How Details Sometimes Matter

I’m helping one of my partners write a grant. He gave me the skeleton of what he wants, his vision for the new programs for the next three years. It’s a good framework, quite eloquent and full of all the peacebuilding jargon. He told me his greatest challenge is connecting all these ideas coherently. He’s quite distraught about the logframes (logical frameworks) which is essentially a format going from objectives, to outputs, and showing the appropriate measurement tools that will be used.

So today I nailed him down. “How are you going to consider the program a success? How are you going to measure outputs? Are you funding these participants for two years or one year? What exactly do you mean by ‘collaboration with other partners?” This is my job. To nail down details, to fill out the logframes, and to double check the budget lines.

I drove my moto home, rather fought my way home through traffic. A friend came over and we talked about grad school options. I cooked dinner, exact recipe of groundnut stew I accidentally turned into groundnut sauce. I walked to the market for a pineapple, dodging puddles from the afternoon rainstorm. I cleaned out my fridge which had been accidentally defrosted. And I thought:

How more inexact is life?

My job in Cambodia is about measuring change. I help my partners find creative ways to measure how they’ve changed people and made Cambodia more peaceful. It’s a necessary step for donors, in order to get more funding, to run the same programs, to make Cambodia more peaceful. It’s necessary in relief and development to measure what change you’ve achieved. And for this reason, we concentrate on details of how the project is going to happen, and how we’re going to determine that people have changed. I like my job, and details make the different between good peacebuilding and the unsustainable alternative.

Yet I find it so ironic, as a conflicted overseas living nomad, living in an underdeveloped nation, trying to tell people that details matter, when I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, and I can’t get my groundnut stew to the right consistency. Sometimes, it seems that details just get in the way.

How Focus Groups got Interesting

I've lived many places...I loose count...but...most my overseas experience has been in former English colonies. There was bad English now and again but I don't remember feeling overwhelmed. However, English in Cambodia...it's just really bad very often. Understandably, Cambodia was essentally the Communist Bloc until 1991. Still, my fears that my English will deteriorate into the depths of the underworld, are consistently reaffirmed. I frequently can't find words to express myself. It's already happening. It's awful.

I've recently been doing quantitative research for my partner organization. This means reading through transcripts of focus group interviews (our preferred method of monitoring and evaluation) and looking for themes, repeated phrases, and nuances in language. However, my interviews were translated from Khmer to English. This throws a twist into the process, and so I'm looking for almost exclusively themes. It's been interesting. Mostly because the translator...an outsourced third party...was really, really bad. 

• On a proverb which we should all apparently know, "the punctuality does not win the dead-lock road."
• On listening: "To become a good listener, the most important thing in conflict is that we have to listen to the reasons from both sides seriously."
• On the type of conflict in the community, "There is a domestic violence with some reasons: husband is the drunkard, children doesn’t listen to parents’ advice, husband and wife are not harmonized and they have no sense of being tolerant to each other."
• On a specific conflict, "In the time of consolidation, we use the reasons to deal the conflict but in the case they don’t listen to our advice, they can continue suing the case."
• On a case study where a child is skipping school to spend time with his girlfriend, "As my ideas, first of all, need to educate and give advice to correct the habit not to go sightseeing [dating] too much and need to transform what we did wrong. Because the child is still in the age of study and have to think of the future...""...Educate not to go sightseeing [dating] till too late at night...."
• On another specific conflict, "Conflict because of words approached to the beating."
• On the dangers of falling coconuts, "Nowadays in my village there is a land conflict and conflict between the neighbors because of no sympathy to each other. For example, such as coconut tree grows bending to another land side and that side asks cut it off because of being dangerous but the owner did not agree then the conflict brought about." 
• On going with justice, "As a matter of fact, when we receive the complaint on something, usually there is only one side that comes to sue and prepare all things surrounding the conflict. In order for our resolution to go with justice, it requires us to listen another conflict side as well."
• On gender equity: "the strategies to solve the problems are judged by the mediator based on the rationale reality; for instance, sometimes husband do not accept their crime of domestic violence to wife so we capture husband for punishment because the women are physically weaker than the men so the men can’t abuse to women."
• On the importance of listening, "For me, I think that listening is the cornerstones for the conflict solver."
• On a conflict as old as time (and my personal favorite), "For my village there is a case threatened to bombard because loving the villager's daughter could not fulfill."

My project with this material is still in process, trying to pull off a legitimate baseline report on precisely what Cambodians think about mediation. It's one thing to do research in a language you don't understand, without deep concern for the purity of mediation. However, as they say, "the punctuality does not win the dead-lock road."

This Post is for my First Year

This post is for my first year. I still have four months to go before surviving a full year in Cambodia as a 22-year old peacebuilding advisor. But this post is for my first full year dating someone I care about. I thought about writing about long distance relationships before. This blog is the intersection of nomadic discoveries and my own personal story, and it qualify in both categories. I haven't for three reasons. First, I haven't figured it out, seriously have a long way to go. Secondly, it's not just my story to share. And finally, if anything, I can't write a piece titled, "how to manage a long distance relationship." I can't reduce it to a series of smart bullets and silly statements.

Jon and I went to uni together, lived in the same intentional community together, and both had internships in DC last year. There's some discrepancy how we met, but it was Halloween weekend 2009 which would have involved a dance and him fixing my roommate's virus-infected computer which was downloading gay porn. In all honesty, I thought he was a nice guy, I liked him well enough, but didn't think he'd last long, between Cambodia and the fact that I can be truly annoying. I'm glad I was wrong.

Long distance relationships are difficult. It's really, really difficult to lives 12 time zones and 10,000 miles away from something special. It's difficult because we've built separated lives. It's difficult because my life is hilarious I want him to experience it with me. It's difficult because there's no buffer between me and the strange people on the bus. I doubt I'd encourage anyone towards such idiocy, and yet sometimes, disjointed is better then the complete absence of someone's presence. We humans are strangely adaptable creatures. When you find something good, you keep it, work for it, and wait for it. If I had to make a bullet point, it would be this.

• If you're doing to do it, make sure the other person is worth it.

So this is for a year of learning about myself and someone else, learning to balance and be balanced, growing up in the world, and finding happiness with someone who bizarrely and illogically tolerates my insecurities and global nomadic tendencies. Yes indeed, life as a global nomad takes surprising turns, and has surprising blessings. 

How to Live with the Genetic Lottery

I was born in Rochester New York. This means I automatically "won" the genetic lottery. I was one of the lucky few born in the United States. This meant I was automatically eligible for excellent health care, world-class education from preschool through PhD, I benefited from the feminist movement to the fullest, I have access to a massive job-market, endless information, limitless entertainment, and complete freedom of speech, assembly, movement, and religious expression.

I lucked out. And it was beyond anything that I could have every controlled.

But as a global nomad, there are some hesitancies associated with this specific nationality. So many times I have wished I was Canadian because they get many of the benefits without the baggage. It sounds terrible saying "baggage" in reference to your nationality. But there are some challenges that truly make you think twice about how you present yourself.

With an American passport comes decades of baggage from bad international policy. I'm reminded of the wars (not Iraq or Afghanistan...way older then that). I'm reminded the Barak Obama is a Muslim (because that's what it says on the internet). I'm accused of being "easy" (because American women are, apparently). I'm reminded that I'm rich and therefore cheated out of nickels and dimes (because comparatively, I am) and I'm frequently put on the spot and asked to defend America as "a Christian nation" (because that's the perception).

I wouldn't trade what I lucked out with. But like anything in life, there are challenges that come with our blessings. Americans living abroad take the full force of the backlash against America-the-superpower. We tolerate the internet rumors and live in the stereotypes which we can't even begin to correct. But it's people like us that prove to the rest of the world that Americans care about the poor, that Americans are as human as anyone else, and that even though we are flawed, we still try. We try to be open to learning, but yes, at the end of the day, we are probably really and truly food-snobs.

So I tolerate the harrasment that comes with being a 22-year-old white American female, and once in a while I have a meaningful conversation about all those negative stereotypes. It's not a hill I'm going to die on, but sometimes it would be easier to be Canadian.