Blood and Milk

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)

J from Tales from the Hood posted his “why I do this” story recently, and reading it started me thinking why I do this work myself. There’s a lot of twisted up stuff in my explanation – about wanting adventure, and doing what you’re good at, and the things my parents expected of me. But it really comes down to this:

It’s an awful fucking world out there. We are wrecking our planet, from Lake Erie to the Niger Delta. We’re killing each other with bullets and machetes and pollution and indifference to the needs of others. Humans are devastating machines that decimate each other and everything around us.

I can’t stand still while that happens. I don’t honestly think I am going to do much good. What can one person actually do? But the only way to avoid despair is to take action. If I didn’t try to do something I would never get out of bed. I took the action that struck me as most needed and – truly – most fun. International development. I like living overseas. I like learning other cultures. I like facing the weird problems of this life and knowing how to open a metal can with a paring knife. And I believe that poverty in most of the world is far worse than what we have in the US. (Even taking into account Mississippi and Appalachia.)

And I turned out to be good at it. Going to grad school for global health was like being a fish who finally found water. After flailing my way through Georgetown, fighting and bleeding for a GPA that rounded up to 3, I sailed right through my graduate degree and finished with a GPA of 3.97. And it wasn’t even hard. It was a lot of work, but it was joy.

Once I do something, I don’t do it badly. If I am going to work in international development I am going to do the best possible job of it that I can. That’s why I have this blog – to help me figure out how to do it better. That’s why I read so much (I link to most of it on my Twitter feed).

If you’re looking for the career-type info on how I ended up doing this, it’s very calculated. Here’s the short version, which leaves out all the embarrassing detours:

I have wanted to be an aid worker for literally as long as I can remember. When I was 16 I decided to go to Georgetown because it had a good reputation for international relations. I choose my work-study job to be internationally focused. I interned with a small international NGO. My first job out of school was a disaster, but the second was an internship with the American University in Cairo that let me live in Egypt for a year. While at AUC, I figured out I needed grad school, and an MPH, for all the jobs I really wanted. So I went to grad school, and interned and networked and studied foreign language while I was there. Then I finished school and networked my way into an unpaid internship in Uzbekistan. I got a paying job in Tashkent after that and the rest has been pretty standard.

(Photo credit: me. I took it out my windshield while driving the other day. It’s the tallest flagpole in the world, shown next to the president of Tajikistan’s palace.)

1.       Does the success of cash transfers mean that poverty is a result of the capitalist system and instead of working for international development projects I should be an activist trying to change the global economy?

2.       Are we going to look back at 2011 as the year that climate change became obvious in US weather?

3.       Why is it so hard for people to understand breastfeeding? (I just had a woman at a convenience store tell me that she didn’t breastfeed because her milk didn’t come in because she didn’t drink much milk when she was pregnant. I was genuinely at a loss for words.)

4.       Behavior change efforts work best when we remove obstacles and help people do what they already want to do. Is it possible to frame all change programs that way? Or are we stuck always trying to change what people want to do?

5.       I agree with GiveWell’s conclusion that philanthropic money is better spent overseas than in the US (thus my career choice) but wow, the US is awfully bad off in some places.

6.       Premature babies are often born early because of difficult circumstances in the life of the mother: chaotic or abusive home life, poor nutrition, poor access to medical care. Then we sent these fragile babies home to the same situation that made them this way. It’s a vicious cycle.

So, on Monday I had a baby. (He’s healthy, I’m healthy, and he’s the most perfect and adorable baby in the whole world, for the record. And no, that’s not him in the picture; the internet and kids makes me nervous.) We’re home from the hospital now, and returning to ordinary life, which is as you’d guess a lot of work. And lots of well meaning people want to help me. So they offer to hold the sleeping baby so I can get something done.

But holding the sleepy baby is not helpful. Holding a baby while they sleep is the single best part of having a newborn. They’re all sweet and snuggly in your arms, and they look like angels. Holding the unconscious baby = not work.

If you want to help me, offer to make me a sandwich or clean my bathroom or scan my tax documents so I can pay the IRS. Or hold the baby when he’s crying and won’t nurse or sleep or settle down. That’s the help I actually need right now.

I think too many aid projects just want to hold the baby. (In the case of orphanage tourism, quite literally.) They see what they think is a need – a need that’s easy to fill! And they rush to do it. They don’t stop to ask – what do you need?

This is true both of big institutional donor programs that are eager to apply the sexy solution of the day to every situation – microfinance, health savings accounts, results based financing – and small individual donors who create tiny barely-functional NGOs to provide broiler chickens or used clothes to the needy.

The answer is to pause first, and actually find out what people need. It sounds easy, but it’s not. Just asking people generally isn’t enough. I feel like a total jerk complaining about the nice people who want to help me by holding my son, and I am a deeply privileged resident of the wealthy world.

If I was a Bangalore slum-dweller or a Congolese villager, who would I feel comfortable talking to about my needs? Would I talk to a researcher from the capital about what I need and what I don’t? Or would I just be afraid that if I criticized any aid, they’d send it all somewhere else to people who were grateful?

Bad aid isn’t solely the result of laziness or indifference – doing research on people’s true needs is surprisingly difficult. So is designing programs that meet those needs. But taking the time to do it makes all the difference.

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(Photo credit: Sinosplice)

Chosen because it’s a guy holding a baby