Blood and Milk

In mid-November, Paul Currion wrote a pointed blog post asking why we see so few interesting thinkers in the aid sector. I tracked him down on skype to talk about it a little more. It turns out we were on slightly different tracks in thinking about this, and it was a useful conversation for me (and I hope Paul). Here’s a recap:

Alanna: The system as a whole doesn’t reward individuals with interesting or innovative ideas. If you think in an unusual way, you’re not perceived as a visionary or a useful contributor. You’re seen as wacky or a complainer. Not a team player. Since we all have to be aware of our next job, we can’t afford to be visionary. And you don’t get to be the kind of senior person who’s allowed to have big ideas by being an interesting thinker. You get to that level by being a good team player.

Paul: The aid bureaucracy is fundamentally a mechanism of control. A civil service mentality. hence the layers upon layers of task forces, working groups, etc. Which doesn’t leave us in a good place, at a time when the sector is really struggling with a massively changed external environment. It’s not just that people don’t care, it’s just that the lack of vision runs so deep that most people don’t even realize it’s a problem.

Alanna: Based on my interactions with people at senior levels in aid, that does tend to be true. I know plenty of front line aid workers who know we have a problem, but they aren’t able to affect things. And the people who can, don’t see a problem.

Paul: The next question is, what do we do?

Alanna: I think the problem at heart comes from the menage a trois, as J put it. The donor’s the customer, and as long as your donor is happy, there is no real drive for change, no matter how much the beneficiary is getting screwed. Which is actually what happens with civil servants, too. And I don’t know how you upset that triangle. For development you can talk about moving away from an aid model, but relief’s pretty much got to be aid.

Paul: It doesn’t seem to me that this is the only problem, or even a substantial problem if other things were fixed. But we can assume that those “other things” won’t get fixed. My argument in the blog post was not so much that the beneficiary is getting screwed but that the sector is just being overtaken by events, and everybody is standing around going “humanitarian reform blah blah blah” without realising that they aren’t wearing any pants.

Alanna: If it’s being overtaken by events, what happens next? Answering my own question: dyncorp, maybe.

Paul: The good news: newly empowered and middle class affected communities. The bad news: military and private contractors. The mixed news: diaspora communities and local political interests. Or maybe nothing happens next, and aid organisations just become increasingly irrelevant because they’re simply failing to meet the challenge.

Alanna: And no one responds to crisis?

Paul: Not in the way that we’re used to seeing. Imagine if there had been a third megadisaster after Haiti and Pakistan. We simply wouldn’t have been able to mount a response. You could see a “hollow” humanitarian sector in the same way as you see hollow states. Activity at the core that makes it look like things are happening, but increasingly little capability outside the core.

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It was a thought-provoking conversation, and it’s been on my mind ever since. Two things really stick out for me.

The first is the role of local political interests in providing aid after disasters. We’ve seen that many times – Hizbullah providing aid in Lebanon, Islamic groups in Turkey after the Van earthquake last year. There are plenty of non-altruistic reasons to provide aid, and those will not go away if the humanitarian sector as we know it hollows out. It will mean a very different – older – model of aid comes back into practice, though.

The second is the fact that aid bloggers aren’t really addressing the failure to think in an interesting way. We’re not doing the interesting thinking, and we’re not calling people out. I think it’s because most of us are part of the aid establishment, and we all have our next job to think of. We don’t want to be known as wacky troublemakers any more than the next aid worker does. What we really need then is aid journalists. Outsiders, with no vested interested in the system. Tom Paulson can go to the Pacific Health Summit and bug people all he wants. That’s what he’s supposed to do. J from Tales from the Hood can’t do that. J can’t even comfortably tell the truth and use his/her own name.

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Some questions to end this post. Is Paul right about the lack of interesting thinkers? Can you recommend some? For me, Ben Ramalingan and Edward Carr come to mind. And some of the most interesting thinkers that are relevant to aid don’t actually write about aid – now I am thinking of Dave Snowden, JP Rangaswami, and Tyler Cowen.

And, finally, an administrative notice. My housing for SXSWi seems to have fallen through. Does anyone need a roommate?

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(photo credit: sskennel)

Last week I took my son to the circus. Specifically, a traveling troupe of Chinese acrobats. It was quite clearly the troupe that plays Dushanbe, not the troupe that plays Moscow. They attempted the big stunts, but they didn’t always make it. Spinning plates got dropped, a human pyramid crashed, and one tumbler tumbled right off.

This is what interested me: it didn’t affect the show. They were ready for failure. They had spare plates standing by for quick replacement after droppage. The ribbon twirlers had fresh ribbon at hand in case of tangling. The air acrobatics had truly fantastic spotters. Everyone who fell had at least one person gracefully rush up to soften their fall. They responded to errors so quickly and smoothly that it was like a dance.

Ever since I saw the show, I’ve been wondering how we can build that kind of resilience into development interventions. How can we make sure our errors don’t wreck our work? One thought: maybe ongoing monitoring is the equivalent of those dedicated spotters who saved the falling acrobats. Collecting implementation data will let you know if your human pyramid is going askew, or keep the guy on the springboard from bouncing onto hard ground. Another: you have to be profoundly humble and honest to prepare for failure that way. You have to admit, up front, that mistakes are possible. If your spotters are hiding in the back room, they won’t catch the tumbler in time. You can’t seamlessly replace a knotted ribbon if the new one isn’t right next to you.

It’s a beautiful analogy. Would it be allowed in real life? True, some people do call this industry a circus. But do our donors actually want us to be honest and humble? Would people think we were just incompetent if we visibly prepared for failure? And what, exactly, would preparing for failure look like?

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Photo credit: Don Fulano

Now picture that top girl falling, and landing in the arms of a costumed spotter

It’s okay to quit the Peace Corps.

I’ve gotten a couple of email lately that made me really nervous. I responded to them personally, but it made me want to say something here, on this blog. I know a lot of Peace Corps volunteers read this, so:

It’s okay to quit Peace Corps. It’s okay to ET – leave your stint early. It’s okay to leave after two weeks if you can tell the situation is wrong. It’s okay to leave after 18 months if something is making you nervous. It’s your life, and it matters, and it’s okay to get out early.

Leaving Peace Corps won’t ruin your life. 33% of all PCVs do it. It won’t ruin your career, either. I promise. Not even if you want to work in development. It will not ruin your dream of having meaningful work and an international life.

If you want to leave Peace Corps and you think you can’t because it’ll ruin your career, email me. Alanna.shaikhATgmail.com. I’ll help you figure out what to do. Not some paid careers list thing, just me, pro bono, helping another person because I like to help.

Don’t do anything drastic. It’s okay. Your life isn’t ruined and it isn’t over and you are not a failure. Sometimes things are just a bad fit and that’s all right. No one will hold it against you.

We all make mistakes. I left a job I loved because it was the wrong job for me at that point in my life. I got fired from my very first job out of college. I flaked out on an internship with a woman I respected and I think she still dislikes me as a result. I cancelled an internship with CARE Egypt because I needed to go home already and not be in Cairo any more. And I still got to go have a whole career full of stuff I love to do with brilliant colleagues surrounding me.

You thought Peace Corps was the right fit for you and it’s not. Just fix your error, get out, and find the next step in your life. I really will help you if you like. My email’s right up there.

Don’t do anything drastic. Your life is not over. Neither is your career. Don’t make any dangerous decisions because you feel bad right now. Just get home, wherever that is to you, and find your next step once you get there.

Don’t stay if you fear for your safety, and don’t stay if you’re afraid you’ll harm yourself. Nothing is worth that.

(photo credit: marysuephotoeth)

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I was deeply upset by the injury and death of Xiao Yueyue, a two-year-old in Guangzhou, China. She was hit by a truck, which drove away, and lay in the street bleeding for seven minutes. Nineteen people walked by her without stopping for help until a street sweeper moved her out of the road and alerted her panicked mother.

I was stunned and horrified that anyone could walk right by a bleeding toddler lying in the road. A tiny child, in pain, alone and still in danger, and no one helps her. How does this happen? I understood the callousness that develops toward adults, but to a dying child? It leaves me speechless and teary.

My attempt to understand how this happens included reading about Chinese law, Chinese culture, and the bystander effect. There’s not much I can do about other people, but I can try to prevent myself from becoming the kind of person who walks past a bleeding toddler.

I finally made a Twitter plea for help on how to avoid becoming a bystander, and it led to a wise response from a friend of mine. She pointed out that we walk past other people’s pain every day as expats and as people living in a brutal world. There is more human suffering out there than acute bodily trauma and we make a daily decision to ignore it.

I am already the kind of person who can ignore a toddler in pain, as long as she’s not in my line of sight.

We’re all bystanders. The bystander effect is the story of our age, from climate change to famine in the Horn of Africa. We let terrible things happen because everyone else lets them happen too, and because we feel helpless to stop them. I don’t like it. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know what to do.

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(photo credit: tracyyxx)

I’ve spent the last two weeks as part of a multinational health sector assessment effort, and we’ve worked through interpreters the whole time. I’ve obviously worked with translators before, but never every day all day for two weeks.  It’s really crystallized my own ground rules for how to work effectively with interpreters. This is what I’ve got:

1. Jokes almost never succeed when translated. They’re just too cultural and based on language and tone nuance. It’s easiest to avoid them.
2. If you want to connect with people personally across language, and you can’t use humor, talk about common human experiences. Kids are great if you all have them. I’ve got pictures of kids on my phone and they’re a great icebreaker. I’ve seen other people successfully transcend language and culture barriers by talking about a dislike of mushrooms, fear of snakes and bugs, mocking people who are drunk, alluding to sex, and comparing government officials to babies. I wouldn’t myself be brave enough for an off-color reference, but it worked from the woman who made it.
3. Take the colloquialism out of your language and use short phrases. It feels awkward at first, but if you can code-switch between talking to your mom, talking to your friends, and talking to your boss’s boss, you can develop an easy way of speaking through a translator. So, break up your thoughts into Twitter-size pieces and be a little more formal.

Some colloquialisms to avoid (that I have heard lately from people who should know better):

• Big ticket
• Hard vs Soft (in terms of estimates or rules)
• Peanuts (to mean small amounts)
• Small time
• Take a swing at
• Out of left field
• Take a shot at
• Take a whack at
• Shot in the dark
• Rolling in money
• Drop, fall (to mean decrease)
• Go off the reservation (also don’t say that because it’s racist)
• On track

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(photo credit: dweekly)

This probably falls into the category of stuff everyone already knows, but it’s so important I wanted to mention it anyway.

Training is one of the most common interventions in international aid. It’s where we all start, when we think about problem solving. If the doctors/farmers/parliamentarians/journalists knew how to do their work better, everything would be just fine, right? But as we learn very quickly, training is one of the hardest things to get right. Here’s what I know.

Pre and post training knowledge tests are worthless. It doesn’t matter if people know more after your training. It matters if your trainees actually change the way they act after your training. The best solution I have found is competency-based training.

Competency-based training (CBT) means that you only teach people what they need to be able to do. Nothing extra. You don’t graduate them from the training until they can do it properly, in the context they need to do it in the future.

For a physician, then, if you are training on IUD insertion, you teach as much anatomy information as they need to do an IUD insertion. You then train them to do the insertion on life-like medical models and then you train them to do it on actual female volunteers. Finally, you observe them while they do insertions in patients in a clinical setting.

Notice what they are not doing: reading about IUD insertion or taking tests on their knowledge of female anatomy. Instead, they watch insertions being done, and they do them. Your physician officially completes the training and gets her certificate when she can insert an IUD correctly on her own in a clinical context.

CBT generally includes checklists that define the proper performance of whatever thing they’re teaching, for trainers to use as they observe trainees. If you want to use the best possible practice for your training, you don’t officially certify your trainees until they’ve been back at work for a while and you observe them using their new skills properly in their work practice.

Next, you need to make sure trainees are allowed to use their new skills. That means, at the very least, making sure that their supervisors understand and support the new approach and making sure that the new approach is legal. If you train teachers to use a new technique where students choose which topics to study, it won’t work if the principal won’t let them or the national curriculum requires certain topics during certain months. Training entire cohorts – everyone in one office, say – also helps support people to use their new skills.

Finally, if you want trainees to share their new skills, you have to put something official in place. It does not happen on its own. It doesn’t happen because people like being the most competent person among their peers and don’t necessarily want to share, and it doesn’t happen because just learning something new doesn’t make you a natural or comfortable trainer. You could, for example, require that all new trainees give a presentation to colleagues once they complete training (and you could plan for that by adding a session to the training itself for participants to develop and plan their presentation for colleagues). This probably won’t get those colleagues to change their behavior, but it will at least help everyone understand why one staff member is doing things differently.

Possibly the biggest challenge to getting impact from training is keeping your employees once they’re trained. Newly trained staff may leave through natural attrition, or because they are poached because of their updated skills. You can try positive incentives – pay raises, benefits like internet access or plots of land for kitchen gardens, but you can only provide so much in a resource-restricted context. Or you can try punitive methods – make people sign a contract to stay for a certain amount of time after training and pay a penalty of they don’t – but that can make people nervous about being trained.

I think the best solutions are long-term. You can train so many people that it makes up for natural attrition and floods the market to reduce demand. Or – this is my favorite solution – you can incorporate training into professional education. If every nurse learns patient counseling skills in nursing school, then you don’t need to come along and train them at all on the topic later.

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Photo credit: US Army Africa.

Chosen because it’s competency based training in action. They’re not sitting there reading about house-to-house search.

Voices from the Inside October 9 2011

For every expat aid worker who swans in and out, complaining about Delhi belly and inadequate per diem, there are at least ten host country aid workers doing the real work of international aid. They don’t live in hotels, they don’t get special treatment, and they’re the ones who’ll still be there twenty years from now.

We don’t hear much from those aid workers. They don’t tend to blog, and the media prefers the pretty story of whites in shining armor. But these aid workers – the “global south” – are the heart of the work we all do. We ought to be learning from them.

In that spirit, I am proud to announce my new podcast series, “Voices from the Inside,” where I’ll be interviewing the aid workers who actually come from the developing world. Some of them are expats now, but that’s not how they started.

These are the voices that can tell you the real story of aid work.

Find the first episode right here, where I talk to a woman I met during this trip to Bishkek.

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photo credit: livepine