Thursday, February 10, 2011

T Gets Technical Part 1: The Evolution of my Mandate

I have recently, and somewhat regretfully, returned from my mid-mandate break. I'm waiting to pilfer my travel buddies' pictures since my ancient Nikon didn't fully capture the beauty of the mud city (Djenné) and cliff (Pays Dogon).

Seeing that my internship is now halfway over, I've been reflecting on its somewhat haphazard evolution. As some of my readers have expressed interest in learning more about what I'm doing in Mali, I figured I should oblige with the following warning:


This blog post risks being excessively boring since 99% of aid and/or development work is "unsexy".

Anyway, my mandate evolved as follows: 

  • Applied to be a "microcredit officer" for the shea butter cooperative in a tiny village called Zantiébougou that doesn't have electricity.
  • Got interviewed as such by a Québécois NGO, but with a caveat that I would need to accept that my mandate may change and evolve over time.
  • Got hired as such, once again advised that things may very well change before I take off. (This part was kind of annoying, because preparing for Bamako is a lot different than preparing for a tiny, isolated village with no electricity).
  • Advised during my pre-departure training that I would be doing something funding and communications related in Bamako.
  • Spent my first 2 weeks in Bamako without knowing my mandate or job title. My work then was to get used to the heat, the smells, the food, the bugs, the pollution, and find a non-jerk family.  

Eventually, I was advised that I would be a "Project Advisor", charged with supporting the communications team by transforming their initial "cooperation" with potential donors to "consolidation" on specific projects . In addition, I have to revamp the website, and hopefully launch 2-3 new projects, or at the very least secure stable funding for them (huge, intimidating amounts of funding sometimes).


In terms of translating into the daily grind, so far I've been reviewing funding proposals, providing feedback, then waiting for my local colleague to rewrite them and get back to me. I also do some leg work for the communication team.  AMPJ, being in a Francophone country, mostly deals with Francophone donors. However, there's nothing stopping us from asking for funds from Anglophone donors, so I started translating some of the communication team's documents and sending them off too. In addition, I decided that if I was going to be on Facebook multiple times a day while waiting for edits, I might as well make it work related somehow. So I'm working on an AMPJ page, because one of my "objectives" is to help raise the profile of the NGO. I'm guessing my director meant within the local community, but I'm sure using the intarwebs counts for something.

Eventually, I got bored of reading the same 3 projects over and over again, so I asked for more work. This translated into making "logic frameworks" for projects. Definitely a brain teaser, but again, I'm still just a worker in an unsexy office (if I wrote "unsexy office worker" that would be a misnomer, right?). I also managed to convince my boss to let me draft a proposal myself instead of just reviewing them, so now I'm *patiently* awaiting his comments on it.

In the spirit of what I'm translating as "International Cooperation", I am supposed to follow the local partners' lead on everything. This has meant a lot of sitting around, but now I'll make up some things to work on (eg: database of potential donors) to make the time more easy passing and let my local colleagues decide if it's useful or not. That's local ownership right? And if I teach the communications staffer how to use the Facebook page's discussion threads to get incoming Canadian volunteers to bring them office supplies, that's capacity-building right?

I did however, refuse  to entirely cede the micro-credit  aspect of my mandate. As such, I have been very, very lucky enough to go on a few ill-fated project-related excursions, and I'll discuss those and post corresponding pictures in Part 2.

I was also fortunate enough to have some very experienced classmates in my M.A. cohort alert me to the potential unsexiness of international work, so my occasional anomie is not surprising to me. Instead, I'm trying to focus on growing personally and professionally from the overall experience of uprooting, leaving everything I know behind and living for a spell in what truly is a different world, as my last post can attest. Clearly, I'm also working on developing a very robust sense of humour. In the end though, my ultimate challenge is to develop an ironclad G.I. tract, so I wouldn't have to have a stomach ache every day while I'm here...inshallah.

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