Rethinking The Plan

Courtesy of Rong Cao

The Unexpected

It’s been a while since I wrote an update on our activities here in Cairo. We’ve visited the Giza pyramids (camels galore! We toured for nearly 3 hours on camels that were well treated by very friendly men) and finished our needs assessment. We’ve been working for three weeks now, and we just received a document that would have drastically reduced the amount of work we have done thus far. We were told that working in the real world always reduces your productivity because other people’s actions affect your work, but I don’t think I really could have anticipated this kind of frustration. The document we received was basically all of the information we’ve gathered thus far. Having it from the beginning would have turned three weeks into a week of fact checking, but it’s not the end of the world. We have decided to completely redesign our purpose and deliverables. We’ve learned that a lot of what we had wanted to help them with is not really in our control. As the mantra we’ve become familiar with goes: it's just context.

So what now?

We had been planning a lot of big picture stuff and pure data collection for the summer. We were going to give them a program evaluation that was supposed to help them plan for the future, but the document I was referring to is a program evaluation that was done by an outside organization for them. They talked about how it was useful to see where they were at, but it really didn’t help them with planning. Well, if we want to be useful, then we need to come up with something different that they can actually use. We spent a day writing up the last of our interviews, mapping the information and resources we have currently, and discussing next steps for the team. We came up with a list of short and long term planning documents that would prove very useful to the CEDO if they were provided to them. Now we just have to do a little bit of data gathering and start sitting down with different team members to start designing the things they said they want/need. We are planning to set up a staff meeting to debrief them and ask for feedback on our new plan, but I suspect that will prove more difficult than useful. We’re trying to make this participatory, but in the end everyone is just too busy for it to be very participatory. They seem to prefer having us make things that they can then review rather than being part of the design process, which is understandable in the high stakes world of development and poor economic conditions.

In other news…

Statue of Alexander the Great, Alexandria, Egypt. Personal photo.

We went to Alexandria for a day trip this weekend. It was a low-key, cool, and friendly city. I had quite a few people ask to take a picture with me, which doesn't normally happen while I'm in Egypt (much more common while I was in India), and when we were leaving I had a woman at the train station deliberately block my path as I was navigating the crowd just to inform me, “Inti gameela! (You are beautiful!)”. This was quite surprising considering I was just wearing jeans and a baggy t-shirt with my hair pulled up into a bun, but hey, it made me feel good.

Some children whose parents asked me to take a picture with them (and you thought your parents were embarrassing!). This was after they snapped a shot.