Another one for the Mercy Corps Blog

Two weeks can tell one a great deal about a new environment, a new job, a new staff. On average that’s 112 working hours – admittedly a long time to spend with the same four people in tiny, crowded room. First impressions have been made, and the mood has been set. Since I’ve been in Banda Aceh, my team has been absorbed in making adjustments to accommodate for donor deadlines, budget modifications, as well as moving to a new office, which have all posed substantial hurdles; all the while our program, Kedai Balitaku, has had to continue as normal. Stress has been high, indecision has been unavoidable, and new challenges seem to be constantly arising from nowhere. Yet, above all these annoyances, lies a secure blanket of pure enthusiasm for a rock-solid development concept, which has already demonstrated success. When the right people are working on the right project, even a new office building that poses actual physical stumbling blocks in between the car park and the desk, and between the desk and the bathroom – an environment likely dangerous for children and barely suitable for the elderly – can do nothing to break our collective spirit and our drive to continue serving the residents of Banda Aceh. These past two weeks have been inspirational if anything, and I feel fortunate to have been placed with such a committed group of individuals for my first experience with actual fieldwork.

Realistically however, the reasons why I have been so impressed by these past two weeks have nothing to do with any scarcity of problems or issues associated with Kedai Balitaku. If any particular aspect of this project is examined thoroughly, one will find that improvements can and should be made – certainly no program is perfect, and neither will be any of its individual components. But it is precisely these problems that indicate what an exceptional program I’ve become a part of.

Let me explain:

As an outside evaluator, a contracted consultant of sorts, I fully expected my first two weeks to resemble something of an investigation, rather than a two-way open discussion. How could I have assumed that a tightly knit local staff – who’d spent hundreds of hours building this program from the ground up – would want to immediately begin deconstructing and analyzing their work, so that an outsider could give it a rating? But until now, no degree of office politics has distracted anyone from their goals, and it has been interesting to find that, not only are a great deal of problems with this program completely external to staff coordination, but even the majority of the internal problems have already been acknowledged. Working to find solutions to these problems, rather than debating contested shortcomings, will encompass the bulk of our collective efforts here for the remainder of my short contract.

I look forward to the next seven weeks with my new staff, and I’m already falling in love with Aceh. Engaging work and creative projects seem to be the norm, rather than the exception, and I imagine that we’ll all continue to learn a great deal from one another.