehabilitating a country that had been destroyed," she states, "and basically trying to help the government spread their own, Cambodian education, to make sure every child gets an education. When we invest in a child from a poor village we drum it into him that we want him to gain knowledge and then go back and help his own village get out of poverty. The only element we're adding, that doesn't change anything fundamentally, is computer technology that improves communications and access to information. When you look at Angkor Wat and traditional Cambodian silver, you can see what, at the height of their civilization, Cambodians can achieve. That intelligence is still there."

While certainly nothing like the sybaritic princess who complained of the pea beneath twenty mattresses bruising her, Debbie is nonetheless acutely aware of the many layers her job requires her to penetrate. Some are a royal pain. Her organization is often pressured to take bribes—which are vociferously and adamantly refused, regardless of resulting setbacks and delays. She also needs to battle the impression that 500 schools is enough, when it isn't anywhere near the minimal number needed, Debbie insists. And, she would like people to know that AAfC uses a mere 5% of all donation monies for operating expenses. Only their Cambodian staff members are paid; Debbie, like her brother and father, are out and out volunteers.

But for the most part, Debbie's job is a joy, full of a sense of accomplishment, connection, and reflection. She mentions that a recent wave of Japanese college students collect money at busy train stations day after day, and then build schools. "They're all over Japan," she says, "and this gives me a lot of hope about young people here." Debbie also points to her organization's collaboration with visionaries such as Nicholas Negroponte who launched his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC ) project after building an AAfC school, and Spanish IT and communications guru Javier Sola who founded an NGO that develops free and low-cost Khmer language operating systems using Open Source coding so Cambodians can use computers in their own language.

Finally, it's clear that Krisher-Steele loves the country that benefits from her care and attention. "Cambodians can teach us," she says, " that you can be happy without all the material frills we seem to be wrapped up around. When foreigners go to a village, they are amazed by how happy Cambodian children look. They're happy because they spend time with their friends—they have all this time to develop good relationships with each other. It's what makes the village work—there's a very strong community connection. I think that's something we kind of lose in this developed world, as we sit in our individual cubicles in front of our computers. I think we lose the crucial people-to-paeople bandwidth. That's what I learn when I go there, and I'm happy not to connect to my Blackberry or anything because I'm there in real time." While there would seem to be a conundrum there, concerning computers, it is not one that bothers Debbie, who believes that "those who have IT technology and those who don't will constitute the major separation of the future. The ones who don't have it are going to be left behind. Giving Cambodians technology gives them possibilities." That's no fantasy princess talking. Let the next generation of little girls dream, instead, of being Debbie.

If you would like to learn more about the development of Cambodian school project by AAFC, please access:
• http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodiaschools/AAfC/
• http://www.cambodiaschools.com/our-programs/rural-schools-program/

About Bernie Krisher:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Krisher
• http://www.time.com/time/asia/2005/heroes/bernard_krisher.html (available for time.com subscribers only)

*Edits to website address made by Development Office on September 29, 2015