What can we actually do?

The best laid plans

Our minds at ease after finding a place to live, we were able to earnestly apply ourselves to our summer work. We met with the staff of Nahdet el Mahrousa’s Innovative Social Incubator and the National Program Management Unit (NPMU) in charge of the Career and Entrepreneurship Development Office (CEDO) program. Each team gave us an overview of their work and gave us an opportunity to ask questions. In the end, we will be working with the NPMU, so we reserved most of our questions for them. As MDP students from the previous year had warned us, the information we gathered left us with the feeling that all of our plans and work up to now were fairly useless to them. We came away wondering how we could actually help them. Their problems felt almost insurmountable.

We spent the next two days discussing their problems and ways to tackle them. We ended up decided that a program evaluation was probably the only thing we could really do that had the potential for being any use to them. Then Sunday night (5/26/2013) our professor, Ragui Assaad, came to our apartment after arriving in Cairo and spent the evening discussing plans and ideas with us. He thinks that the preliminary work for an impact evaluation is also possible. Basically, we would design a tracking system that they could implement to begin collecting data. With these two ideas in mind, I felt much more at ease.

Burning the Midnight Oil

We ended up working until past 11 p.m. Sunday and Monday. We had finally settled on a proposal, so we spent some time writing it up to present to the NM staff. Then we compiled a list of questions we have and information we still need. Next, we started working on interview protocols. It’s amazing the amount of time that is spent just writing and talking about things. Both days we’d be working diligently, with very few tangents, and it would suddenly be time for lunch or after 6 in the evening and time to go home. Of course, even after we got home we realized we still had things to talk about, so we continued working late into the evening, almost 11:30 p.m. both nights. We’ve talked and decided to do better about stopping by 8 p.m. I’m sure it was mostly a symptom of feeling rushed now that our first week is over and we’ve barely started our project, so we shouldn’t have too much of a problem managing our time better in the future. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves more distracted by the workers in the office though. They come in much later than us, and we haven’t had much of an opportunity to chat recently, which should change in the next couple days.

A Night Off

Today was the first day since we started planning that we were all done by 8 p.m. Josh wanted to go out for some sheesha, and Rong just wanted to be out and talking to someone. I just wanted to be alone, so all the guys, including Edwin, ended up going out to a hookah bar nearby. It was nice to be alone listening to the bustle of the city while I did laundry, checked my email (I got a job offer!), and got ready for bed. Hopefully, this is a sign of more to come. We already have plans for lunch or dinner with Eirik, the Norwegian intern with an Australian accent, for tomorrow, so who knows what awesome adventures are ahead us!