Bad Volunteer Staff Member? Bad Person? Only Human?

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

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

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

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

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

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.