Four skills I would never have acquired if I hadn’t lived abroad

By Alanna Shaikh | 22 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 5 Comments |

1. How to open a can of food with a knife

Place the knife straight down on the top of the can, with the tip of the blade resting where you want to make your puncture. Choose your location carefully; the farther from the edge you are, the easier it will be to puncture the can, but the harder it will be to get the food out once open. Whack the handle of the knife with a blunt object (another can works). It takes less pressure than you would think. Once you’ve pierced the can, saw at an angle through the can to get the kind of hole you want.

Note: This will make your knife very dull, and you can’t do it with a penknife.

2. How to bathe in 3 liters of water

Fill two 2.5 liter bottles with water. Sit crouched or cross legged in your bathing location. Drizzle half a liter of water over yourself until you’re wet. Lather with soap as needed. Rinse yourself (drizzling again) with the other half of the bottle. The pour half the second bottle onto your head, wetting your hair. Do your face, too. Lather with shampoo. Rinse with the second half of the bottle. Stand up, rub a small amount of conditioner through your hair of you need it. Do not rinse out the conditioner – that is why you only use a tiny bit.

Note: The key here is pouring water from your bottles very gently, so that all the water you pour out is use to wet or rinse. If you just dump the water around willy-nilly, you will run out.

3. How to eat food you hate

Cut the offending food into the smallest possible pieces. Put it in your mouth, one piece at a time. Do not chew; swallow the piece whole. Put ketchup on whatever it is if possible.

Note: You need a lot of beverage to really make this work, but it really helps a lot with life’s truly gross foods, and it is subtle enough not to offend the cheerful host who just filled your plate.

4. How to light a gas oven

Start by looking into the oven ad finding the hole in the bottom where you can access the gas. Once you’ve done that, you can proceed in two different ways, depending on your tolerance for risk and what kind of hurry you are in:

a. Fastest, most risky: Close oven door. Turn on gas. Light cheap cardboard match (Do not use a wooden match). Open door, throw match into hole for gas, close door. Wait for “foom!” sound.

b. Much slower, much safer: Fill a cup with water and set it near the oven. Take a piece of paper, and twist it to make a taper. Light a candle. Open the oven door, stare in, and remove the bottom metal panel from the oven. Usually it just slides out. You will then see the gas tube snaking along the bottom of the oven.

Light the taper from the candle, turn the gas on, open the oven door, and then light the gas. You can put the taper anywhere along the tube to light, but toward the front of the oven is obviously safest. Extinguish the taper in your cup of water.

Notes: Yes, I generally use method A. If you’re using a taper, make sure you hold it at the very end – the whole point of making the taper is to stay as far from the flame as possible. You can light the gas with your candle, but wax drips everywhere. The cup of water may be overkill, but if you’re lighting the oven this way you have alredy proven you are a fraidy-cat. Why not be as safe as possible?

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(photo credit: leff)
Chosen because it included both cans and gross food.

Jargon of the Day: Multilateral

By Alanna Shaikh | 19 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 0 Comments |

Jargon: Multilateral

Translation: Involving three or more countries. Most often used in the phrase “multilateral discussions” or “multilateral negotiations.” This one’s so basic to most international discussions that I tend to forget it’s jargon, and expect everybody to know it.

A semi-definitive guide

By Alanna Shaikh | 18 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 3 Comments |

This post is now obsolete. I get so many career questions, I have moved it all over to the International Development Careers List and my paid consulting.

American culture is such that I don’t even really like writing this post. But I am starting to get deluged with requests for assistance, and I just don’t have the time to answer them. I have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed – however much I’d like to, I can’t devote my whole life to pro bono work.

This, therefore, is my semi-definitive guide to what I will do as part of my commitment to service, and what falls into consulting work and thus requires pay. Please note that unpaid work depends on me having the time to do it, and therefore may take longer or be refused.

Career Coaching

Service
• Answering any question general enough I can also post it to my blog
• One phone call on any topic
• Any number of emails that are easy for me to answer from my own experience
• Taking a look at a resume and indentifying obvious flaws

Consulting
• Detailed resume review and commentary
• Resume editing
• Advice about what employers are good to work for and what aren’t (because I will not do this in writing, I can’t blog about it)
• Practice interviews
• More than one phone call

Social Media Advising

Service
• Social media audit, including quick recommendations for what could be improved
• Scan of organizational blog and suggestions for improvement
• Guest posting to your blog

Consulting
• Social media audit, with detailed analysis of strengths and weaknesses
• Design of social media plan
• Blog planning, writing, editing, or management
• Social media training

Technical Assistance on Health and Development

Service
• Read proposal and provide general impression
• Suggest resources for learning more about a topic
• Any question I can answer on Twitter
• Helping individual moms with breastfeeding

Consulting
• Technical input into proposal design or evaluation
• Proposal writing or editing
• Training of any kind (except as previously mentioned)

Other random things I think of as service
• Board membership (though I am very picky about what boards I join)
• Speeches
• Providing references

In a nutshell – if you need specific, detailed guidance that takes time to produce, that is paid work. So would anything that requires me to be quoted on the record and/or shift from informal to formal, any communication which requires multiple phone calls, and questions that require research for me to answer or that I find boring.

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(photo credit: Sokwanele – Zimbabwe)
Chosen because writing about this makes me kind of uncomfortable, and somehow featuring Zimbawean currency made me feel better.

Jargon of the Day: Holistic

By Alanna Shaikh | 16 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 4 Comments |

Jargon: Holistic
Translation: I think holistic may not actually be jargon, since it’s used to mean what it actually means – whole or all-encompassing. People like to talk about a holistic approach to problem solving, which generally just means trying address multiple issues at the same time. Holistic always sounds like a junk word to me, though, like people just throw it in to sound important.

Development 2.0 – More than jargon?

By Alanna Shaikh | 14 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 3 Comments |

There are a few possible interpretations of Development 2.0 that make it more than jargon. Two are simple (although not easy) and most likely inevitable. The last one is very, very hard. And, of course, it’s the one that matters most.

The first meaning of Development 2.0 would be using new technology and methods to share information and improve practice. Use new technology to improve the quality of the work we do. This includes both using new technology to solve development problems, and to share information across communities of practice. It could mean a better kind of water pump, it could mean Ushahidi, or it could mean posting your trip reports to YouTube. Other examples include Aidworkers Network, Appropedia, networklearning.org, and uncultured.com. Not to mention the growing community of international development blogs and twitter accounts.

I think this kind of Development 2.0 will occur naturally. Development organizations are full of people who care about their work and seek ways to do it better. Early adopters will grab useful new tech as it occurs, and sooner or later institutional resistance will be overcome.

Another form of Development 2.0 would be using the social web to crowd-source funding for development projects. We saw the Obama campaign route around traditional donor dominance by getting hundreds of thousands of small donations instead of relying on a few major funders. We could do the same thing in development. This would mean a greater diversity in what projects get funded, and fewer irrational restrictions on money. This would mean that no one had the power to impose a global gag rule, for example, or force a project to procure all their mobile phones from Finland.

The truest, most difficult form of Development 2.0, however, is more than improving our current work. Instead, it will mean going from a donor model to a partnership model. The web 2.0 revolution was when people went from being passive consumers of pre-packaged information and entertainment to creating their own content and sharing it with each other using new tools. It shattered traditional media structures in ways we are still trying to understand.

If we could do that in development, it would be genuinely earth-shaking. What if developing countries went from being passive recipients of aid packages to identifying their own needs and developing their own solutions, reaching out to donors to provide funding and targeted expertise as requested? What if they shared those solutions with other countries in the same situation? Countries who have seen success in bringing down HIV rates could offer technical expertise to those still struggling. New technologies make information sharing and analysis easier than ever. They are not the exclusive province of the developed world.

Web 2.0 still relies on traditional media to provide content to be discussed, contextualized, and remixed. Perhaps in Development 2.0 donors would do deep technical research to support good program design, and monitor and evaluate programs to support the best possible uses of donor money.

Thanks to JamesBT, Bjelkeman, carolARC, waugaman, stevebridger, and Will Schmitt for helping me refine my ideas on this.

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(photocredit: Ed Yourdon)
Chosen because I have a deep and abiding love for Al Gore.

Nothing, something, and more

By Alanna Shaikh | 11 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 12 Comments |

Bad development work is based on the idea that poor people have nothing. Something is better than nothing, right? So anything you give these poor people will be better than what they had before. Even if it’s your old clothes, technology they can’t use, or a school building with no teacher.

But poor people don’t have nothing. They have families, friends – social ties. They have responsibilities. They have possessions, however meager. They have lives, no matter what those lives look like to Westerners.

The “it’s better than nothing” argument is meaningless. No one is starting from nothing. If you find yourself saying, “our program/charity/intervention is better than nothing” that’s more than just damning faint praise, it’s a sign that you have a problem.

Good development work is based on the idea of more. Identify what people have already, and what they value. Work with them to figure out how they can get more of that. More education, or more money, or more food. More control over their lives. Whatever it is, the focus should be on getting more of what they need – not some of whatever we can find.

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(photo credit: Turkairo)
Chosen because the look in this girl’s eyes and her carefully tied scarf prove my point.