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.