Being worthwhile

My greatest challenge here now is not the climate, or the power outages or the language. It’s the constant niggling that makes me need to feel that this whole thing has been worthwhile: that I’ve achieved something, or I’ve contributed, or it’s been worth my time, money and energy to be here and volunteer for six weeks.

Early on I declared to myself that it was wholly unrealistic to expect that I would achieve something every day here; I decided that this would be a success if I did something of value every week. So far, so good. Now, in week four, I find myself struggling to know what I will be doing this week, if anything at all. And this makes part of me shudder, and feel really miserable.

But I need to look at the bigger picture. Six weeks on a development internship is a ridiculously short time. Volunteers come here for two years and say that the first year is for working out what’s going on and the second year for actually doing work. And working in a new environment in a culture so different from my own, it is unreasonable to think that I can be anywhere near as productive as I want to be in this tiny timeframe.

I knew before I came that I wouldn’t make a real difference to this organisation – no unskilled, inexperienced university student could expect to in just six weeks. But I hoped I’d be learning things constantly about development, and NGOs, and Mozambique, all the time, and that I’d be busy, working on all sorts of little things. But even when I do have worthwhile work to do, it runs out quickly, and I ask around for what to do next, and there’s nothing.

I realise that I need to look at it from the managers’ points of view. When I was working with the Global Poverty Project campaign back home I sometimes had two or three interns assigned to help me out. Sometimes I could give them jobs that didn’t really need to be done; sometimes I could give them the most painful menial tasks imaginable, and a lot of the time I was clueless as to what to do with them. And we were working in English, and they were more skilled than me in many ways. So what can I expect, working in an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar language on a project totally unlike anything I’ve really experienced?

Realistically, given that I’ve already worked on three livestock data analyses and identified a number of inefficiencies in the way the system works, I’ve already contributed to a very reasonable level given my position. And I think I should understand that even if I go through entire weeks where I do nothing of value, I’m still learning just by being here, and I’m learning that to be valuable in this kind of work you need to stick around a lot longer.

To finish on a more positive note, I won a bottle of wine in a raffle at a primary children’s musical at the local centre for rich white expatriate children, which I found myself at thanks to the guesthouse owner inviting me. I don’t really drink wine, and I would hardly drink it alone anyway, so it’ll make a nice gift for someone when I leave. It’s already got a nice little bow on it, so I can just leave that on and make it look like I made an effort.