Amandocracy

On Simple Solutions: Playpumps

2009-10-02T18:15:00.005+02:00

A former colleague of mine keeps a blog.
Actually, several former colleagues of mine from more than one organization keep blogs. But that's beside the point of today's broadcast.

The point of today's broadcast is that this particular colleague (let's call him Owen) is doing a multi-part series on playpumps from his perspective while working in Malawi. (The playpumps link is to a video from playpumps.org that explains a bit about what a playpump is. Basically, lots of people in different parts of Africa draw water from hand-pumped wells. The playpump idea is that kids can play and do the pumping at the same time, cutting down the pumping that people - aka mostly women and girls - have to do to draw water).

You can find parts 1 and 2 of Owen's series here and here.

Here are a list of reasons why you should check out Owen's posts:
- Owen provides an interesting, full-sentence perspective that you won't get from following Playpumps International on twitter.
- The playpump is billed as something somehow related to the most challenging problems sometimes having the simplest solutions. I think more people need to think a bit more carefully about what 'simple solutions' actually are.
- The playpump is like a lot of other simple revolutions in development. It sounds good and makes contributors feel good... but is it actually good? Does saying that something is sustainable actually cover off all the bases? (NO!) Does looking good on paper automatically mean it will work out in practice? (NO!) Who is making sure that this idea is being translated into good practice? What kinds of problems are being encountered on the ground? Does the playpump make any faulty assumptions about the 'field realities?' Who is paying attention to these lessons? Are they being incorporated into the next phases of implementation?
Yes, you need to ask all those questions and more. Owen's blogposts is all about grappling with questions like this - for him, the answers he's finding aren't really painting a pretty picture for the case of the playpump.
- If you donate to playpumps or to anyone else who promises a 'simple' solution to these sorts of problems, you owe it to the people you think you're saving to understand more about the world that your money is being injected into.

America: You're starting to scare me.

2009-09-29T17:55:00.005+02:00

My old friend twitter brought to my attention the How To Take Back America Conference held this past weekend in the old U.S. of A.

One of the speakers at this conference was Kitty Werthmann, author of Freedom to Dictatorship in 5 Years. Kitty, an Austrian-born survivor of the Third Reich, has believed that Democrats are some sort of communo-fascist hybrid for some time. This time, however, she gave a talk to a packed house on "How To Recognize Living Under Nazis & Communists."

Now, it's no secret that I'm not particularly sympathetic to the tenets of early 21st century American Republicanism, especially the really, really right-wing stuff.

Even so... whoa guys (& girls trying to cope with those pesky feminist attacks on marriage and motherhood). Seriously?

The vitriol being spewed by some of the more... enthusiastic elements of what used to be the right wing fringe are starting to frighten. They're rabid, illogical, and open about their professed right to violence as a possible tool in the fight to take America back from... the communists? the fascists? the feminists? the atheists? (I'm genuinely not sure here - I usually lose the thread of the argument somewhere around the references to the middle part of the second amendment).

I've decided that the best way for me to help America dial back the scary rhetoric and go back to good old fashioned partisan mudslinging is to lend some clarity to some of the terms that most readily apply to the ideas that Mrs. Werthmann and the other folks at the Eagle Forum are so keen to toss out into the body politic. I'm thinking that if we get some clarity around what all these dirty words mean, perhaps we can go back to insulting each other the way nature intended: like we're all 5 years old.

Without further ado then...
Marxism: They hate capitalism, the state, laissez-faire economics, corporations, alienation, exploitation, the bourgeosie and stating their philosophy in a way that would be easy for proletariats (or Joe Plumbers or whatever) to understand. It has also been rumoured that they hate industrialization, but this is difficult to prove because, as previously noted they hate making their philosophy easy to understand. Dudes with crazy beards are good as are labour unions, solidarity, and political plurality. So is class warfare, as long as the proletariat wins.

Calling someone a Marxist is kind of like calling someone an anarcho-syndicalist. It's not naughty if you're correct, because they likely ascribe to intellectually complex ideologies that are probably dangerous to the standard of life that you love and either currently enjoy or aspire to, and they're probably pretty proud of that (pysche! insult turns into a compliment!). If you're wrong though, it's more stupid than naughty. People who aren't Marxists aren't Marxists, and the ones who are get mad when you try and give bourgeosie jerks the distinction of having attained such socio-political enlightenment without them having earned it. Besides, no one really understands what you mean.

Also, Marxist ≠ Communist (or communist!)

Communism: Communists hate private property, people who say they're socialist but really aren't, Marxists who disagree with them, corporations and the bourgeosie. Soviet communists (which are a bit different than just regular communists) also hate Americans and thinking for themselves. Communists (in theory, at least - tbe Soviet communists are again a bit different) like egalitarianism, stateless societies, common ownership of everything, revolutions and big government.

It is widely held that Soviet communists proved that communism is an inoperable ideology - this hypothesis has not been tested widely though.

In America, calling someone a communist! is a fantastic insult. Americans have a proud history of labelling all kinds of dissenters as communists!, regardless of whether or not they have anything to do with Stalinism, Soviets, or even communes. Even school children know that communists! are bad. As a matter of fact, being called a communist! in America has almost nothing to do with communism. So keep at 'er, folks. As long as you mean 'communist!' in the uniquely American homage-to-McCarthyism kind of way and not in the 'someone who subscribes to a communist ideology' way that much of the rest of the world understands it. Because if you mean that second thing, you're being silly again.

Fascism: They hate communists, capitalists, class warfare, political systems with more than one party, and agreeing on universal ideological tenets. Money's good though. So are dictators, differentiated socio-cultural identities based on a common mythology, and successful corporate enterprises that get along with the dictator and makes lots of money.

While lots of people think it's very naughty to call someone a fascist, it isn't, really, because no one actually knows what fascism is. Least of all actual fascists.

Nazism: They hate communists, capitalists, class warfare, political systems without armbands, peace, Europe, America, and lots of religious minorities, stateless peoples, sexual minorities and persons with disabilities. They like secret police, armbands, war machines, and big government public affairs bureaus.They also generally enjoy building large mechanized systems with which to put an end to that which they dislike.

It's very naughty to call someone a Nazi. Seriously. I wouldn't do it if I were you.

And, our two bonus definitions

Godwin's Law: (updated to the parlance of our times) "As a threaded online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." In other words, the more you talk about something that is increasingly tangential to the actual issue, the more likely you are to call your opponent a Nazi. You may or may not be right in this assertion, but the magnetic draw of probability will certainly impair your judgment on this front.

If you fulfill Godwin's law during the course of a discussion, it is extremely likely that you have made yourself and your argument look silly.

Reductio ad Hiterlum: Wikipedia isn't super-helpful here as the article seems to have been written by some sort of pedantic debator who thinks that logical fallacies are self-explanatory.
The basic gist is that this is an extension of Godwin's law: while some Nazi/Hitler comparisons are valid, most follow the principle of reductio ad Hitlerum, which holds that most references to Hitler abandon both logic and reality in order to make an emotionally-charged and argument-ending point that offers a conclusion totally devoid of context, usually via drawing a ridiculous parallel between their opponent and Nazis.
It goes something like this: Hitler wore pants. Because Hitler is bad, pants are also bad. Anyone who wears pants is a Nazi (and Nazis are, of course, bad).

If you utilize the reductio ad Hiterlum model of reasoning, you have definitely made yourself and your argument look silly to everyone except the people who agreed with you before you started talking. Also, you should probably stop wearing pants.

According to The Economist, Godwin's law and the principle of reductio ad Hiterlerum can be taken together to give us the following rule:
"in most discussions... the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument"

You lose, Kitty Werthmann.

Poopyhead.

Compliments

2009-09-14T23:54:00.002+02:00

I've been very lucky in my life and lucky for a lot of reasons.

I was reminded today of one of those reasons: in private, in person, and sometimes in very public places, a surprising number of really tremendous people have paid me the honour of a compliment.

And not just any compliment. No, no - I'm talking about the kind of compliment that leaves you awestruck and humbled; the kind that was thoughtful and measured and eloquent; the kind where you're pretty sure that you aren't really worthy of such praise, but glad nonetheless that someone out there thought so highly of you, if even just for a moment, and found a moment to tell you so.

Don't get me wrong - all kind words, if sincere, are worth saying. But sometimes people say things (or write things) that profoundly affect the person that they're saying things about.

I count myself as truly lucky to have been on the receiving end of words like these. I'd like to say more about the gratitude I feel and how I have tried to grow into a better person as a way of demonstrating that gratitude for this luck of mine. But I never have been very good at that kind of thing.

Instead, I think I might try returning the favour or at least paying it forward.

AIDS Awareness - In Several Guises

2009-09-13T21:02:00.010+02:00

((if you came to this blog by searching for something about how you catch AIDS, please skip to the bottom of this post))

Some of you savvier internet-international development types might think it strange that there has been such a furor over MSF's "Boy" ad and things have (so far at least) remained relatively quiet on the "there is such a bad thing as bad press" front for the AIDS is a Mass Murderer Campaign.

While I can't speak to other denizens of the blogosphere, my answer is that I simply won't be deigning to give it the benefit of a commentary. While the 'Boy' ad may have been an emotive and disturbing composite of real (or real enough) events, the new AIDS awareness ads, while provocative, aren't really even an apt metaphor.

That being said, Google Analytics has pointed out to me that a large percentage of the tiny number of one-time readers my blog has come here searching for something related to "how you can catch AIDS." This is probably because of my You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks post penned after a visit to a Malawian primary school. Not that it matters - the point is, people come to this blog looking for information about AIDS transmission and I want them - even if it's only handful of them - to get access to accurate and helpful information about it.

AIDS: Some Facts & Resources

(It should be noted that I am not a doctor. If you are concerned that you or a loved one has a medical condition, you should seek medical advice. And even if you aren't you should be careful to trust the accuracy of online information, especially on blogs. I have tried my best to provide accurate information here, but I make no guarantees and will not be held liable for any consequences that may arise as a result of misinformation provided here.)

AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome. It is an incurable and life-threatening sexually transmitted infection most commonly spread through having unprotected sex. It is also spread through sharing needles and from mother to child during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Historically, it has also been spread through tainted blood transfusions (though this is rare and NOT a reason to avoid donating blood or receiving transfusions in most places - please, please, please talk to a physician or a blood donation clinic if you have concerns about this possibility).

AIDS is actually caused by HIV (human immunodeficiency disorder). HIV/AIDS is currently classified as a global pandemic.
Both HIV & AIDS are incurable illnesses. Both are also treatable.

Many people who are HIV positive do not know that they have an incurable and life-threatening condition, as symptoms are not apparent in the early stages.

HIV/AIDS itself does not kill people. What it does it destroy the immune systems of people with the virus, making them more susceptible to opportunistic infections and tumours. Just because HIV/AIDS itself does not kill people does not mean that the virus is not deadly: infections caused by the virus have killed more than 25 million people since 1981.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has an easy-to-read and authoritative Question & Answer section on their website that is available in multiple languages. You can find it in English by clicking here.

Care also has an excellent list of resources.

AVERT also offers comprehensive resources.

And I'm sure there are many other good sites out there.

If you are concerned that you may have contracted HIV/AIDS, speak to a physician immediately or get tested for it.

The State of Alberta

2009-09-11T19:15:00.004+02:00

I would like to write a concise, well-researched post about the state of Alberta.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to comb through the hundreds of pages of documentation I would need to look through in order to do that (researching the state of funding for graduate students in Alberta post-secondary education is quite enough, thank-you) nor do I have the energy to put up with the weeks-long bout of increasingly perplexed depression that researching would no doubt cause.

Onto baseless anecdotal blog-drivel then.

This province is in trouble.

And it's not in trouble because I'm an Alberta-hating hippie who is just pouting because the PCs have been in power my whole life or because I'm some kind of socialist nut-job who hates oil, Stephen Duckett, and the private sector.

Some part of why it's in trouble is that writing down the sentence "this province is in trouble" anywhere and daring to allege that even some small sliver of the blame may rest at the feet of the current government will get me called all these things and worse. But that's not really the point - there's partisan political fundamentalism at work in systems other than ours, and I'll save my thoughts on the damage that does for another day.

The vision for a future Alberta is in trouble. No political party is offering an inspirational or even coherent vision for Albertans to get behind. The PCs don't have to and the Liberals and NDP both seem thoroughly convinced that, despite all evidence to the contrary (including their respective performances in the last elections), the most effective way to get their message out to Albertans is to harp loudly and often about how they're not the Conservatives. I don't care what the Opposition parties are not: I want to hear about the Alberta they want to build. The Green Party is folding in on itself (for shame). That leaves the Wildrose Alliance Party - and in the midst of a leadership race, time will tell if they can come up with something that isn't pandering smoke and mirrors. Here's hoping they can.

The quality of representation and respect that (most of us) get from the members of our Legislative Assembly is in trouble. I have been insulted twice in the past four months by public offhand comments made by elected officials - once by Minister Iris Evans, who thought it would be appropriate to say that I wasn't raised properly and once by Doug Elnisky, who thought it would be funny to make a blog joke that I along every other woman in Alberta should get our 'Equal treatment' in little packets at Starbucks. There have been other denigrating outbursts, like Dave Taylor's garbled 'Scopes monkeys' reference... and I have no doubt many that I've missed. The point is, showing such callous disregard for the basic dignity of constituents through comments that have little if anything to do with the actual jobs of elected officials is saddening and absurd behavior.

Our democratic integrity is in trouble. Voter turnout in this province is embarrassing - we sit in roughly the same boat as places like Colombia, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. And people who vote in those places are risking their LIVES to cast their ballots. Since the last election, both the Chief Electoral Officer and the Auditor General have called it quits, and both did it amidst an embarrassingly small furor over government attitudes towards their department that, for me at least, leave serious questions about the ability of our system to behave in a transparent and impartial way when called upon to do so.

Our system is making bad decisions for us. There was a 16 billion dollar forecasting error in the current budget. Let that sink in a bit: the government was wrong about their budget forecast by about 16 billion dollars. That is a lot of money to screw up with, and the consequences are severe. Cuts to education and health both seem to be on the radar - sectors that can ill afford the loss, given that they're both absolutely essential to the success of our province in caring for its citizens and in assuring economic prosperity in the future and given that neither sector has ever really been given the resources needed to recover from the last round of devastating deficit-inspired cuts. All this on the heels of record-breaking surpluses and certain knowledge that the royalty-revenue boom was not going to last forever. What happened? Seriously, guys (and girls - sorry Minister Evans) - we trusted you with this and you should have known better.

The decision has been made to close Alberta Hospital and the government has said (though I don't know if they still stand by this position) that they're working on a strategy for dealing with the patients that would subsequently be bedless - not that they already have one, but that they're working on it after the decision has already been announced. This all in spite of the fact that Alberta has been through the debacle of closing a psychiatric hospital without adequate planning once before (in Red Deer in 1977) and knows what the consequences of that kind of action are (they're bad).

That's not to mention the rest of the health care system. Unless you believe that 'it has to get worse before it gets better,' recent decisions regarding health provision are doing serious damage to the province's health care system that it will take years and an extremely unlikely policy reversal/regime change to fix. At the top of my list is the amalgamation of the health boards into one mega-board which can't possibly be as familiar with local conditions province-wide as their regionally based predecessors were, and it's already starting to show.

And Bill 44 is a nightmare. Regardless of whether or not you think parents should be able to shield their children from controversial curricular content, this piece of legislation is shoddily worded, largely redundant, and causing more trouble than it's worth on all sides.

Even without the research, this sucks. So much so that, other than sending pointless little rants out to sail on the over-saturated waters of the worldwide web, I don't even know where to start with fixing it.

Messages of Hope

2009-09-04T17:14:00.005+02:00

I'm a bit starved for inspiration today... but it's Friday, and I think that blogs should go into the weekend with a most recent post that is either amusing, important, or uplifting. My last post is none of these things, and so I'm wracking my brain for things to say.

Unfortunately, my brain isn't a very good place to go looking for things that are important or uplifting today (I won't comment on amusing - I'm a comedic legend in my own mind, 24/7). That fact is that I've spent a lot of my online time this week feeling pretty frustrated, pretty disgusted, and maybe even a bit forlorn about what humanity is up to.

From the former Auditor General vs. Toronto cyclist incident (which has been reported as far away as India and Malaysia) to the Alberta government's poorly handled and seemingly short-sighted decision to allow the closure of the Alberta Hospital to riots in Gabon to the continuing bad behavior of some Americans, and Canadians and their politicians (never mind all the horrible news in between), I can't help but look back on this week's snapshot of us and see that it looks a bit grim.

'Grim,' however, is a prognosis that I refuse to accept. Here are three little bits of my life that remind me that things can be a little bit better than that if we let them.

"Hold on. Hope hard. It gets better."
-anonymous chalk graffitist, as written on a street in Edmonton on a day when I really needed it

"Quand on se souvenait que tout était sorti des mains et de l’âme de cet homme, sans moyens techniques, on comprenait que les hommes pourraient être aussi efficaces que Dieu dans d’autres domaines que la destruction."
(roughly tranlated: "When I considered that this had all sprung from the hands and from the soul of this one man - without technical aids - , it struck me that men could be as effective as God in domains other than destruction. ")
-Jean Giono, from L'homme qui plantait des arbres/The Man Who Planted Trees

And...
The Change (video)

Happy weekend everyone.

Oh, He Just Forgot. Well, That's Okay Then.

2009-09-03T23:25:00.002+02:00

I'd love to be important enough to forget where all my paycheques come from. that sounds like grand fun.

Peter MacKay drops the conflict-of-interest ball

---

MSF Ad-roversy

2009-09-01T17:39:00.003+02:00

I've been following the discussions raging online about Doctors Without Borders/MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES/MSF's latest ad.

While there are lots of places to link to, I'll give you The Road to the Horizon for an excellent collection of related links and an interesting position on the ad (more on my take on that after you've had a chance to see the thing for yourself).

And here's the ad...

My first introduction to this ad was via a tweet by @geroter, co-CEO of Engineers Without Borders Canada. I was intrigued by George's concern that the ad "further entrenches the typical story of "Africa" in the media." After watching the ad, I tweeted something snippy to the effect of "Are you sure that's Africa? MSF didn't specify the country, so is the entrenchment of "Africa's" story here yours or theirs?" (Sorry George - the dangers of unedited instant internet communiques).

I left it at that. At first. But George's concerns buried themselves in the back of my mind along with some of my own that I had totally ignored, waiting for a chance to strike.

That chance came today, when a friend sent me a story in The Ottawa Citizen about the experiences of two longtime MSF volunteers.

I watched the ad again.

It's powerful - there's no denying that. Who wouldn't be moved to do something (anything, really) to spare that child from the suffering you can hear in his voice?

And someone is soliciting feedback in a big way about this ad (I say "someone" because I'm not sure if it's MSF or if it's Pete their web guy not operating in an 100% official capacity), so my hat is tipped to them for trying to engage with their 'audience' in the world of web 2.0.

But...well, where do I start with the 'buts?'

I don't like it when ads reinforce the collective superficiality of the West by giving us 10 seconds of emotional connection and a sleek, simple solution at the end. This ad is that. Our heartstrings are pulled, and we are told that this little boy needs us to donate to MSF. It doesn't matter where he is, or whether or not MSF would have stopped the militias from orphaning him (which they could not have - that's not the kind of work that MSF does), or the fact that 'fixing' the problems of wherever that poor child is are far more complex than a monthly donation will solve. 'What you can do' is made easy.

There are more 'buts,' like how the desperation of this ad leaves me feeling empty and hopeless, or how I am uncomfortable with how the anonymity of the ad makes me feel like MSF is complicit in this child's powerlessness instead of working to change it, or that, some part of me feels like the tone of this ad is a betrayal of the optimism that attracts at least some of MSF's volunteers to the work that they do.

Basically, I don't like the ad, and it would take me an essay to explain why. So instead of an essay, I turn to poetry.

Many years ago, a poet named T.S. Eliot wrote a long poem called The Wasteland. Eliot's not for everyone. He is for me though. I find myself drawn to his poetry often, wrestling to unlock what he was saying that speaks to me so and seems so much to offer a wrenching and chilling insight into this world of mine. With regards to this ad a quote from part 2 (the game of chess)...

‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

'Africa' never speaks to us because we seem to only want to listen when they are screaming.
We never know what we are thinking because really, we aren't.

I think that we need to do better at both if we really want to help - ads like this aren't really helping.

Finger Shake Hat Tip: Edmonton Intl Fringe and Related Matters

2009-08-21T22:52:00.006+02:00

I've spent much of this week a-Fringing.

I overlooked my annoyance at the fact that the actual title of the "Stage a Revolution" Fringe doesn't actually have the word "Fringe" in it (again) and set off, program in hand.

Despite being a mixed bag, the Fringe remains one of my favourite Edmonton festivals. That being said, it is a mix, so I wanted to share some of the highlights and lowlights of this year.

I spy with my little eye, something that was the same at the Saskatoon Fringe

And that is the Review for this year's Fringe Production of School House Rock: Live! which played at 3 Canadian Fringes.

Planet S magazine out of Saskatoon and SEE Magazine out of Edmonton, ran the same review of this kids' show, with the exception of some extra "a-a-a"s, an added "ABC" and a sentence or two at the end.

Though I didn't compare scientifically, most of the other shows that toured between Saskatoon and Edmonton (including Burlesque Unzipped, G-Men: Defectives, and Raunch) warranted their own made-in-Edmonton review.

Isn't that cheating a little? Sure the show's on tour, but I for one don't really think it's cool for reviews to be touring too.

Speaking of Kids' Fringe: Tsk, Tsk on the Venue Change, Edmonton

Those of you who attended shows for the kids at previous Edmonton Fringes may remember sinking into the beautiful, air-conditioned and centrally located PCL Theatre to take in whatever tickled your fancy.

Not so this year. This year the kids' venue is the Strathcona Community League.
In addition to being a couple of blocks off of the main Fringe grounds (and therefore a couple of blocks from the KidsFringe), the Community League is HOT.
And as much as it sucks to see grown-up shows in a stuffy over-warm venue, grown-ups who go to the Fringe tend to be troopers. Asking kids to sit through a play is enough of a challenge as it is (even a really, really good play). Asking them to do it in a venue that has to tinfoil over its windows to try and keep the natural light and heat out (and, on the heat front, failing miserably) really just isn't fair. While I think it's great that the Fringe does cater to family Fringers, I think they did a better job last year with centrally located kid-friendly programming and a theatre that made it comfortable and convenient for parents to expose their children to the Fringe.

Yay! Volunteer Love!
As much as I'm annoyed about the venue change for kids' shows, I heartily approve of the Fringe making an effort to take better care of its volunteers. Not that the festival hasn't made that a priority before, but the volunteers (along with the crazily overworked staff) are the lifeblood of the festival, and some air conditioning near the box office seems like a lovely idea.

The Shows
I loved loved loved Addition: An Unconventional Love Story, nggrfg and The Be Arthurs Reunion Tour, and most of the other shows I've seen have been great too (including School House Rocks: Live!. Yes, I go see plays for kids. So what? I like comic books too...). Usually there's at least one or two cringe-worthy performances in the bag I manage to see (and, with a couple of solid days of Fringing left, I might find a cringer yet), but this year has been a remarkably entertaining Fringe for me.

The Arts
When I convocated from the U of A, I was fortunate to have Felix (Fil) Fraser join my class as an honorary degree recipient. Fortunate both because Mr. Fraser is a credit to the arts and also because he's a tremendously engaging speaker.
Towards the end of his speech to my class (or half class, as U of A arts now graduates too many students to be in the Jubilee Auditorium all at the same time), Mr. Fraser said something that really stuck with me. He said,

"In the face of the million human tragedies that are a constant feature of our information society, we need to constantly remind ourselves and the world that we humans, who can kill and maim and destroy in the name of self righteousness, are also the ones who make music.
It is the arts that humanize us. Never let anyone tell you that the arts are a frill; that they should pay their own way; that there are more important things in life than the expression and appreciation of human creativity."

I feel echoes of that sentiment when I get the chance to experience the Fringe. It's a madcap expression of the diversity of the human spirit, and it takes the community along for the ride. I love the passion and enthusiasm that the festival brings out in this city, and I especially love that Edmonton has such a great opportunity for so many people to experience the arts, be it for the first time or over and over and over again every single year.

Anyway, like I said, there is more Fringe left to see, so I'm off to go see it.

There and Back Again - Hiatus Over

2009-08-19T18:09:00.002+02:00

Last time you tuned into this blog, I was in Malawi. More specifically, I was leaving Malawi.

Times have changed, and I've been busy since.
I'm back in Edmonton now, working a steady job and getting up to speed on a surprisingly large number of side projects, including The First Drop. As you can tell by its addition to my side-bar, I'm pretty excited about where this project is going, and consequently am putting my proverbial back into it.

I'm also trying to devote time to Better Edmonton, which you can follow on Twitter or find on Facebook.

There are other projects, but they're not quite ready to be aired on a blog.

Which brings me to the question that anyone actually reading this now might be asking themselves: why is this blog back?

Good question. In a surprise twist, here's an honest answer.

I have always found it helpful to write, and have always found that my writing style has only two gears: inappropriately informal and stuffy to the point of academic incomprehensibility.

As one of the voices @thefirstdrop (and on their blog), I feel like writing more will help me get better at sending words forth into the land of Web 2.0.

I also find it helpful to wax philosophical on occasion and I've found that periodic spurts of ranting and raving enhance my calm. Sometimes, there are real pearls in those rants, raves, and waxes that other people find interesting or at least entertaining. And I like the attention. ;)

Last, one of my open secrets (and, hopefully a 'secret' that many more people share with me), I think that lots of the things I care about are worth caring about and, if something is worth caring about, it's worth knowing about, talking about, writing about and even, sometimes, doing something about.

And I still find it helpful to write.

So this is a place for me to do all that. To write however I want about whatever I care about today, to improve my writing generally, to plug causes that I'm doing something about, to rant, to rave, to wax and to wane, and above all, to have my own little slice of fiefdom on the world wide web where I can release personal diatribes and witticisms that serve my purpose - whatever that purpose happens at that particular moment.

With any luck, my purposes will, on occasion, resonate with yours.

-A

The road goes ever on and on...

2009-04-24T10:18:00.002+02:00

News is, I think, best delivered as band-aids are removed; suddenly and quickly with some time set aside to deal with the aftermath.

Out with it then… after some serious contemplation and for a variety of reasons, I have decided to end my placement with Engineers Without Borders Canada early and return to Canada.

The behind-the-scenes preparations for my return to Canada have been in the works for some time already. I delayed announcing this to the wider internet until after I had communicated my decision to my friends and family and to both of the organizations in question.

After wrapping things up at home and at work in Nkhamenya, I will be spending a few days in Lilongwe finishing up handover notes and having some transitional meetings with other members of the EWB staff. From there, I’ll be heading home via Toronto. I’ll be leaving Lilongwe on the afternoon of May 5th and arriving back into Toronto on the afternoon of May 6th. I’ll likely be back in Edmonton later that week.

Though this has at times been a challenging and even occasionally a frustrating experience, I have also found it immensely rewarding. I have been humbled to work with the amazing team of overseas volunteers currently working for EWB am deeply grateful to Engineers Without Borders Canada and to Plan Malawi for facilitating this opportunity. It has been my great privilege to contribute to the work of these organizations and also to work alongside their staff. I have been very impressed by the warmth and support shown to me by my colleagues at Plan, and by the friends I have been lucky enough to make while working and living in Malawi.

I will carry the experiences I've had and the people I've met these past few months with me for the rest of my life.

Thank-you for sharing this journey with me. Here’s hoping I see you on the next leg.

" The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say. "

(h/t to J.R.R. Tolkien for writing what I meant to say before he shuffled off bound for Grey Havens of his own)

[PS: Once I’ve gotten back into gear in Canada, I will be re-designing and re-purposing this blog (have no fear – I do have a design and a vague sense of purpose in mind).]

Easter Weekend

2009-04-17T08:29:00.004+02:00

I know this is a week late - I'm sure you'll get over it.
I had a noteworthy Easter in Lilongwe. I got to spend some quality time with a number of other EWB types including Mr. Kang, my good friend Colleen, Alynne, Megan, Anna-Marie, and Garrett (whose blog I haven't been able to scrounge up. Lettner, Ashley and Enam were also around a bit, but they missed most of the hijinks.

Work was done (as Mike can tell you) and fun was had. There was a delicious eggplant BBQ with guacamole made from fresh avocados - the avocados are plentiful and GIGANTIC these days.

There was also an Easter Sunday spent attempting to make kites which quickly morphed into a paper airplane making contest on account of not having any string which in turn evolved into a series of attempts to make branded EWB airplanes = flying light bulbs for short.

And while retreat was not too long ago, it was really nice to see people again. Friends are great to have and great to see often, and I had some quality time with the ones that made it to Lilongwe. It was really great to have the quality time.

(Oops... I never did tell you about the monkeys, did I? Sorry about that...)

Dare I Say "Done Well?" What is "Development Work" Anyway?

2009-04-14T11:02:00.001+02:00

I say 'development work' or something similar quite a lot in this blog, and no where have I defined what I mean by either 'development' or the 'work' that one might do related to it. That's because vague terms that everyone assumes mean the same thing to them as everyone else are convenient rhetorical devices that I shamelessly employ whenever they suit my purpose.

So, if we were going to get beyond the rhetoric, what is 'development work,' anyway?

According to my trusty Mac dictionary, "development" can be defined as "the process of developing or being developed."

... I may have used "trusty" a little prematurely.

"Develop," then, is defined as "to grow or cause to grow and become more mature, advanced, or elaborate."

Leaving aside the sticky questions about what "advanced" and "elaborate" mean (and especially according to whom) for now (otherwise we'd be here all day), let's move on to "work."

"Work" is "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result."

So, the layman's definition of 'development work' ought to be "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to grow our cause growth so that the object of our work becomes more mature, advanced, or elaborate."
Or something to that effect.

That's a nice, vague definition that raises a whole bunch of interesting questions, no? Questions like:
- (as already touched on) Who gets to define what "advanced" and "elaborate" mean in the contexts of societies that are the targets of development assistance (nevermind "mature")?
- Who is making the effort? Who ought to be?
- In service of who? Of what?
- How do we best go about measuring success?
- Does learning about what kind of effort is involved count?
- When do we get to say 'enough - we have finished growth that is 'development' work and now go do growth that is 'sustainable' social evolution'?

It's also, in the contexts of the work I'm doing, laced with a bunch of assumptions about where we do development work, who 'we' is... and probably others besides.

Lots and lots and lots of people in the development sector claim to have answers to some if not all of these questions. And the ones I've linked to here are just a small sample of the experts - that doesn't even get to the institutions, the non-expert policy-makers, the implementors, the amateur volunteer-type speculators (including yours truly) or even, most important of all, the "intended beneficiaries" of all this (largely held to be people living in absolute poverty or people living in countries where there is widespread absolute poverty).

The truth is, though, that no one has "the" answers. What we have is lots of different answers and lots more questions arising out of those answers (and out of other, complicating factors like what happens when we throw more complicated ideas like "accountability" and "empowerment" into the mix).

For my part, the development work I've been doing so far is a little bit of helping and a whole lot of learning. I'm a volunteer, and I work with people who have a lot of experience doing 'development' in Malawi - all currently employed by a non-governmental organization, but coming from many backgrounds including work in Health, in water provision & sanitation and from governments, NGOs, and the private sector. I'm here to help where I can, to learn more so that I can help more, and to see if I can figure out some piece of this whole "development work" puzzle to help others in the sector work better by getting and then sharing a perspective.

Awhile back, I had a conversation with a traveler passing through Lilongwe. He was French and was traveling across Africa in a Land Cruiser. When he asked me about whether or not I thought I could 'make a difference' in a year in Africa - I could tell by the way he asked it that he was waiting for me to give one of those answers borne of youth and inexperience that runs something like this:
"Sure! My mom told me that if I care enough, I can do anything I set my mind to!"
Instead, I thought seriously about the question and said something like this:
"Probably not. I think though, that I can learn a lot about the challenge and complexity of the work I've signed up to do and maybe I can scratch the surface of understanding it. And I think that, as long as I spend the rest of my life trying to make this year up to the people who taught me about what it would really take to 'make a difference,' this year will be worth it to everyone involved. Plus I might actually discover that there are small things I can do that will change things for the better - but if I do, I'll see that as a bonus."

I still don't know if I was right about the prognosis for my placement on either the learning or the probability of making a difference fronts. But I think I was on to something regarding the essence of what development work is for me. I think, for me, "development work" can take many forms, but at its heart is about being critical of your abilitiy to but nevertheless remaining constantly committed to helping as well as you know how.

Choices, Changes & African Proverbs

2009-04-11T23:04:00.000+02:00

I procrastinate.
This is a fact, and Malawi hasn't changed it one bit.

Today, I'm procrastinating by thinking, reflecting, and "Googling.

Some quotes that speak to me....

“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”
-Robert Fritz

"Hope is the pillar of the world"
-Kanuri proverb

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
-Barack Obama

Choices are the hinges of destiny."
-Pythagoras

"The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."
-Charles Dubois

"They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
-Andy Warhol

"The tears running down your face do not blind you."
-Togolese proverb

“There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy.”
-Anon

"The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn."
-David Russell

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
-Epicetus

"Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'"
T.S. Eliot

"He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers."
-Cameroon proverb

Movie Night in Malawi

2009-04-09T19:01:00.000+02:00

The Prelude

I was eating dinner in the Rise & Shine Diner the other day. It's a frequent haunt of mine (I think I've become addicted to the nsima with beef relish. soooo tasty).

I wasn't in any hurry, so I sat around for a bit visiting with my friend Nelli and Zealous, the niece of the owners of the diner. Zealous is in town visiting over the Easter break, which lasts three weeks in Malawi. The diner was pretty quiet - this was around 5:30 pm, which is a bit early for supper in Malawi.

While we were chatting, someone put in a Nigerian movie.

A bit about Nigerian Movies

When I say "Nigerian movies" I do mean movies made in Nigeria. But leaving it at that is like describing Bollywood movies as "movies made in India." Nigerian movies are their own genre.

Sometimes referred to as Naija movies or Nollywood movies, Nigerian films are usually English-speaking, multi-part movies with slapstick comeday and crazy melodrama. They often involve witchcraft and/or the tension between 'traditional' and 'modern' Africa. They often come in 4 or 5 or 6 in 1 packs of DVDs, so you can watch the whole series of film in one go.

I could say more on these lovely gems... but I won't. Instead I'll tell you about the one that was flipped on in the Rise & Shine.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the exact title of this one... I think it was "Aziwa II."

The Plot
This Nigerian movie was a remake of Pocahontas. And not just any Pocahontas - this one was based specifically on the Disney animated feature.

The film starts with a 'tribal' princess (you can tell she's tribal because she's scantily clad and has her face painted) talking with the 'foreign' prince (you can tell he's foreign because he's wearing an orange poncho and a matching fishing hat). She's begging him to leave because she loves him but her father wants to make war. The foreign prince insists that he's just here to search for the "herb of life" and doesn't want to fight.

They are, of course, interrupted by a gigantic muscle-bound warrior and his posse. Cue the posse of foreigners with guns, who shoot one of the warriors. The foreign prince-guy is captured and, after being sentenced to death in front a a disgraced and hysterical tribal princess, thrown in a bamboo cage.

The princess visits him in the night and they have a touching exchange. At one point, the foreign prince says, "I would rather die tomorrow than live a thousand years without knowing you" (sound familiar?).

Anyway, the execution is interrupted. First the princess realizes that she'd rather die than live without her foreign prince guy and throws herself between the executioner and the prince. Then the prince's posse show up with their guns.

But the prince is betrayed! One of his men shoots him in the chest (it turns out later that they're planning on making off with a bunch of gold that they must have found in part one).

Luckily, him getting shot by his own people causes the tribal king to sympathize with this foreign prince-guy that his daughter is in love with and the village healer brings the prince-guy back to life using the 'herb of life.'

When the prince guy wakes up, the tribespeople give him a big bundle of the herb of life and he rushes back to his kingdom - apparently, he was off on this herb of life quest to save the life of his father, king of the orange poncho people. He strides into the throne room just in time to accuse his would-be murderers of treason as they're telling the king about his tragic death at the hands of the 'savages.' Huzzah!

But it's not over yet - he's left his tribal princess to pine after him and has to go back and sweep her off her feet properly. But the Queen Mom REALLY doesn't want him to go. And, back in the wilderness, the father of our distraught heroine seems to think that this infatuation with the foreign prince-guy is just a 'phase' and is trying to fix up his daughter with the muscle-bound warrior from the beginning. Ooh... riveting.

The End?

Just as the Prince finished telling his fiancee Princess (not to be confused with the tribal princess - this one is wearing an elaborate silver and blue dress and doesn't have her face painted), "I'm sorry, my heart is somewhere else," the electricity cut out. ESCOM, Malawi's neighborhood friendly hydro-power supplier, has a habit of gifting us with inconveniently timed blackouts. Rumours abound with respect to why that might be the case.

Anyway, I have no idea how Aziwa II ended. I finished my nsima, paid my bill, and went home.

Stupid Internets

2009-04-01T22:56:00.000+02:00

So, I hadn't meant to let that other post linger for as long as it has - I've got big plans for a post about what I mean when I say "development work" and I need to tell wonderful stories about a staff retreat (my first trip to Lake Malawi!) involving monkeys and other, more serious things.

Unfortunately, my internet access has been and continues to be a bit sporadic.

Bear with me!

Bad Volunteer Staff Member? Bad Person? Only Human?

2009-03-25T14:18:00.003+02:00

This kind of work encompasses my whole life unless I fight to wall off little pieces to keep outside of the 'me' that works in development.

Some of that is because of EWB's ethos of volunteer sending ("Being a development worker is not a nine-to-five job – it is a lifestyle"), but I can't help but wonder how much of it is universal to the expatriate experience itself and especially in development work (dare I say, done well?*).

When you travel halfway across the world, the trip sort of necessitates you building a new slice of life (nearly halfway, anyway - I figured it out one day and the actual halfway mark for me is actually a bit closer to Sri Lanka). You've left your friends, family, and context on one side of the ocean, and now have to find new friends, family and context on the other. It's a great adventure to do it, but the stakes are high and whatever costs incurred are invariably more at other peoples' expense than mine.

I'm here to live, to understand and to "have a positive impact:" there are tensions between these three things; not the least of which is having the humility to question whether or not I'll ever be able to figure out what a positive impact even is, the understanding that, whatever it is, I probably won't manage it on this contract, and the motivation to try anyway. One of the other tensions is that, in order to ever come anywhere close to achieving 'understanding' of the cultural contexts and pragmatic considerations of living and working here Malawi, it's important to experience Malawian life and culture firsthand (to use one of the more distasteful turns of phrase floating around in development, it's "necessary to achieve a firsthand understanding of the livelihoods of the intended beneficiaries").
By the same token, I want to make friends, have a house, and learn how to cook so that I can live: all these things involve behaving like "intended beneficiaries" are regular people, figuring out what to do about being a relatively well-off traveling white person, and letting go of the need to 'understand' and 'achieve' for awhile so that I can just be.

And all that is just what I do in the evenings. We haven't actually touched on the 'job' yet, in the 9 to 5, contractual responsibilities sense of the word.

So then we have the job. We also have the bits of life that I wall off as mine: my addiction to technology, calls home, brief road trips to the city to shop and eat cheese. Even these things aren't clearly unrelated to my life as a development worker. Communicating home can be about 'raising awareness,' technology is a tool that helps me 'focus,' 'increase productivity,' and 'do outreach.' Even the road trips end up being about work - be it through taking some time away from the office to write down thoughts on development lessons I'm learning not directly related to my project or my partner, time meeting with other volunteers to share experiences and tools, or even accidentally stumbling into a staff meeting in a different city, it's rare for me to go 24 hours without doing something development-related.

I notice the all-encompassing nature of my life as an EWB Overseas Volunteer staffer most sharply when I'm away from that life.

Like now.

Right this moment, I'm sitting at Mabuya Camp (again, not still), writing this post. I've been away from my house in Nkhamenya for a little over a week now. My backpack is packed and sitting beside me, and it's early afternoon. I need to walk or catch a minibus to carry me from expat/tourist-soaked Mabuya to the bus depot, and from there commence the public transportation adventure that will take me back to Nkhamenya.

I don't want to go.

It's not that I don't want to go, exactly. The trip, though a bit stressful (wandering through the market with a backpack in the hot sun while being beset by the wonderful variety of vendors who populate the market) is fun, and usually involves exhilarating brushes with the unexpected. And the bus ride is usually a great space to think, read, and/or meet new people.

And I'm looking forward to being back in Nkhamenya. I've been away for just over a week, and am missing my friends (and, if I dare to admit it, my nsima, compliments of the Rise & Shine diner). There are a group of Pentecostal missionaries from the United States coming to visit the husband of my good friend Nelli, and I want to be there to see them and lend Nelli a hand during what's likely to be a chaotic, crazy-awesome couple of days. I'm also missing and being missed by several of the people in Nkhamenya that I've been lucky enough to call 'friend' (mbwezi) this past while. Three "where are you" phone calls and counting.

I miss sleeping in my own bed, and want to see how disastrous my yard has become without my tender lovin' care. I am not looking forward to hauling water from the borehole, but am looking forward to cooking something homemade with it and to sitting on my couch and walking around in my neighborhood - comforts that are seriously lacking while I'm staying in Lilongwe.

Stalling here is putting me a bit behind at work too. I've got an outstanding project with the Sponsorship Coordinator that I was hoping to work with him to finish by the end of the month and a couple of reports to write. Plus I need to meet with the Health Coordinator to catch up on how projects have been going this part week, get back around to giving a hand, and get the jump on making arrangements to visit another field office.

That being said, I'm still sitting here typing away instead of closing up my computer and starting my journey.

The reason? There are many; some are complex, some are obvious and some are likely subconscious. One is that I'm lazy about traveling in the sense that I dislike all the work that goes into leaving point A in order to get to point B. I'm also a lifelong procrastinator, and the fact that I have a lot of things to do in Nkhamenya is seriously affecting my interest in going, despite the fact that delaying isn't going to make doing my laundry any easier.

On some level, though, it's a relief to be away from my job and my domestic responsibilities. Vacations are always nice - unfortunately, I'm thoroughly unjustified in taking one. That's not what I'm here for, and I think it's a bit of a disservice to my employers and my partner, who are supporting me here on the basis of a shared understanding that I will be giving 110% to the work.

Other than the running water, however, I'm not actually 'vacationing' by delaying in Lilongwe. I'm using the time to meet with fellow volunteers about work stuff, get caught up on 'technical' background reading (which I try not to do when I'm at work and can't do at home owing to the lack of domestic electricity), and get everyone I can get my hands on with EWB onto twitter (outreach!). I'm also trying to use the time away from Nkhamenya to get some perspective on the time I've spent there so far; trying to figure out how I've been doing on balancing the tensions I mentioned above. It's my first time in Africa, my first job as a development worker, and I'm pretty sure I'm screwing important things up; being able to check in with people who have more experience is something I need to do to try (and likely fail, but at least try) to pick through how much of the failure and frustration I've experienced so far is a forgivable part of experiencing, how much requires immediate and severe course correction, and (most troublingly) how much of it isn't me at all, but has more to do with the complex dynamics of 'the big picture.' Successes I can talk about in Nkhamenya - failures are harder territory to navigate with people I've known for such a short span of time whose own jobs and lives are somehow bound up in the work we do.

But do I need to be here to do that? Why am I not trying harder to work through these things on my own in Nkhamenya, or to integrate far enough into local life to find people nearer to my Malawi work and life that can fill the roles that I'm currently giving to the characters and circumstances I meet when I go to Lilongwe?

I don't know if all this makes me a bad volunteer or a bad person who should be doing more and trying harder. All I know is that today I'm in Lilongwe even though it feels like I should be in Nkhamenya.

[UPDATE: My mom says 'only human.' Go figure. ;-)]

A Moment of Weakness Multiplies ad infinitum: @amjhenry

2009-03-17T15:00:00.003+02:00

As some of you may have noticed, I've added a new box to the sidebar of this blog: I've surrendered to IDEAfest-induced peer pressure and registered on twitter.

Twitter is, in my former opinion at least, kind of silly. It's basically a website that lets you 'tweet' your friends/'followers' from the web or from your cell phone to give them up to the minute 'updates' on whatever you feel like keeping them up-to-date on (a more frequently updated version of facebook statuses, for those of you familiar with that little gem of social media). In 140 characters or less.

While I'm still not sold that twitter is inherently un-silly, I've decided to give it a try. While I'm in Malawi at least, I think it might be an interesting way to try and keep you more immediately in the loop about life, times, and crazy random happenstance as they unfold. Hopefully, I can keep up with it (without totally failing to, you know, do good work) and pass along some interesting insights into things here that wouldn't make it to you in the more formal, I-actually-need-to-sit-down-and-think/write-coherently land of the blog.

Please feel free to let me know if you agree - or let me know whatever else you might feel like telling me. Email, blog comment, facebook, or, introducing tweet @amjhenry. I may be far away, but the internet just might be able to keep me at your fingertips (delayed, maybe, or crazy slow, depending on where I am in Malawi, but at your fignertips all the same).

Also, Happy St. Patrick's Day (green beer day!). When this publishes, I'll be in Senga Bay blasting through a working week of EWB Team Meeting.

Maybe I'll tweet to let you know how that goes (though it depends on talk time - text message tweets cost me a 20 units. Ouch).

A Week in Lilongwe

2009-03-15T19:23:00.003+02:00

By the time you get to read this, I'll be in Lilongwe again, en route to Senga Bay for a staff retreat (yay post-dated blog posts)...

Anyway, I spent the first week of March in Lilongwe.
The trip had been coming for some time.

While the past 4 months have been rewarding and wonderful and unlike anything I've ever experienced before and likely ever will again - even if I continue in development work or in living in Africa, I doubt that my first four months anywhere else will ever be identical to these - they have also been extremely challenging, sometimes frustrating, and quite often pretty lonely.

I needed to come to Lilongwe for some meetings. I was overdue for a face to face discussion with my contact at the country office of Plan Malawi about the progress on the Community-Led Total Sanitation project. Two of my areas of responsibility are to "document lessons learnt" and "provide assistance in effective scale-up" of the project. Having been able to make some observations, I was hoping to get a check-in on expectations for 'lessons learnt' and make plans to visit another field office so that I can see how the project is rolling out at other locations and provide an opportunity for the two CLTS teams to 'compare notes.'

I also needed to meet with someone on the EWB Team (southern Africa edition) to talk behavior change and get to know one another so that we can make a space to talk strategy, learning, and other aspects of hygiene & sanitation promotion as they relate to our work.

Those two meetings would have taken 3 days, but a combination of circumstance and deeply personal intuition turned it into 7.

The easy bit first: circumstance.

I had a hard time getting in touch with my country office counterpart due to
a) sporadic blackouts (this is, apparently, because Malawi's hydro-electric dam is getting clogged with detritus in the river...) making email difficult
b) network problems with my cell phone (though it may actually be my cell phone - it seems to be possessed by technological gremlins)
c) 'tis the season for Plan to prepare their budgets for the next financial year - so my country office counterpart is understandably otherwise occupied.

So I came into Malawi for the weekend for my EWB meeting, trusting that I'd be able to call on Monday and make a meeting for Tuesday.

But... Tuesday was a national holiday.

So... Wednesday. But as I was heading to the meeting (and I really mean as - I was about 30 seconds from getting onto a minibus), I received a call from my counterpart: he had been called into a high-level government meeting with sector donors and needed to reschedule. That took us to Thursday. By then, it just made sense to stay awhile longer.

The hard part: personal intuition.
The last month has been hard. I've been homesick for both personal and professional reasons, and have recently been bowled over by a series of really profound personal epiphanies. Personal epiphanies are good, true - but they're a bit difficult to process so far from home and the people that I have been friends with for long enough that they'd understand where I'm coming from.
It's also been frustrating at work, but I didn't really realize that at the time - my frustrations and their sources really only came to my attention after I'd been in Lilongwe for a couple of days.

Anyway, back to missing home: I reached out via email to reconnect with those people -that I was missing and who would just know what I was thinking and where I was coming from without having to really explain - also good. Really good. I'm deeply grateful that I have been privileged to have such close friends and colleagues.

But being able to reconnect with them threw my level of satisfaction, focus and performance at my work with Plan into pretty sharp relief. I still haven't picked through exactly what was going on there, but something was going wrong, and I needed some perspective on what it was, why it was, and what I could be doing differently to make things work better.

Which set off a weird cycle in my personal life. Just as I was making friends in Nkhamenya, and starting to really be comfortable enjoying my life there, I was also being confronted by pretty heavy work and personal stuff that was kind of quintessentially 'Canadian' (as in, related to my life back in Canada - I have no idea what universally quintessential 'Canadian' stuff would look like) and (as I learned rather quickly) extremely challenging to talk to my Malawian friends about. Not impossible - but the degree of challenge in the conversation caused those conversations to be interesting learning experiences of their own that didn't really help me deal with all the, for lack of a better word, 'upheaval' I felt like I was going through. Learning, good - feeling increasingly out of my depth and alone in uncharted personal growth waters - not so much.

So that's how I was feeling, and I kind of knew why (but not really) and it was really messing with my ability to 'be' (useful, yes, but also just 'be') at work.

So I went to Lilongwe. And spending a week at Mabuya socializing with other EWB volunteers, various other development volunteers (including a pack of people from the United Kingdom volunteering as teachers), tourists, and the crazy hodgepodge of expats who are regulars at the camp gave me a profound and much-needed recharge. As much as I'm starting to really love Malawi and find my Malawian friends becoming wonderful, heart-warming fixtures in my life, it helps to be able to talk to people whose life experiences are a little bit more similar to mine.

Some part of me feels pretty conflicted about that admission - I kind of feel like I've cheated somehow. But I haven't delved into why or if that makes sense or is something I should be keeping tabs on in future - right now, I'm just accepting that some part of me knew I needed the time, and some other part of me listened to that little voice telling me to 'go' and took it.

That seems like an incomplete, anti-climactic place to finish. Which is bad blog etiquette, but probably the most stylistically honest way to close.

Til next time.

Canada Plays Snookers With Bilateral Aid

2009-03-11T17:00:00.004+02:00

I've been meaning to post about the Canadian government's recent announcement regarding their decision to shift our bilateral aid focus to the Americas.

I haven't gotten around to it, because the decision makes me angry, but in a "familiar & forlorn, wow, this decision's already been made - way to go, jerks" way as opposed to a "I think they might listen to well-thought arguments and rethink this shadiness" way. Again.

Anyway, EWB Canada is fighting the good fight in Embassy magazine.

Please take the time to at least care.

[Quick aside: what I've written here and here provides a nice, long, "between the lines" summary of my thoughts/fearful predictions of yore.]

Absence makes the... brain explode

2009-03-11T08:17:00.005+02:00

I've been out of Nkhamenya for about a week (more on that to follow - and I really mean it this time. That post is already nearly done).

In the meantime, the place has gone and changed on me!

Minor details first: someone swiped my mop. To be fair, it was my own fault - I left it hanging on the clothesline instead of locked in my house.

There is a row of trees behind my cooking/bathing house that separates the houses owned by my landlord from the properties just behind. I don't know what the trees are called, but they bear tula fruit (which is extremely poisonous and may not be spelled correctly).

While I was gone, those trees were pruned. And I mean REALLY pruned.

While I don't have a 'before' shot, here's a view of the arboreal carnage:

On the other side of my yard, the extremely large house that has been vacant since I moved in (it used to house a PeaceCorps volunteer) has been occupied. That means that I now share a latrine.
Which is a bit embarrassing, as I had neglected to clean my latrine before I left for a week, trusting that no one would have to deal with the declining conditions in the building except for me. Nothing like having to greet the new neighbors with a "sorry about that."

As a result of this new arrangement, the 'long way' to the latrine has now been 'thrashed' (meaning that the grass has been mowed by means of swinging a long thin piece of metal at it with a technique that I have yet to try and master). Which is nice, but the pre-exisitng overgrown state of that path compounds my neighborly embarrassment.

Speaking of 'overgrown,' my yard looks like some sort of strange jungle. That is NOT supposed to happen - my neighbors are all quite careful to keep theirs free of errant vegetation and swept clean.
I have hired the boy next door to take care of it for MK 300 (about $2.70 thanks to the tanked exchange rate - sigh...) but may pay him a bit more to assuage my guilt over how bad I let things get.

My yard:

My neighbor's yard:
(the weird halo effect on the house is rain bouncing off of tin, I think)

Speaking of decrepit... in the week that I have been gone, some sort of blight has killed a bunch of the maize growing in the garden that my latrine is located in the middle of.
The maize belongs to my neighbor. I'm not sure if she knows that a significant portion of it is dead, and am really not sure how to tactfully raise the subject.

Speaking of my neighbor, she has taken to singing in the evenings with her nephews and house guests (both nights I've been back - it's kind of awesome) and has new house guests.

Speaking of new people... At work, one of the field staff has transferred to a different office, so there's a new face.

On my way to work, there are new vendors: a phone booth (which is actually a table manned by someone who stewards the phone and sells mobile phone talk time) has set up in the trading centre, and a previously unoccupied shelter across the paved road from the entrance to my neighborhood (well away from the trading centre) now houses a chip vendor.

Last but not least, mango season has officially ended. It was tapering off before I left, sure, and we had already started buying 'oranges' (which are actually green and quite sour) from the vendors, but there are well and truly no more mangoes to be had.

I had something profound to say about my emotional reactions to all these changes, but I've already made peace with my initial knee-jerk disappointed internal "hey" changing into a quietly reflective pondering of my assumptions about 'timeless Africa' and more pointedly about 'timeless rural life' mixed with a pang of regret on being away from "my" community and some stress about upcoming time away all swept up in an irrational bit of optimism at the end on how changes, no matter how small, show us that bigger things can get better too. Or if not better, at least different (yes, I just said "can get different" - figured I'd share the brain explosion with any arm chair grammarians in the audience).

Instead I say "bring on the guavas!"

IDEAFest Edmonton

2009-03-10T12:52:00.004+02:00

While doing the kind of work I"m doing right now on the kind of contract I'm on has all kinds of difficult and interesting challenges, one of the hardest is simply this: missing things at home.

While I miss my family & friends and personal landmarks like birthdays and funerals, I am today specifically referring to IDEAFest, an event organized by a long-time friend, colleague and collaborator of mine.

I'm going to h/t Chris LaBossiere and shamelessly rip off his description of the event (as I couldn't have said it better myself(:

IDEAfest is a perfect example of how one person can start a movement, and bring people together to discuss ideas in person. IDEAfest was the brainchild of U of A graduate Michael Janz. (his Twitter profile can be found here).

IDEAfest was a rapidly formed event (two weeks of grassroots planning, marketed strictly through Edmonton's Social networking community). It took the format of a larger, popular idea sharing event called TED. What I found exciting is that people were asked to self-register to give presentations on ideas and topics that they were passionate about. If you are one of those that think our younger generations are simply screwing around on Social Networks, I challenge that thinking.

Here is the link to the event that was mostly planned and administered in facebook. you can see that the topics of discussion was very broad, and for the most part the quality of the presentations was exceptional. For a first event it was well organized, and I can easilly see it growing into a new "festival" for Edmonton. Something that we as a City do very well. What could be done better as it grows, is better coordination of AV/Tech needs and attracting even higher quality speakers, but again I have to say the first run was very successful.

I'm really excited to hear about the amazing things going on with social media, with my friends (who are doing amazing things that I expect to see flourish... sadly, even in my absence), and with broader themes around new eras of interpersonal interaction, social intercourse, and intellectual and civic engagement, especially amongst young people.

But I'm also moved by regret. As much as I'm learning here in Malawi and as much as the work I'm doing here is valuable and deeply needed, I feel a pang at not being involved at home. Especially with events and projects that are moving so fast along courses that I so fundamentally want to be involved in charting.

I miss you guys.

What would you do if you were a donor? Some Answers from the Field (Office)

2009-02-18T15:44:00.004+02:00

Sorry for the radio silence. It's because I wanted to give the utter awesomeness of my last post (or note, as those of you who follow this publication on facebook are wont to say) time to sink in.
...
Kidding.

Actually, Malawi has been having some serious electricity issues these past few weeks, which has been making it a bit challenging to stay caught up. In my case, 'caught up' means trying to type and email a quarterly progress report and a project update without the benefit of a computer to do it on and support my counterparts at Plan Malawi who have been extremely busy with some budget stuff.

During one of the irritatingly frequent blackouts (for Canadian and Malawian residents alike), I had an idle chat with some of the staff at the field office.
At one point in our chatting, the community development facilitator who was part of our group (CDF or field staffer) asked me what I'd do if I were a donor to help (here in Malawi, specifically) - it was as this point that our chatting became less idle.*

*[no less paraphrased though - this was awhile ago, so my recollection might not be exactly accurate. Anyway, you'll get the general idea]

I didn't have an answer for him, so I made a joke (that wasn't very funny) and spun the question back to him.

The field staffer in question said he'd spend on getting HIV/AIDS under control, as it affects everything, from food security to the growing challenge of orphans in Malawi.

The ICT Coordinator said dealing with HIV/AIDS as well.

The office assistant said nutrition and research - into AIDS as well but also into health and disease more generally. That's interesting enough, but it was the way he put it that was really profound (and caused both of the other members of our chat to agree emphatically). He said that developing countries need to invest in research because their priorities (HIV/AIDS, malaria, nutrition) are different than those of developed countries (heart disease, cancer). He argued that developed countries devote their time and effort to challenges that affect them, and that it would be really positive if development aid were to go to recipient agencies in ways that stimulated the same.

Intrigued, I asked out of NGOs, the private sector and government, which places (if we were to take this question of research, anyway) donors should direct money to. The CDF said, without any hesitation, that it should be NGOs; because, as he put it, "the money we see given to NGOs at least goes directly to the people." The ICT Coordinator said the private sector, and specifically "those companies at the leading edge of whatever field we mean." The office assistant said "not the government."

Things went sideways then, as we were chatting during the week where Presidential candidates to hand in their nomination papers, officially kicking off election season and the mention of the "g word" of course led to a discussion about that.

A bit later the power came on.

The conversation really left me thinking. Now it can do the same for you (I hope).

What Star Trek is Teaching me about Development

2009-02-09T19:01:00.015+02:00

I'm no expert on the development sector and I'm certainly no expert on Star Trek, but starting in my first couple of days of pre-departure learning with EWB, these two areas of non-expertise have somehow met up in the strange corners of my mind to share insights with one another.
So far, here are the top 4 things that Star Trek has taught me about development:

4. Technology is the engine by which humanity brings to life its most beautiful dreams and its most terrible nightmares
(to paraphrase another bit of science-fiction on the big screen that I'm a fan of...).

It's a theme throughout all the iterations of Star Trek. Technology is everywhere, and it gives humanity (and humanoid variants) tremendous power, but with tremendous responsibilities.
In the future, (aka Star Trek) hunger is all but eradicated (yay replicators!), transport to and from your starship is instant, and all but the zaniest interstellar diseases are no problem.
But... most of the zaniest interstellar diseases are man-made, and many of the tragedies of the Star Trek universe are man (or species similar enough to human to make the lesson transferrable) made. From Bajoran to the Borg, Star Trek continually comes back to the beauty and the horror that technology puts at our fingertips - both in its existence and in the disparity of access to it.
Technologies (appropriate, integrated into more diverse approaches, and otherwise) are viewed as one of the tools we can use to solve the tragedies of the world in which we live. And being able to "beam me up" would definitely make my life easier as well as solve one of the more ubiquitous challenges faced in development - namely, getting people and supplies from Point A to Point B.
On the other hand, technologies are also a fundamental part of the many, many, many problems we're now trying to address - climate change, war, drug-resistant TB and malaria, and the widening gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds are all at least partly because of a technology (or several) developed by humankind.

3. Scotty's School of Managing Expectations is where it's at
This one is from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Relics. Don't ask how Scotty and La Forge manage to be in the same room in the same century: it's better if you just accept it and enjoy the wisdom of this little gem.

Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Look, Mr. Scott, I'd love to explain everything to you. But the captain wants this spectrographic analysis done by 1300 hours.
Scotty: [thinks about it some time] You mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
La Forge: Yeah. Well, I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
Scotty: How long would it really take?
La Forge: [annoyed] An hour!
Scotty: [looks unbelieving] Oh. You didn't tell him how long it would REALLY take, did you?
La Forge: Of course I did.
Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

He goes on to explain that, if something will take an hour, you should say that it will take at least two, be really dramatic about how impossible it will be to get it done in an hour, and then deliver it in the 60 minutes alotted, thus guaranteeing that everyone is really impressed with whatever you did instead of accepting it as part of the job you're supposed to do without any fuss.
That's quite possibly the best fundraising advice I've ever heard. I think it also applies to job performance in general... though only if no one else understands what it is you do well enough to hold you accountable. Which is, in a nutshell, the development sector (how long do you think it actually takes to "document lessons learned regarding the implementation of CLTS in the pilot phase, hmmm?).
[Random aside: The CLTS website I linked to there is new! This excites me, and has delayed the publication of this post, as I stopped editing things to spend some time exploring the new site.]

2. If we can dream it, we can "make it so."
Just before I left Canada for Malawi, I was watching the Discovery Channel in the middle of the night and stumbled across a little special called "How William Shatner Changed the World."
While I'm not sure that everything cool invented since Star Trek first aired can actually be attributed to all inventors since then being Trekkies, I like the idea that a fictional universe helped unlock the potential in humankind to dream. I also like the vision of a better world (and strange, new worlds) that Gene Roddenberry gave us a glimpse of in the original Star Trek and in spin-offs since. The power of the human imagination in both cases showed us all that we can boldly go where no man has gone before - a lesson we can and should take especially seriously when we're trying to improve the world we have.

1. The most effective people and the least effective projects in development have one thing in common: a Kirk Complex.
There's a certain exchange in The Wrath of Khan that sums up what I mean when I say "the Kirk Complex." The exchange is regarding Kirk's impossible success on a simulation in Starfleet Academy (the Kobayashi Maru scenario):

McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.
Saavik: How?
Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.
Saavik: What?
David Marcus: He cheated.
Kirk: I changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose.
Saavik: Then you never faced that situation... faced death.
Kirk: I don't believe in the no-win scenario.

In people, this complex is a strength: it is lateral thinking and perserverance and mental agility and ironclad determination, even in the face of impossible odds (in the case of both Kirk and some of the most urgent development work, of death itself). Attributes that, in my limited experience, are critical to success in development work.

In projects, however, it is stubborn fanaticism in the worst sense: clinging to optimism, even when the signs of failure are obvious and crying out to be seen and responded to; perhaps by a person willing to try something else, even something unorthodox, to deliver a success instead of another doomed silver bullet.

The jury's still out for me on what that means for development organizations, which are comprised of both people and projects (and the relationships between).

Anyway, thus concludes our lesson. Live long and prosper.

My house!

2009-02-04T10:31:00.002+02:00

And other photos...

That's not a good sound...

2009-02-01T10:57:00.001+02:00

I have a story that I’ve been saving for over a month. As I put it to someone who got a sneak preview via text message: what follows is the account of “a small crisis that I’m hoping will turn into a funny story.”

I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not it qualifies as either a crisis or a funny story…

Picture this: it is about 4:30 in the morning on December 13th. A sunny day is just about to dawn in the Warm Heart of Africa. The corn is about 4 inches high and dusted with dew. The muted pre-dawn light is enough to see by, and the smoke from the many cook-fires that will be starting shortly isn’t yet hovering in the air. The doves are though. They’ve already landed on the roof belonging to the hapless star of this story. As for that hapless star, we’ll call her “Namanda.”

Namanda is awake at 4:30 in the morning on December 13th for two reasons. The less compelling of these two reasons is that one of the roosters who lives in her neighborhood has decided to announce sunrise early, and seems to be located somewhere in the immediate vicinity of her window. The second, far more urgent reason is that she needs to use the toilet. The “toilet” in this case is a pit latrine located in the middle of the garden in front of her house. Her house is a nice place made of brick and plaster with a roof of corrugated sheeting. On this fateful morning, she’s been living there for less than 48 hours.

Because Namanda has no furniture yet and therefore nowhere to set things and because she doesn’t understand the rhythm and norms of life in a Malawian town yet, Namanda takes her house keys with her when she goes to use the latrine.

Due to the urgency of the situation on that fateful morning, she does not lock the doors behind her. She drops her keys into the breast pocket of her pajama shirt, slips on a pair of flip-flop sandals (or tropicals as they’re known locally) and hustles out to the latrine.

As she’s doing her business, she thinks, “I’d better be careful not to drop my keys into the pit. That would really suck.” So she puts her hand over her pocket.

She finishes up, makes use of the toilet paper she’s brought with her from the house. With toilet paper in one hand, she turns to replace the pit cover.

There’s a gentle thud – the sound that something metal might make as it glances off of something concrete – followed by the sound of metal clinking against metal and another, more distant thud. Namanda’s hand flies to the previously abandoned pocket, but her brain has already noted the absence of a hitherto comforting weight.

That’s right. On Day 2 in Nkhamenya, I dropped my keys in the latrine.

This unfortunate event in turn precipitated a series of adventures investigating whether or not the house had spare keys (negative), whether I should go through the landlord to replace the locks or if I should take care of it myself (myself, but with substantial assistance from my neighbour), whether or not I could buy the same brand of locks to replace the old ones (negative), and then attempting to purchase the locks and hire the carpenter.

Many a learning experience later, the locks are replaced and I have a shiny new set of skeleton keys.

In retrospect, I strongly advise against dropping keys in the latrine. It's kind of inconvenient.

"Canadians share in the global consensus that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures"

2009-01-28T09:03:00.007+02:00

The 2009 Federal Budget of Canada was released on Tuesday, and was introduced as follows:

"The world is passing through an extraordinary time. Canadians share in the global consensus that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Budget 2009 will help Canada to meet the challenges of our times. It aims to protect our country from an immediate economic threat while providing the solutions we need to secure our long-term growth and prosperity."

I am concerned that the 'extraordinary measures' arising from this consensus are so narrowly targeted.

Basically, this article sums up the situation nicely as follows:
"...there are no fresh ideas about updating international trade rules, or how to help the world's one to two billion poorest. It is a domestically-focussed, Canadian macro-economic document, which is appropriate for the times, but breaks little new ground."

While it's true that the budget "meets our international obligations" - you have to be careful to define those obligations as to our G-20 colleagues and to other industrialized nations. The budget is quite clear on that point, and quite silent on our whatever obligations we may have outstanding to the other 60% or so of the world's population.

While I don't disagree that the Canadian government owes its citizens a good-faith effort to avert the potential impact of this recession domestically (and that such measures may indirectly benefit the entire global economy), I worry that we are turning our focus inward at the precise moment when we need most to be paying attention to the long-term, global consequences of the actions we take in the short-term to stave off disaster.

While it's true that "extraordinary times" are widely accepted to be "dangerous and uncertain times" in this case, I think that they can also be seen as a time of opportunity - with everything that has broken in the last 3 months, we are uniquely positioned to apply innovative solutions to deeply rooted and concerning challenges.

This budget is, I think, a fine example of one of the more tragic dilemmas of Western democracy. Elected by Canadian voters, the Canadian government is accountable to Canadians first and foremost, and so must put the interests of Canada ahead of all other considerations; this looks to be shaping up to be especially true in a post-1990s deficit situation. In extraordinary times, it seems, spending outside of the domestic market can only be justified if it directly benefits Canadian citizens.

I think, Canada, that we can do better than that. In the words of Lester B. Pearson (someone that I think our current leadership could learn a lot from):

"It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world. "

(h/t to Embassy Magazine, the only online publisher currently paying attention to the the global part of the global financial crisis as it's playing out in Canada)

My Head, My Heart And My Hands May Be in Malawi...

2009-01-23T18:00:00.004+02:00

...but at least one of my feet is in an all-too-familiar Chamber in the halls of my alma mater...

Have a good weekend.

Obama, Obama, Obama

2009-01-21T11:39:00.004+02:00

This needs to be quick as I have real work to do, but the political science nerd in me couldn't let the inauguration of America's 44th President pass by unremarked.

First of all: yes, people the world over (read: in Malawi at least) really were paying attention to the inauguration proceedings.

I haven't seen a Malawian paper yet today, but the weeks leading up to the inauguration have been sprinkled with stories about the newly minted President. As far back as November, American Ambassador Peter Bodde was warning Malawi that Obama's election could mean renewed pressure for democratic reform. A couple of weeks ago, both papers ran stories quoting Bodde quashing any hopes of a Presidential visit in the first 100 days. This editorial in The Daily Times on Obama's oratory style was a really interesting read last week.

Anyway, a number of people in the office spent last night watching the inauguration in various T.V.-equipped locales around Nkhamenya (the speech wrapped up around 7:30 p.m. local time). One fellow from work showed up this morning with a digital video recording of the address; another has already printed off a transcript of the speech and has half-jokingly vowed to "imprint the words on his heart." Someone also keeps wandering through the office singing "Obama.Obama.Obama" in a rising chant. The whole event is also a hot topic of conversation... in particular people are (unsurprisingly) interested in Obama's hints at foreign policy and what the talking heads on PressTV and other outlets have to say about it.

For my part, I stayed late at the office last night and attempted to watch via online video feed. One of my colleagues left to try and watch it at a neighbor's but came back, foiled, because the neighbor didn't seem interested/was under the impression that the speech had already aired. So we cosied up to the laptop to watch streamed video, which glitched and we missed a lot of the speech (as the video froze and lurched forward, played for a few seconds, then froze and lurched forward again).

We got the general idea though.

I'll save critical analysis for some other day - right now I have to go to a meeting to discuss work schedules for the next two weeks (I have a village stay, site visits to some Community-Led Total Sanitation projects, some software training and at least one visit to the field to learn about home visits to sponsored children to coordinate).

Not in Africa, but...

2009-01-20T08:32:00.005+02:00

While skimming through the world news this morning, I ran across this feature on the BBC, written by a girl living in Pakistan.

It's a diary of her life in the Swat Valley region of Pakistan. The area used to be known as "the Switzerland of Pakistan," but has lately been making headlines as a hotbed of Taleban activity and the focal point of their campaign to close/destroy Pakistani private schools in an effort to stop the education of girls.

Education and the rights of women and girls have long been causes dear to my heart. Since coming to work with Plan, I've found that the listening to the voices of children (and protecting their ability to speak) has joined the list of causes I'd like to advance. With that in mind, it goes without saying (though I'm going to say it anyway) that this article struck a chord with me.

I touched on the education of girls in a previous post sometime back. Though I still don't know if achieving real success in development is as 'simple' as "getting girls (especially rural girls) into and through school up to the 8th grade," but I'm pretty sure ensuring that girls receive educations is a pretty significant step in the right direction.

Education is a a huge economic asset; for women especially, it opens doors to economic self-sufficiency and sustainability in the future. It's also been shown in studies all over the world that more educated women marry later (read: when they're women and not themselves still children), have fewer children, space the children that they do have, are substantially less likely to die in giving birth to those children, and are more likely to have children (both boys and girls) who themselves attend school and reap the benefits that it brings. And that's just the benefits to the girls themselves; the benefits to the countries and communities in which little girls grow into empowered and inspired women are nothing short of profound. (You can check out the reports being published by Plan as part of their Because I Am A Girl campaign for more detailed info).

In Gul Makai's case, you can already see the difference education has made. Being able to read and write allowed her to share her story with the BBC: maybe, just maybe, the education she already has will help her secure the education she and others like her need and deserve in the future.

You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks

2009-01-18T15:18:00.007+02:00

As part of my orientation to Plan and the projects that I'll be assisting with for the rest of my placement, I've been visiting schools in the Kasungu District participating in the School Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion Project. The project is partly funded by the Plan Canada office, which is neat - it was both surreal and really exciting to see development dollars from the true north strong and free at work here in Malawi.
I'll write more about the project later (read: I want to run my post by the powers that be at the office to make sure that I'm providing a fair representation of one of their projects so as not to mislead fellow Canadians who may also be donors to Plan). For now, I just want to share a brief and deeply affecting episode.

We were visiting Mpsaszi Primary School to deliver construction materials and meet with the headmaster. Though I don't remember exactly the order, Mpasazi was later in the day on our first of 2 days conducting visits - probably the 5th or 6th school. So I knew the ropes.
1) We arrive in the Planmobile.
2) School is already out, so we either wait for the headmaster to come from his home (which is always nearby) or are greeted by the headmaster.
3) We go into the headmaster's office, make introductions, receive an oral progress report on the project including any oustanding problems, and sign the visitor's book.
4) We walk out to the construction (in this case, latrines) to inspect progress. These inpsections have been a great learning opportunity for me, both in terms of seeing what "good" and "bad" Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines (VIPs) look like and in terms of having the chance to talk to Sam, the field office manager (aka the "PUM"), Chingati (the Health Coordinator) and Tuntufye (the project point person) about the ins and outs of the project and Plan's history with each of the schools we visited.
5) We make sure the materials are all delivered and either chat with the headmaster, the teachers and the gaggle of children that has inevitably materialized or we pack up and go.

This visit went exactly according to the steps outlined above, with just a minor deviation in Step 3.

After showing us into his office, the headmaster was called outside to discuss the construction materials, leaving me with a little bit of time to kill. This headmaster's office, like all of the others I've seen in Malawi, doubles as a store-room for miscellaneous supplies and academic materials. The upper-primary school English textbooks happened to be on a shelf at eye-level, so I picked one up to flip through, curious about the curriculum in Malawi.

The second page of the book features a lively cartoon of children sharing books (a common occurence in Malawi - there never seem to be enough textbooks to go around), with this caption:

"You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks."

The previous page is also a message about AIDS - about how children with AIDS are children too; they're just special children. But it was the targeted mythbusting really dropped my stomach to my feet.

Occupying the intermediate space somewhere between "reading the statistics" and "attending the funerals" this single page brought home one of the major realities of Malawi to me in a potent, de-abstractifying way. High HIV/AIDS prevalance (one reasonably reliable estimate puts adult prevalence at 14.2%) means that children living with HIV/AIDS or at risk of being exposed to it are real, ever-present, and one of the many things that children in Malawi must be educated about that simply are not issues for the vast majority of children in Canada. I tried to put myself in the shoes of the children who must accept peers with AIDS or worse, have it themselves; with the teachers who face HIV positive pupils in primary school; and with the parents who have to field those awkward questions that children bring home from school about HIV/AIDS before we even get as far as the birds and the bees. I have a sister who will be entering elementary school fairly shortly: soon, my mom will have to explain why some children need wheelchairs or why she has to be careful about taking peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. The analogous situation here here is explaining to a child why some of her classmates have a deadly virus transmitted by sex, body fluid transfer, or from mother to child.

I pretty much failed outright in my attempt - it's just too big a thing for me to understand without ever having had to live it. But trying was a sobering experience.

A Walk Home

2009-01-14T08:48:00.001+02:00

This is one slice of life in Nkhamenya. It was a particularly good one.

On Tuesday January 6th, I knocked off from work at about 6 ‘o’ clock. The sky was already starting to darken to dusk, owing to the large thunderhead building on the Western horizon and to the fact that the sun sets before 7 here.

Some of the field staff offer to give me a ride home on their motorcycle, but I decline. The skirt I’m wearing is inappropriate for motorcycle travel and anyway, I kind of want to walk.

The air was cool and smelled of rain – Malawian rain-smell is fresh and cool, like at home, but it doesn’t have the sharp, clear edge that it does at home. The view is breathtaking. Plan’s office in Nkhamenya is on the southern edge of town on the top of a hill. Heading north (towards my house) is a valley where the Nkhamenya trading center is, then another, gentler hill where the town unfolds. From the paved road in front of the office, you can see mountains in the distance to the northeast that mark the boundary between Malawi and Zambia, the town in the valley and sprawled up the next hill, and farmland and more town and villages to the east.

On this night, the eastern sky is clear and blue, while the mountains are gently greyed by falling rain, and a breathtakingly impressive thunderstorm is (as I’ve already mentioned) billowing in from the West.

I set off at a brisk pace, wanting to beat the rain home, and am promptly interrupted by running into Macfarlane, one of the men who lives near the maize market on the southeast edge of town. We exchange greetings in Chitumbuka (“Matandala? Tatandala makola. Kwali imwe? Natandala makola.”) and then I get lectured for not coming to see his house on the weekend. I promise to do it later in the week, and we part ways.

A little farther up the road, I’m flagged down by one of the local women who wants to chat. I decline the invitation in broken Chichewa (“Ndifuna kupita ku nymba… mvula zibwera”) and she laughs and wishes me well in Chitumbuka (“Muyendi makola”). A gaggle of children spot me from across the road (“Azungu!” Hello!”) and I pause to wave and laughingly reply like I do every day (“Hello! Good-bye!”). Then I continue on my way across the bridge just before the trading center.

Neli Ngoma and her family live in a compound just across the bridge – they’ve sort of taken me under their friendly and generous wings since I’ve moved to Nkhamenya. Frank, the father, is just pulling into the driveway with his bicycle. We stop to chat (exchanging greetings in Chichewa and then chatting in English). He’s just come from the field, and is looking forward to the rain. I’m planning on stopping at the restaurant his wife works at for supper. Which works out well – Nkhamenya has a resident madman who likes to throw stones at people and speak to you in unintelligible rhyme and Frank spots him headed our way. Frank escorts me to the restaurant – the rain seems to be due at any minute, but hasn’t started yet.

We sit and chat for a bit while we wait for Neli, Frank’s wife, to come from the kitchen of the diner. They’re busy tonight so it takes her some time. After she’s spoken to Frank and I, Frank leaves and I sit and visit with Fatsani, one of the other women who works at the diner. We chat about school, our families and about Canada, and she translates the choruses of the music videos playing on the restaurant’s TV.

After chatting for about half an hour, I remember that I wanted to order dinner. But Fatsani and Neli already have me covered. I have nsima with beef relish and am told that it is a gift – they flat out refuse to take my money (it’s a fight to pay for the bottle of pineapple Fanta I had while I was visiting with Fatsani). By now it’s about 7:15 and night has completely taken over – but no rain yet.

I say “night has taken over” and not “it’s completely dark” because it’s nowhere near dark outside. The thunderhead has blown into the east without loosing the storm, and the sky is alight with a waxing quarter moon and stars like I’ve never seen. Winter stars in Canada are bright, but rainy season stars in Malawi seem so close. And even at half-mast, the moonlight is bright enough to cast shadows; you can even still see the dark outline of the mountains in the distance.

I walk the rest of the way home without running into anyone I know. Once the blaring music from the local Chibuku bar fades, the quieter sounds of town at night set in – crickets, bats, and the metallic creaking and running water sound that means someone is drawing water from the borehole near the second bridge (a Chibuku bar is hangout that mostly sells locally brewed Malawian “beer” that comes in cartons and that I haven’t been brave enough to try yet). Just past the second bridge, I turn west off the paved road onto the lane that leads to my home. I can hear children laughing, women doing dishes or the sounds of people visiting by candlelight as I pass by the many, many houses crammed into my neighborhood (you’re never alone in Nkhamenya).

The maize garden in front of my house is beautiful in the moonlight. I stop to admire it a bit before dropping my things in my house and then stopping in next door to visit my neighbor. After a brief chat, I head back into my house, stopping on my porch to again admire the view before retiring for the night.

A Little Bit of Awesome in Africa

2009-01-07T11:53:00.002+02:00

My neighbor has a dog, and that dog has a name and the name that it has (other than my neighbor's dog)... is Chuck Norris.

That is all.

Christmas Photo

2009-01-06T11:55:00.001+02:00

(h/t to Alynne for this beautiful shot of the southern Africa half of our sending group tooling around on the Zomba Plateau)

Spark Notes Update

2009-01-05T09:01:00.002+02:00

Happy 2009!

I live in Nkhamenya, a town/village (I've heard both - I personally lean towards 'town') 60km north of Kasungu on the M1, Malawi's main north-south paved road. For MK 4000 (about $35 CDN) per month - MK 5000 when/if the electricity gets hooked up - I have a 5 room house all to myself. Tin roof, brick & plaster, glass windows with burglar bars, locking doors, concrete porch - the whole nine yards. Also, 5 rooms is A LOT, as the latrine, cooking house and bathing room are all detached.

Work is good. I'm still learning the ropes here at Plan, but I've been able to attend (and help with presentations at) several training sessions on things ranging from Plans School Linking Program to Community Led Total Sanitation facilitation. I'm learning software by the bucketload, figuring out the filing system, and visiting the field whenever I can.
Work updates will get more interesting when I can update my photobucket with new pictures. I promise.

Life in general is good this new year. There's no shortage of people in the area wanting to be friends (though attempting to learn ChiTumbuka and ChiChewa at the same time is proving to be a bit tricky), the weather's good, and the market keeps me full of vegetables.

To Profit or Not to Profit?

2008-12-31T16:00:00.005+02:00

I know, I know - I'm supposed to be writing about what I'm doing. Bear with me awhile longer - this one is about something that got me thinking.

This article in the New York Times has caused a bit of a stir in some corners of the development blogosphere (I stumbled upon it here and followed up with some additional interesting reading here).

The gist of the question floating around is this: should people/organizations/CEOs who do development work be able to make money "helping?" How about a lot of money?

I don't have an answer to either, but they are interesting questions.

In trying to come up with an answer, I've come across the following additional questions and observations.

-Most people don't like it when other people make more money than they do. This stigma needs to be avoided by NGOs (who rely on donations from 'most people' either directly or through taxes) to function. It also needs to be ignored entirely when discussing whether or not it's ethical for NGO CEOs to make big salaries.

-The discussion on whether or not NGOs and the people who work for them tends conflate the question of whether or not aid staff should make a living wage with the question of whether or not they should be allowed or encouraged to make A LOT of money. They're two different questions. The answer to the first one is a resounding YES as far as I'm concerned. People who aren't making a living wage doing development work aren't maximizing their impact: they're learning a lot about the conditions they're trying to change via first-hand experience, but at the expense of being able to focus on and innovate in the work of changing them. I am fortunate enough to work/volunteer with an organization that provides me a stipend that I count as a living wage. While I can't live forever/start an RRSP with the stipend I get for being an EWB Canada volunteer, I can live comfortably in Malawi, and that helps me do (or at least try to do) better development work.

-The question of whether or not development professionals should make A LOT of money is trickier. One school of thought holds that a good way to improve development work is to reward good work and/or to use material incentives to attract talented people (aka pay people more) while another camp firmly holds that development work should be a reward in and of itself and that people who are attracted to such work for the money are simply the wrong sort of people to be doing it. I don't know enough about what "talented people" in development look like to declare whether or not money is the answer to unlocking their true potential, and I'm 100% convinced that, either way, the definition of "good work" needs a pretty serious overhaul before we can say that more money in the form of salaries will encourage it.

-On the "good work" point: an argument in favour of higher salaries is the meritocracy effect. Reward people for good work and the good work being done experiences a net increase. Kristof highlights the point in the example of Dan Pallotta, businessman-turned-pariah. I don't disagree with the logic: it seems to work in sales. I worry though about whether or not the targeted outputs of development work
a) exist in any sort of useful, form; and
b) lend themselves to the creation of salary brackets.
Outside of fundraising, how do you quantify whether an organization or a CEO or an individual field-level staffer is doing "good work"? By number of beneficiaries reached? Number of committees trained? Money spent on projects? Community members who feel they were "helped" by the organization when asked on a survey?

-I get the feeling that this discussion is about expats who are based in developed countries and go do development work in developing countries and largely being conducted by those expats and the people living in the developed countries that they're based out of.Do the terms of the discussion change when we're talking about local NGO staff? Should the Malawian Head of Malawi Fresh Water (this guy's partner organization) be subject to whatever moral consensus we reach? How do we involve such people in the discussion? (I'm going to ask around at my office next time I have the chance - knowing what Malawian development workers collecting pretty decent salaries think about this whole mess would, I think, be rather interesting).

-I have serious reservations about the implications of thinking about aid as an industry. These reservations need some more thinking (they're even more half-formed than my thoughts about NGO salaries), but I raise them because the question of whether or not aid is and should be an industry, with experts, careers, pensions and bottom lines is a thorny one that directly relates to how the sector's employees should think of themselves and be treated. My knee-jerk reaction is to rail against industrializing aid - I am motivated to be here by the (vain, perhaps) hope that I can work myself out of a job, and anything that lends more permanence to development infrastructure than is minimally necessary makes me nervous. On the other hand, 'industry' and the private sector more broadly have pretty good track records in solving some of the problems that hamper the work of development agencies. Areas of best practice like staff retention, professional development, organizational efficiency and output quality control might benefit from a more 'industrial' touch than the one currently being administered by us starry-eyed idealists.

-In case you're a data type, the Canadian government graciously hosts a database detailing the tax documentation filed by registered charities. The salaries of EWB's CEOs are quite modest, by the way.

That's all the food for thought I have for now.

So... the "weekend," eh?

2008-12-28T18:04:00.000+02:00

By "this weekend" I apparently meant "early 2009."

Sorry!

I'm just in the process of returning to Nkhamenya (my home - more on that later) from Zomba (where I spent Christmas - more on that later as well).

I'm going back a few days early so that I can clean my yard and write the updates I've been promising before I go back to work (more on that later).

*sheepish grin*

Happy New Year!

Give the Gift of Opportunity

2008-12-19T11:20:00.004+02:00

So...I'm planning on writing a more substantial update over the weekend, but in the meantime, please allow me to share EWB's current fundraising campaign with you.

The Gift of Opportunity Campaign is a chance for people to contribute to the work that EWB is doing in Africa.

I know that barely any time has passed since the wide world of Amanda and friends (and friends of friends and random officiandos of handmade jewelry) pitched in to fundraise for this year in Malawi. I'm not trying to pressure you into donating again. And EWB certainly isn't one of those "now that we have your email we're going to use it to ask for money ALL the time" organizations. I just wanted to let you know that the opportunity to keep supporting the work that I'm doing is there if you're so inclined.

I hear tell that it's becoming increasingly fashionable in some circles to make donations of material aid in the names of friends & family in lieu of Christmas gifts. This isn't quite the same - you don't get the satisfaction of seeing photos of your specific beneficiary with the specific goat that you bought. You do however get to contribute to the work I'll be doing to assist Plan International in their work in Malawi to ensure that Malawian children, their families and their communities have access to safe water & adequate sanitation to free them from the entirely preventable spectre of water-borne disease.

That's a pretty solid showing of Christmas spirit in my opinion... even without the goat.

What’s in a Name” – The ‘Amanda’ Mystery

2008-12-10T09:00:00.000+02:00

“Dzina langa ndi Amanda.”
(My name is Amanda.)
[insert mysterious grins from adults or the pealing laughter of children here]

By Day 2 in Malawi, I knew there was something fishy going on with my name. Despite being far more pronounceable than some of the other Canadian monikers I’m chumming around with (“l” and “r” are pretty interchangeable sounds in Chichewa, making Alynne, Garrett and Colleen all exercises in hilarity ), my name rarely fails to prompt some surprise or amusement from whoever I happen to be getting acquainted with.
Armed with this suspicion, I decided to do a little bit of investigating.

I chatted with children with no real success.
I listened to the radio with some of the kitchen staff and made a surprising discovery.
I pulled in some help and got fellow EWBers (most especially one Graham Lettner) on the case.
I put some of my question-asking powers to work.

And before the month was out, my associates and I made a surprising number of interesting discoveries about the many reasons for the hilarity of being named Amanda.

• There’s an Amanda brand margarine. We’ve only seen it in one shop though, so as much as that’s kind of funny, it’s probably not the root cause.
• “A” is an honorific prefix in Chichewa, and “manda” is the Chichewa word for “graveyard.” So if I say my name slowly and deliberately, stressing the wrong syllables, it sounds like my name is “graveyard” or “Mr./Mme. Graveyard.”
• According to a book currently in the possession of one of the other EWB volunteers, amanda is also a title used by members of the Nyao in some of their activities (I know that’s pretty vague…still working on figuring out the whole Nyao thing…).
• Most people here introduce themselves by their first name or their first name and surname together. But if you wanted to introduce yourself by surname only, a man would say “A [surname]” while a woman would say “Na [surname]. So not only is my name “Graveyard,” it’s funny because I’m introducing myself as “Mr. Graveyard” (A Manda) instead of “Mrs. Graveyard” (Na Manda).
• Amanda Robinson (Or Robson, potentially) is the name of a radio personality on one of the big Malawi stations. I’ve been asked if I’m her a couple of times. Oh, the celebrity.
• Amanda and similar names like Tamanda and Miranda are fairly common Malawian names. Meeting a white foreigner named Amanda has actually given some people I’ve talked to pause not because it’s a weird name but because its weird for a strange person from a faraway land to have such a normal name.

Mystery solved. For now…

Really, Canada? I leave you alone for 3 weeks and this is what you come up with?

2008-12-06T19:20:00.002+02:00

Though I’m half the world away and have my hands full getting settled in Malawi, I am at the end of the day still a Canadian and a politics nerd: I can’t help but to be following what’s going on in the true north strong and free. [This post does meander around back to being on topic eventually, but not in a “and we all lived happily ever after” kind of way…]

Others (daveberta, albertagetrich, Chris LaBossiere and Six meetings for starters) have all said much of what I’m thinking, albeit with their own editorial slants that I don’t necessarily agree with. I’m a little horrified, a little mystified, a little intrigued, and (saddest of all) remarkably unsurprised that Canadian politics have degenerated into such a shambles in such a short amount of time.

I think the budget update/campaign finance sneakaround that the Harper government tried to ram through was absolutely shameful; to even attempt such blatant partisan hackery at a time when real vision is needed to shepherd us (Canada and humankind a bit more grandiosely) through this mess is political opportunism at its worst. To screw it up so badly is equally ridiculous. And then to scream “separatist” at an already politically alienated Quebec… Nevermind the irony of staving off such a shady “backroom deal” oust via closed door meeting with the appointed representative of the Queen of England. It boggles my mind.

Then again, the Opposition isn’t exactly rising to the occasion either. The possibility that Harper is running away from “parliament” is NOT the issue here, nor will an unstable and – let’s face it – leaderless coalition of the desperate “fix” anything. Especially not one so beholden to the interests of Quebec’s self-appointed protectors and so devoid of focus on any objective higher than sticking it to the nasty mean Prime Minister man. That’s not cooperation – it’s collusion, and it’s the kind of collusion where everyone gets cheated but no one is really deceived.

As a Canadian I’m annoyed and disappointed in all this, and, despite all prior indications, still did expect better from my duly elected representatives. As a Canadian development worker living in Malawi, however, I’m swiftly coming to the realization that, whether I can expect it or not, I require better from them in order to do what I came here to do.

The ‘why’ goes something like this:

Both of the organizations I work with (EWB Canada and Plan Malawi) rely on donors for their funding. In the current global economic climate it’s likely (read: virtually certain) that both the pool of donors and average size of individual donations is going to shrink this coming year as people in the West start bunkering down for the rough ride ahead.

Cue the vicious cycle: hard times hit people and institutions in the West (donors) who in turn start trimming away their excess expenses (donations), increasing the financial constraints facing development agencies (my employers) which decreases either the scope, the number, or the efficacy of development projects (the work I do), thus passing along the hard times to the people who would’ve benefited from the projects had agency funding remained the same and who are additionally trying to survive the same financial crisis hitting donors but from a position of poverty such that they were the intended beneficiaries of development aid in the first place (the people I see and talk to every day I’m here).

I can’t fault individual donors for making that choice. People in Canada just like people in Malawi just like people everywhere else have a lot of responsibilities and tough choices to make, and I’d have a hard time arguing against people at home making the choices that will do the most to help those nearest and dearest to them (though I can probably make a good case for it not being an either/or scenario - some other day).

That being said, the money and the commitment and the vision need to come from somewhere and that 'somewhere' is the government of Canada, opposition and majority members both; the men and women who were elected to govern on our behalf and in our best interests, with conscience and with a view to elevating the state of our nation(s) and who have a responsibility to set aside their partisan squabbles when push comes to shove so that they can get down to the business of charting a way forward.
And no, “need” is not too strong a word.
Though I have no doubt I there are grand systemic arguments about justice and our responsibility as global citizens that I could make, the “need” for this commitment that I’m feeling right now is far more personal than grand theories of humanitarianism can communicate.

If the Canadian government fails to strike the hard balance between what’s good for Canada on the surface in time for the next election and what, in principle and in light of the reality of the world around us, is actually the right thing to do, I lose out. I lose an implicit support from my fellow Canadians and from my government that the work I’m trying to do here is something that people ‘back home’ value. The work I hope to do this year loses out as the prospects for the sustainability of Canadian-funded projects dim. The people I’m living and working with and for lose out too: this financial crisis affects them in ways that might actually kill them or their children, and the diminishing capacity of development agencies to do the work that they have been established to do exacerbates those effects. In the year that I am here, the lives of Malawians living in poverty (and even those who are better off) get harder instead of the already elusive easier or maybe even better that everyone was hoping for.

This risk of ‘losing out’ always exists, and was something I came into development sort of expecting to have to face. But the events of this past month have really thrown a sharp focus on the consequences that the mix of global financial systems and national politics at home can have here. If these challenges are not navigated bravely and carefully by the people in charge in the countries with the cash, being the change I want to see won’t be enough. Without commitment from something larger than me, the work I do this year might just wash away as the organizations I work with lose the ability to carry on building on their past projects.

From what I’ve seen this past while, I don’t trust the current Parliament to figure out what would be good for Canada in the short term, nevermind to engage in a sober, probing, and ultimately inspiring dialogue about striking a just balance between those short term needs and what Canada needs to be doing to contribute to a better world and a better future for us all.

And that scares me.

Reality TV Africa

2008-11-28T09:37:00.003+02:00

Big Brother 3: Africa just wrapped up, and it’s a pretty big deal here. In a real nail-biter, Ricco from Angola and Hazel from Malawi tied in the number of countries that voted for them, forcing a tie-breaker count of the percentage of actual votes cast. Hazel lost by a hair, meaning that Ricco took home the big cash prize of $100,000 USD. Though the second-place finish was a bit of a disappointment, making it to the finals has made Hazel a bit of a national celebrity. She’s big news in both The Daily Times and The Nation, and the President of Malawi issued a statement congratulating Hazel for making it so far in the competition. According to State House Press Officer Chikumbutso Mtumodzi,
the President feels that Hazel’s performance on the show proves that Malawians have got what it takes to perform in international competitions (like Big Brother Africa).

“The President is therefore encouraging all boys and girls, men and women to enter international competitions as one way of putting our beloved country on the international map,”

he said.
According to the Daily Times,

“the race also revealed that all Western African countries voted for Ricco while countries in Southern Africa voted for Hazel except Zimbabwe which voted for their housemate.”

Two things in particular strike me as interesting….
1) Reality T.V. is somehow everywhere. Though I haven’t been here long enough to truly experience the BBA hype, stories from other OVS tell of patrons jamming bars & restaurants to watch the show in scenes that look eerily like Survivor parties (the early seasons, anyway) back home. For those of you reading this blog for more academic purposes (*cough* HLS students), it might be interesting to think about how things as zany as reality T.V. can help us understand the ups and downs of globalization; I know that BBA is definitely giving me food for though on that front.
2) Regional and national pride. Though I haven’t really talked to anyone local about their take on Hazel’s second-place finish (something I intend to do in fairly short order), the fact that President Bingu wa Mutharika seems to see Hazel’s achievement on the show as a potential source of national pride intrigues me, especially in relation to the regional ‘bloc’ voting that seemed to occur in the finals*. I don’t personally take reality T.V. contests very seriously; in fact, I find the Canadian/American versions of shows like Big Brother (with a few exceptions) to be vacuous and irritating. But if Hazel really is an inspiration to Malawians (or Malawi as a more abstract concept), I wonder if there might be more to Big Brother Africa than meets my untutored eye. Politics and entertainment news are often closely linked (ONE anyone?) and I certainly don’t understand the links in Malawi yet… but Hazel has definitely got me thinking about the power of pop culture.

*If you notice me saying “seem” a lot, it’s because I’m looking at all this with an outsider’s point of view; as such, I probably got a lot of it wrong. But I thought it might be valuable to share my impressions anyway.

Photos!

2008-11-24T09:08:00.003+02:00

Check out my photobucket (also linked permanently in the sidebar).

Hopefully that will help me actually get them onto this blog...

Day 10 - Holding onto the Whirlwind

2008-11-20T20:28:00.005+02:00

Well, loyal readers/stumblers/diggers/whoever else checks this out, here comes the long-awaited rewarding of your patience.

As you may have gathered from our neighbourhood-friendly facebook, I’m here. Intact, and (miraculously) luggage in tow.

“Here” is Lilongwe, Malawi. I’m currently sitting on the veranda of a guest house in Area 3, enjoying the frog-filled and extremely dark early evening while covered in DEET (stupid mosquitos – they and I are not going to get along). It’s a balmy 23 degrees Celsius out – nice and cool by my rapidly adapting standards.

I spent the first week on the ground participating in an in-country training program put together by some of current members of the southern Africa team of EWB. To be honest, it’s been a bit of a blur so far. We spent day 1 exploring the Old Town Market looking for a chitenje (a bolt of cloth used as a skirt, the building blocks of tailored clothes, a towel, a baby carrier, and probably dozens of other things I haven't seen or thought of yet), buledi (bread) and willing, friendly, people to chat about Malawi with (of which there was no shortage). From there, we divided the remainder of our time between learning Chichewa, workshops on EWB’s history and role in southern Africa and going on excursions to peri-urban and rural areas near Lilongwe. The rains have started – so far, we’re getting sporadic downpours, mostly at night. The first real rain we had was on Saturday night; as a result, dusk on Sunday was CRAZY with wildlife of the bug and amphibian variety. Other than the millipedes, it was pretty neat.

My first couple of days at work have also been a blur. Day One was this Monday, and ended up being a half day spent meeting the head of Water & Sanitation at Plan Malawi and doing some HR things. Day 2 was a trip out to Mpanela, about an hour’s minibus ride north of Lilongwe, to participate in/observe the second day of a Community-Led-Total Sanitation (CLTS) Training of Trainers Workshop. The workshop was really informative; though it was primarily conducted in Chichewa (meaning I really didn’t understand much) I learned a lot about CLTS and about Plan. Watching community development facilitators participate in a workshop like that was equal parts exciting, inspiring and intimidating. The people I met yesterday are really passionate about the work that they do and really committed to doing it well. I’m also really grateful to them for being so accommodating of me. I was late and don’t speak the language, and still felt welcome in the group.

The mosquitoes are really starting to come out in force, so I’m going to wrap up and retreat to the safety of my netting-festooned bed (aka my “Fortress of Solitude”… copyright kudos to DC comics/please don’t sue me!). But before I do that a collection of random anecdotes so far.

- I can’t escape cell phones. A large percentage of Malawians have one (well, urban Malawians, at least).
- Related to that, the act of "flashing" someone is really different here than at home. Basically, it means calling someone and hanging up on the first ring so that they call you back...
- Barack Obama is pretty big news here. I get a lot of “so, you’re from Canada? What do you think of Obama?” when I’m out in the market.
- Local cuisine is hard work, but pretty delicious so far. Remind me to tell you about our experiences learning how to make nsima & ndiwo sometime…
- On a related note, fresh mangoes are AMAZING (and pretty cheap).
- Children the world over are in some ways exactly the same. Many of the children here are captivated by foreigners (and cameras - if I can ever get an internet connection moving fast enough to upload pictures, I'll show you what I mean).
- I really, really need to get a move on picking up the local language.
- I really, really need to get a move on picking up the local language for a bunch of reasons, but one of the pressing ones is figuring out the names of all the plants. I've been able to pick out maize, sisal, cassava and mango trees so far, but the variety here is spectacular... and I'm still in the city.

...And we're off!

2008-11-09T06:55:00.001+02:00

After an awesome lunch of sushi/maki boat, it's finally time to go.
At this very moment, I'm sitting on a plane that is hopefully in the process of taking off for parts unknown - also known as Lilongwe, Malawi via Frankfurt (Germany) and Johannesburg (South Africa). Cool, eh?

It's been an amazing month. I've learned a lot and spent a lot of time with a really great group of people (pictured below).

(from left to right)
Front: Me, Mike
Middle: Wayne, Alynne, Colleen, Ryan
Back: Garrett, Etienne, Dan

That's it for now. Next time you hear from me, I'll be in Malawi: that's when things will really start to get interesting.

TED Moment 2

2008-10-27T16:05:00.001+02:00

Though perhaps not the most charismatic or gadget-enhanced lecture on ted.com, this lecture by Paul Awuah is among the most compelling talks I've sen.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

2008-10-24T23:31:00.008+02:00

Most people (EWB Canada and me included), agree that addressing gender disparity is vital to effective/sustainable development.
From some quarters inside EWB, I've heard it put as strongly as "the key to development is getting girls (especially rural girls) into and through school up to the 8th grade."

The United Nations has gone as far as to identify gender equity and the empowerment of women as the 3rd of the Millenium Development Goals.

There is also abundant research that suggests that educated women are a crucial socioeconomic driver; women who have completed primary education generally have fewer children, are less likely to die in childbirth, are less likely to stay in abusive relationships and are more likely to access health care and formal employment opportunities (if you watched the Hans Rosling lecture I posted yesterday, you would have seen a really cool graph illustrating some of these trends. There's also good info available from the International Development Research Center (IRDC) on Gender, Development & Policy).

Here's a new version of the old message put in pretty stark terms by the Girl Effect campaign...

(You can find a bit more info about the campaign here,at the official Google blog.)

So...agree or disagree? is it really as 'simple' as that?

(title courtesy of the eloquence of Arundhati Roy and the old friend who introduced me to to her work)

[Edit: Plan U.K (the parent organization of Plan Malawi) is a supporting partner of Girl Effect. Their campaign, Because I am a girl, has an excellent website, including some facts & figures regarding women, girls and poverty.

Not Business as Usual: TED moment 1

2008-10-23T18:07:00.000+02:00

For those of you who haven't discovered ted.com, I highly recommend you get around to discovering it. It a collection of recorded "ideas worth sharing" (mostly in English) on a mind-boggling array of topics.

One of the more popular TED moments on poverty & development is Hans Rosling's sharing of insights on poverty. Watch the whole thing. If you can't stream it on your connection, download it or leave a note for me and I'll email you the download. Professor Rosling has done a truly amazing job of taking the dizzying array of statistics we use to measure poverty & development and make them 'real' and easy to see.

A Million Little Things

2008-10-22T16:03:00.005+02:00

Today is the official halfway point of pre-departure training. In another couple of weeks, I'll be on my way to Malawi along with the other 4 people headed to join EWB's sector teams in the country. According to my weather wiki, it's 28 degrees and sunny in the capital city of Lilongwe.

I'm supposed to be catching up on my homework today: we have a presentation to give on The Critical Villager: Beyond Community Participation, a book that is described by a past EWB volunteer as "a book which is intermittently in print purely because Parker Mitchell, co-CEO of EWB, orders so many copies." I think the book might actually have some traction outside of EWB, but I digress...

Rather than thinking constructively about my homework, I find myself more interested in reflecting a bit on my experiences so far. I think that sharing some of my observations with you fine people might help me get back on track. So, without further ado...

1. Of course one of my political fantasies comes to pass just in time for me to miss the election night party. Pfft.

2. My friends and family at home are amazing. In particular, amazing by phone, by facebook, by fundraising support, by farewell party (though not necessarily by posting photos of that party...) and by gifts for Africa that have already made my day (including a lot of advice).

3. Case in point: the furnace pilot light for the house wasn't lit when we arrived. We noticed yesterday when room temperature slipped to a chilly 14 degrees. After some tinkering (living with a bunch of engineers has its perks), we got it working and are now enjoying the pleasant sensation of central heating. In the meantime, however, I was lucky enough to have my very own microfibre travel blanket.

4. Many hands really do make light work. During pre-departure training, we've been learning a lot (since Monday morning, we've done training sessions on the history of the development sector, frameworks for understanding behaviour change, agriculture, effective writing, and understanding power & privilege). It's a lot of information to take in, and being able to work/share with the incredible group of people in this sending group has definitely made my life easier.

5. It's really hard to wrap your head around switching continents. I have my e-ticket booked, I'm halfway through a training module designed to get me to prep myself for departure, and I'm in regular contact with my coach (aka my EWB supervisor) overseas, and I'm still not really processing the fact that I'm going to Africa for a year. Go figure.

6. There are a lot of restaurants in Toronto. I know that seems obvious, but so far I've eaten Vietnamese twice, Thai twice, sushi, Indian, Italian twice, Second cup sandwich once, Chinese bakery once, pizza, shawarma, soda jerk diner ham & eggs, Duff's famous wings, Portuguese bakery breakfast, Starbucks snackfood of some kind, and a Portuguese deli sandwich. I've only return visited one restaurant so far and I've grabbed coffee from two different Second Cups, one Starbucks and two independent places. I'd like to do more independent/fair trade coffee places, but they're surprisingly difficult to find unless you know where to look.
And that doesn't even get into the home-cooked meals. Some of the guys here like to cook (and some peoples' moms are taking really good care of us), meaning that feasts of pasta & home-made sauce, French toast, curry, samosas, pakora and TRUFFLES!
Delicious. Not necessarily nutritious, but definitely delicious.

7. Last (and probably least), Canada is a really pretty country in the fall.

Blog Action Day - Poverty Edition

2008-10-15T06:57:00.005+02:00

Though most of us have probably gone to bed by now, I and my fellow Canadians spent some of the evening of October 14th (and in my case, the first hours of October 15ht) watching the latest federal election results come in.

As much as it can be hard to keep the bigger picture in mind on nights like tonight, it's important to remember that we elect politicians to take care of some pretty important 'big picture' decisions.

One of those big pictures, in my mind at least, is poverty alleviation (both at home and around the world).

Today is Blog Action Day. It's a chance for bloggers from around the world to spend some time discussing/pontificating/posting pretty pictures on a single issue: poverty.

Though even defining poverty can be a pretty complex task and the causes are equally complex, I think we can agree that it's an important issue to tackle as we go forward (particularly as the current troubles on the world financial scene continue to put pressure on everyone). I encourage you to surf the other Blog Action Day contributors for discussions on definitions. I want to tangent a bit and briefly raise a different part of the picture.

Over the course of the next year, I/the organization I work for has the potential to be directly affected 3 elections (not counting the American election, which arguably affects us all with varying degrees of directness). Canada, Ghana and Malawi will all be dealing with the consequences of national elections in the coming months. I wonder, will these governments be expected to renew commitments to prosperity for their citizens or even for the global community?

Hard times are ahead, and I think it's incumbent upon us all to make sure that it's not just a small minority of concerned citizens "getting involved" to do whatever it is we're going to do to face tough, 'big picture' questions like how to tackle global (and domestic) poverty, but also that our elected representatives continue to be expected to make just decisions even in the face of such challenges.

As Demosthenes, an old Greek favorite of mine, once said:

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

Making democratic contributions often feels like a hopelessly small opportunity - be it through voting, writing a letter to your elected representatives, getting involved in your community league, volunteering with a citizen's action group of some kind or even just discussing your thoughts in public - it can eventually make a difference. That's what the system is for - it's our job to undertake the great enterprise of making it work for us.

Human Development - Know it, Love it, Measure it

2008-10-11T22:11:00.008+02:00

Awhile ago, I touched on the concept of human development. The time has come for me to touch on the idea properly, and ruminate (in the form of a blog post, as it happens) on some selected complexities.

According to the United Nations (specifically, according to the UNDP Human Development Concept), human development is...

about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. ... It is thus about much more than economic growth, which is only a means—if a very important one—of enlarging people's choices.

That is the definition that EWB Canada uses to guide the focus of their work; in particular, EWB Canada holds that a fundamentally important part of creating such an environment is the building of human capacity.

Yesterday afternoon, the group that I'm doing pre-departure training with participated in a group workshop aptly titled "what is development?" As part of the exercise, we each had to come up with a personal definition of human development and then work together to point out some common and contradicting themes or keywords in our definitions.

My definition was...

(Human) development in the international context is increasing the human capacity to manage vulnerabilities in order to maximize the ability to attain & maintain a good quality of life (with some subsequent brainstorming on what exactly I meant by "good quality of life").

Here's a fun graphic outlining some of the concepts we touched on while sharing/discussing the different definitions that showed up (kudos to Ryan, one of the people in my sending group, for hooking us up with wordle)

Coming from political science land, it was interesting to me that words like "system," "global reality," "economic," "security," and "justice" didn't come up more often (even from me). Discussions about international development (not quite the same as human development, but in the same semantical galaxy, anyway), that I've had in the past have usually resulted in much more diverse connotations (usually in the form of a more explicit focus on access to markets, prosperity, or good governance as a key condition of successful development). As a group, our unit of analysis was definitely at the individual level - we're all about choices and personal growth on Day 3 of training. Community and national capacity weren't really brought up at all.

We also didn't get much into measuring human development; that was probably because the workshop was supposed to be about what it is more than about how it's quantified, and it's an important question that I think we'll get to later (I think that EWB might see that as more of a skill than a fundamental concept in terms of training).

So what is this human development thing, exactly? How do you do it? How do we know when we're doing a good job of it?
Good questions - and exactly where this gets tricky. While creating an environment where people can live up to their full potential is all well and good on paper, what does that look like, really? Does it mean literacy? Mobility? Who does the creating? For which people?
We certainly didn't come up with a nice, sound-bytey answer, and I don't think that the international community has either.

But even if we don't really know exactly what human development is, we sure can measure it!

The international standard for measuring this vague, complex and often contradictory notion of human development is the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI is a composite index of normalized indicators (statistics collected, usually at the national level) that are used to calculate whether a country is classified as developed, developing or underdeveloped. The first HDI report was released in 1990, and has had some pretty far-reaching implications for development ever since (it's used regularly by the United Nations & other bodies to assess all kinds of things).

Using statistics like literacy, infant mortality, GDP per capita, life expectancy, etc., the HDI ranks 177 countries by aggregate score. This sending group of EWB-Canada volunteers are going to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Malawi. According to the 2007/08 HDI Report [.pdf], these three countries rank 135 (up from the last report), 176 (down from the last report), 164 (up from the last report) respectively. Ghana is classified as developing; Burkina Faso & Malawi are categorized as underdeveloped.

It will be interesting to get into some of the strengths & weaknesses of the HDI with this group of volunteers (and share those discussions here) later in the month as well as to see what "underdeveloped" looks like on the ground once I touch down in Lilongwe.

If you're interested in learning a bit more about the HDI (or like pictures better than long reports), here's an interesting map to get you started.

Touchdown in T-Town

2008-10-08T05:15:00.003+02:00

So, after a nice early start (6 a.m. takeoff... yay) I arrived in Toronto this morning. A nice, scenic, multiple-transfer public transportation trip got me to the EWB Learning House, where I'll be living for the next month during pre-departure training with the other 9 people in my sending group.

Training has formal programming from 9 to 6 five days a week (with some longer days, some shorter days, some weekend days and a bunch of homework). I'm looking forward to such an intensive opportunity to learn, to prepare (and to blog!).

Earrings for Africa! - Update III

2008-09-28T19:50:00.004+02:00

(Recap: Earrings for Africa! is a fundraising project that my good friend Jenna is spearheading to help me as I prepare to take off on EWB's dime). And is nearly wrapping up, as I leave Edmonton today to spend some time with my family before I take off properly.

I'm really grateful to everyone for your support.

To the point then...
Fundraising Goal (not just the jewelry, but in total): $750.00
Day 44
Number of people in the facebook group: 72 (down from a peak of 75, and still pretty awesome)
Number of items created (including several non-earrings and thanks to the efforts of a number of my crafty friends): a lot. Probably close to 50, but I don't feel like updating the Excel formula to find out.
Number of items sold (thanks to the support of all kinds of wonderful people): 40
Funds raised so far: $543
Number of donations (many more thanks): 5 (not including people who told us to "keep the change")

I am, at this point, waiting to hear back from some of the letters I've sent. With any luck, that will be enough to put us over the $750.00 mark. If not, I'm still really grateful for your support. $500 is a lot.

We will still be selling the last few items we made, if people are interested.

Either way, sorry for the post drought in September (it's been a busy couple of weeks). I promise this blog will actually have interesting things to read on it from now on (as in, not fundraising updates ;-) ) starting with my next post (which will be up next time I have internet access).

Til then, thanks for reading!

MSF - Edmonton event this weekend

2008-09-19T02:33:00.003+02:00

While taking a walk along Whyte Avenue this afternoon, I stumbled upon a really interesting educational event.
MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES/Doctors Without Borders is touring a Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City. They're in Edmonton (McIntyre Park, in Old Strathcona by the farmers' market) until Sunday (9:30-5pm) and providing tours (free of charge) to willing passerby. The tour is really good - in addition to talking about the work that MSF does, the guides try to get visitors to think about what it must be like to be uprooted and end up in a refugee camp. The guide for our group had actually done work in a clinic is the southern Sudan: the kind of insight she shared with us was amazing.

MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES (MSF), aka Doctors Without Borders, is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning non-governmental organization dedicated to providing emergency medical relief, particularly to refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). They've been around since 1971, and blazed a great many trails in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance (some of them more controversial than others).

Walking through the camp really got me thinking about the work I'm about to be embarking on. In many ways, I'm fortunate this time around - EWB Canada targets their efforts to capacity building in more stable communities, so it's unlikely that I'll be dealing with the realities that MSF volunteers confront overseas, especially in camps like these where violence and rampant illness & malnutrition are common. It really gave me an interesting perspective on the kind of challenges I'll be confronting.

Check it out if you have the time.

The Plan (wait for it, here comes a pun...)

2008-09-10T04:59:00.001+02:00

Looks like I'll be joining the EWB Water and Sanitation Team as a volunteer with a new partner agency: Plan Malawi.

Plan Malawi is part of Plan International, an international NGO primarily concerned with improving the lives of children in developing countries.

As a new partnership, some of my time with Plan Malawi will be spent assessing the existing and potential opportunities for collaboration between EWB and the organization. For the rest, I'll be working with Plan and with rural communities in Malawi to try and improve access to sanitary water and facilities, reducing the risk of various illnesses.
Though I'm not 100% sure of the details of the projects that PlanMalawi is working on (the internet is a bit scarce - apparently Google doesn't know everything...), it looks like we'll be working with an approach known as Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).

I'm really looking forward to working with an agency that puts such an emphasis on children. I just hope I can get up to speed fast enough to be more of a help than a hindrance to them in their work.

Earrings for Africa! - Update II

2008-09-05T02:48:00.006+02:00

(Recap: Earrings for Africa! is a fundraising project that my good friend Jenna is spearheading to help me as I prepare to take off on EWB's dime)

The thanks continue! Your support has been fantastic so far.

To the point then...
Fundraising Goal (not just the jewelry, but in total): $750.00
Day 30
Number of people in the facebook group: 70 (!!!)
Number of items created (including several non-earrings and thanks to the efforts of a number of my crafty friends): 38
Number of items sold (thanks to the support of all kinds of wonderful people): 21
Funds raised so far: $156
Number of donations (many more thanks): 2 (not including people who told us to "keep the change")

The making things has slowed down a bit (yay school...) but we'll be putting up more photos today. We also hope to take some of the old ones down/replace them over the weekend.

In the realm of other fundraising efforts, I'll be writing some letters over the next week or so (once I finalize who I'm writing them to...). Hopefully that'll be enough to surpass my goal.

If you know of anyone who is not on facebook that might be interested in supporting our fundraising efforts (or just likes shiny jewelry), please feel free to get them to email me. I'd be happy to send them photos via the bits of the internet that aren't facebook.

And last but not least, if jewelry isn't your thing, we do accept straight-up cash! ;-)

Many thanks again!

So... Malawi?

2008-08-28T21:10:00.009+02:00

(note: Most of the country links will take you to a map of Africa with the country highlighted.)

Here's some interesting information about Malawi that I've collected as part of my pre-departure training and/or that I remember finding interesting during my BA.

Let's start with the most important detail of all (as far as my rural Canadian upbringing is concerned): the weather.
I will be arriving in Malawi at the beginning of the rainy season, which runs from
November to May. Though rainfall and temperatures vary (depending on altitude, nearness to the lake, latitude, etc.), the country averages 725-2500 mm of rain per year. The rainy season also happens to be the hottest part of the year (yay...) so it'll be nice and humid when I arrive. That being said, all the weather sites I've checked say that temperatures don't tend to go much higher than the high thirties, so it might not be so bad.
The dry season tends to be cooler (depending on where you are, it can get down to about 6 degrees Celsius at night), with daytime highs capping around 25 degrees Celsius.

Anyway, the political science nerd in me wants to move over to the facts and figures, so here we go.

History in Brief
The Republic of Malawi gained independence from Britain in 1964 (after decades of effort on the part of Malawians to establish an independent state). From 1964 to 1994, the country was governed as a one-party state by "His Excellency the Life President Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda."
I'm going to gloss over Malawian politics for now (mostly because they're fascinating and I want to devote a whole post to them later). Suffice to say that the country has had two presidents since Dr. Banda. The current president is Bingu wa Mutharika and the next general election (presidential and national assembly) is slated to take place in May 2009.
Malawi currently ranks 164/177 on the UNDP Human Development Index (HDI): it is therefore categorized as a country with "low human development" and is considered to be one of the twenty poorest countries in the world (the three poorest/least developed being Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone). (more on the HDI later) In 2006, Malawi was approved for relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program through the World Bank.
Agriculture (especially tobacco) accounts for more than one-third of Malawi's GDP and 90% of export revenues.

Fun(ish) Facts

Offical Languages: English and Chichewa

Capital city: Lilongwe

Biggest city/Urban economic centre: Blantyre

Geographic size: 118,480 sq km (the CIA world factbook helpfully informs us that this is slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania)
est.

Population: 13,931,831 (compared to Pennsylvania's 12,440,621)

Life Expectancy:
total population: 43.45 years
male: 43.74 years
female: 43.15 years

Religions:
Christian 79.9%, Muslim 12.8%, other 3%, none 4.3%

Literacy: (defined as those age 15 and over can read and write)
total population: 62.7%
male: 76.1%
female: 49.8%

Per capita GDP (PPP): $800 (Canada's is about $38,400)

Major exports: tobacco, tea, sugar, cotton, coffee

Major imports:food, petroleum products, consumer goods, transportation equipment

Economic aid: recipient of approx. $575.3 million annually

External debt: approx. $894 million (Canada's currently sits at about $758 billion - not that it's a helpful comparison, really)

Currency: Malawian kwacha (MWK)

Current exchange rate: Malawian kwachas per US dollar - 144.400

Interesting Trivia
One of the most striking geographic features of the country is Lake Malawi (aka Lake Nyasa if you're in Tanzania) which runs along the eastern border of most of the country. Lake Malawi is the ninth largest lake in the world and part of the East Rift Valley lakes system. Lake Malawi is also one of the most biodiverse freshwater systems in existence, hosting more fish species than any other single lake in the world.

Malawi has a national cricket team which has placed fourth at the African championships in two consecutive appearances.

On August 16, 1914, Lake Malawi saw a brief naval engagement when the British gunboat Guendolen, commanded by Captain Rhoades, heard that World War I had begun and received orders to "sink, burn, or destroy" the German Empire's only gunboat on the lake, the Hermann von Wissmann (at the time, Malawi was the British protectorate Nyasaland and Mozambique/Tanzania were the German protectorate known as German East Africa(. Rhoades's crew located the Hermann von Wissmann and disabled it with a single shot from a range of 2,000 yards. Apparently, it was a big deal at the time.

HIV/AIDS prevalance (as of 2003) stood at about 14.2% with an estimated 900,000 people living with AIDS. Malawi has the 8th highest prevalence rate in the world, behind Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Zambia. In 2003, the annual estimate of HIV/AIDS related deaths stood at 84,000.

Travel Advisory: There is no official warning at this time. Travelers are, however, advised to "exercise a high degree of caution."

Sigh... yes, Malawi is perhaps best known at the moment for being home to Madonna's adoption saga.

(thanks to the CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia, voyage.gc.ca,certain pages maintained by the Government of Malawi including the National Statistics Centre and various arms of the United Nations.

As sure as it gets.

2008-08-28T02:00:00.005+02:00

Looks like I'll be working with PlanMalawi in the water & sanitation sector of developmenty-type things.

I'll be posting some additional info later. Right now I have to call my mom and dad! :)

95%

2008-08-22T02:06:00.005+02:00

There's been a minor delay in the matching process for OVS (which is fair, since I've been holding up the show with a major delay with my forms), but my placement is about "95%" sure.

Stay tuned for the "99%" sure announcement early next week!

Earrings for Africa! - Update

2008-08-20T01:39:00.007+02:00

(Recap: Earrings for Africa! is a fundraising project that my good friend Jenna is spearheading to help me as I prepare to take off on EWB's dime)

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who joined the Facebook group, invited friends, or bought jewelry in these first two weeks. I'm really, really grateful for your support.

Here's a brief update, by the numbers:
Day 14
Number of people in the facebook group: 38
Number of items created (including several non-earrings andthanks to the efforts of a number of my crafty friends): 35
Number of items sold (thanks to the support of all kinds of wonderful people): 16
Funds raised so far: $106

If you know of anyone who is not on facebook that might be interested in supporting our fundraising efforts (or just likes shiny jewelry), please feel free to get them to email me. I'd be happy to send them photos via the bits of the internet that aren't facebook.

Thanks again for your support! Those are amazing results for two weeks in the summer.
I'll post another update in another couple of weeks (which will hopefully include some updates that involve me doing other stuff to raise the funds).

PS: No word on where or what yet. I expect to hear back in the next two weeks or so.

Not an Engineer. Not a Problem.

2008-08-07T18:39:00.010+02:00

When I tell people that I'm going to be working on a development project for Engineers Without Borders Canada, I often get some version of this response:

"That's great!"
[pause, and a puzzled look]
"I didn't know you were an engineer..."

That's where the plot thickens: I'm not an engineer. My degree doesn't leave me with a professional designation (as one ill-fated ad campaign once said, I can "Be Anything" with a Bachelor of Arts. Har, har).

So what's an organization called "Engineers" Without Borders doing hiring a specialty-less Arts student-turned-adult like me?

EWB Canada (and for that matter, other EWBs) don't exclusively work on technical projects requiring the highly specialized skill sets of Western-educated engineers. Though all of their projects have technical components, the organization approaches those projects from a the starting point of working towards human development.

According to the United Nations, human development is...

about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. ... It is thus about much more than economic growth, which is only a means—if a very important one—of enlarging people's choices.

(taken from "The Human Development Concept," UNDP edition)

Apparently, I strike the folks at EWB as someone who might be good at helping to create environments in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs and interests. That, in a very vague nutshell, is why I was offered this opportunity.

In a more specific way, there are a list of attitudes that EWB looks for in candidates for overseas placements available here. Those of you who know me already can probably judge for yourselves whether or not you think I might be creative, enthusiastic, or possessing "ruggedness." Those of you who don't will have to judge for yourselves over the coming months. In my application and interview process, I would say passion, empathy and adaptability were characteristics that were definitely stressed over and above technical proficiency.

One of the many things on my list of things to learn and do before I arrive at my placement is to deepen my understanding of what EWB Canada is aspiring to achieve with a people-first, project-driven approach to their overseas work as well as to achieve a deeper understanding of what participating in a human development project means to me (the good and the bad).

At the moment, however, we seem to still be in the "attitude is everything" phase. Actually getting a sense of "how to" is buried in the hundreds of pages of pre-departure resources that EWB has kindly sent along to keep the boredom at bay this summer.

Earrings for Africa!

2008-08-05T19:49:00.007+02:00

As part of my placement with EWB, I'm expected to do a bit of fundraising.

My good friend Jenna, being amazing and all, has decided to sell hand-made jewelry (that she normally makes and distributes as wonderful gifts) and donate the proceeds to EWB.

Check out the Facebook Group or leave questions here for details!

The Story So Far...

2008-08-05T19:00:00.005+02:00

For those of you who don't know her, Amanda (aka me - this post will probably be the only one that I write in the third person) is a recent graduate of the University of Alberta, holding a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Political Science and Middle Eastern & African Studies. She was recently offered a position volunteering overseas with Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB), a non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to poverty reduction through capacity building in the developing world and raising awareness in the developed world (especially Canada).

Without further ado, here's the scoop so far...

November 2004 - Amanda volunteers at a U of A Students' Union High School Leadership Conference where one of the keynote speakers is a returning Junior Fellow of EWB. She's, as they say, hooked.

Winter 2005 - Amanda attends a paltry 2 EWB events put on by the U of A Chapter.

March 2005 - Amanda gets roped into 2 jobs, likes one of them better than the other, and disappears into the inner workings of the U of A Students' Union, with her free time going to the U of A High School Model United Nations Conference (and not, as it happens, EWB).

Summer & Fall 2007 - Escape from full-time work! The return to full-time studenthood means more free time. Kind of. Amanda renews her connections with U of A EWB, attending events casually and helping a bit with certain awareness events held on campus.

January 2008 - Amanda has a chat with a friend (we'll call him "Jamaal") where she is encouraged to apply to volunteer with EWB.

Reading Week 2008 - She does.

March 15th - May 10th 2008 - Two phone interviews and one in-person interview (aka a whirlwind trip to Toronto) later, Amanda is offered a position as a long term OVS and jubilantly accepts. A great many people have already been tremendously helpful and supportive. Thanks to you all (I think I've thanked you all individually already. If not, I'm sorry and thank-you very, very much for your help and encouragement).

May - July 2008 - The paperwork starts, including a matching survey designed to help EWB identify placements on projects/with partner organizations that have the best chance of the most success, based on a variety of factors (and years of experience).

[Aside: As of right now, I know the following:
Contingent on not having anything awfully unexpected happen (like not being eligible for a passport or something), I will be working with EWB and a partner organization operating locally in Africa on a development project. I will be leaving Edmonton in early October for approximately a month of pre-departure training in Toronto before I leave for my placement in early to mid-November. I will be gone for about 12 months and return to Canada after that to debrief and figure out my next steps.
I will know more about all that (like narrowing down from "Africa" to a country and "development project" to at least some field of work if not an actual, specific project) in a month or so.]

August 2008 - December 2009 (and beyond? who knows?) - Stay tuned to this blog to keep updated on Amanda's activities and musings related to her work with EWB. In particular, stay tuned for the following three things (in chronological order):

1) A series of posts on Amanda's take on issues related to development work generally and a sort of introduction to the field.
2) Real-time (ish) updates on interesting things that happen in the lead-up to departure. This will eventually include the much-anticipated announcement detailing where she's actually going and what she's actually doing. Expect some things on the blog (the news and the title, for instance), to change as this information becomes available.
3) Notes from the field, updated as regularly as possible.

Cool, eh?

C'est Feu Continu

2008-07-24T18:45:00.008+02:00

I have this coffee table book called A Turning Point: Images to Words that I bought in the United Nations gift shop a few years ago.
In that book are many quotes accompanying many brilliant photographs by a photographer named Victor Gagliardi. At various moments in my life since I brought it home with me, I have been inspired in turn by many of those quotes and pictures.

And what, you ask, does any of this have to do with giving my blog a home at feucontinu.blogspot.com?

Well, that would be this quote, by French author Jean Giono:

Do you know what creation is?
It is feu continu (uninterrupted fire).
You simply keep on going,
taking up each day from where you ceased.
What you insist on calling genius in me is artisan.
My father was a shoemaker.
So I am to the last.

I think that the idea of uninterrupted fire is a really powerful metaphor for what I'm supposed to be trying to do with the next 18 months or so of my life.

In doing development work, many people (mistakenly, in my opinion) believe that the purpose of every project - every school, every well, every book drive, every World Vision child sponsor - is to change the world. As if by vigorous efforts in a single place in a single time will somehow cascade into more vigorous efforts in other single places in other single times and that somehow, all together they will result in a grand cascade of 'change' heard round the world.

Don't get me wrong. I do believe that this work can change the world. But I think that expecting every single thing we do to catalyze sweeping changes and improvements is a bit short-sighted. Enthusiasm for that kind of work burns brightly, yes, but it also burns quickly, and leaps chaotically from place to place, often burning out before the work is done. There's no persistence possible when one believes in change alone.

Over the coming months, I hope to share with you the privilege of being part of a project that, yes, at its heart, is founded on a belief that change is possible and can be done in this way (that is, through development projects and enthusiastic volunteers). But I also want to remember that it is change in small increments and born of ceaseless effort. Success is not simply measured by change, but also by persistence.

--------------------

(Unrelated note: If you have a few minutes to spare some time, I highly recommend reading Giono's short story L'homme qui plantait des arbres (The Man Who Planted Trees). I've linked to an English translation here.)