Malawi illuminated!

"CLTS yabweretsa mgwirizano"- CLTS has brought togetherness

Monday, August 16, 2010

no money, mo' problems.

I’m nearing the end of my work placement, and I’m looking back and realizing that my work has been nothing but problems all summer. I’ve had a terribly difficult time working in Mkanda with the Task Force. I fan through my journal and see “working here sucks but living is amazing” “I hate my placement” “I came to work but people are busy” “I don’t know how to get motivated.”

By arriving at a time without funding, I spent a month doing make work projects. Because all members of the task force are volunteering to be on the task force, they have other jobs (head teacher, community development assistant, health surveillance assistants) and are all extremely busy. CLTS was at the back of everyone’s mind until July 8 when funding came through. I set up a handful of one-on-one meetings to learn about CLTS but nobody was straight up enough to tell me what was actually going on.

I did a survey to gather the perspectives of the field workers and people dug that because it was keeping me busy. It was extremely useful for me to learn how the program works here and what some of the issues are, but the minute I finished the survey I realized there are absolutely no resources to deal with any of these issues. A little disheartening.

The training/trigger was coming up so I held a session on training. I really thought that I could add some value to the trigger event because this was the purpose of my placement- improving CLTS implementation. 4/10 people showed up. Lesson learned- nobody really cares. I thought that it was useful , but the chairperson went ahead with the event without training and without consulting the others. Once again- a completely pointless exercise.

The trigger event happened without any preparation. I shared with the chairman of the task force that 50+% of the facilitators expressed that they need more training in the survey and why don’t we do it if we have the funding for it and he was stubborn and closed minded, saying that it’s not their responsibility to train. This event taught me a lot about the personalities within the task force.

Activities started and ended with that trigger event. We waited for over a month for funding, haphazardly held a trigger event and then had to wait for more funding to do the rest of the program. Total drag. My motivation hit the ditch after this.

I was really staying positive at the beginning of my placement, but half way through I realized that CLTS is a scam (a future post on this) and that my coworkers don’t care and since then I have struggled finding motivation. I tried to be of use to a dormant program and spent a lot of time meeting with Task Force members and members of the District to keep them accountable to their deadlines but they just don’t care. They often literally laughed at me.

Right now, I’m doing an evaluation of CLTS in T/A Mkanda. They say that we are the best at CLTS in Malawi but I haven’t seen anyone doing any kind of assessment in my time here. I’ve seen the monitoring forms get collected and stored away in a town without electricity or the means to run any kind of analysis. The district certainly isn’t collecting the data (the district isn’t doing much). Why are we the best? Why is this message being sent out there if it’s based on nothing? Sure we’ve triggered 397 villages but what does that mean if villages aren’t being declared Open Defecation Free? I’m hoping that (refer to blog: “don’t get your hopes up”) some analysis of the program will motivate the District and Task Force to stop triggering and start thinking about the quality of their program.

Story short. I loved living here and hated working here. I keep thinking “What could I have done differently?” but there were times that I was just so utterly demotivated, I couldn’t have done it. I just couldn’t find the energy to figure out what I needed to do and I certainly didn’t have the energy to do it. I’m trying to change my attitude and say “I did the best I could in this circumstance”. I’ll be honest and say that part of me is relieved that I don’t have to nag people anymore, and the rest of me is exceptionally bummed out that these lazy people are the Malawian government.

Love kate

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Engineers Without Borders Canada - Ingenieurs Sans Frontieres Canada
University of Guelph Chapter
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The views on this blog are entirely my own and do not represent the views of EWB Canada.