A year of learning about disaster response...: August 2012

Blog. In these months that have passed it has been left much neglected, but not once omitted from my To Do list. I could delve into my reasons for this echoing silence, but it can be pretty simply put: I’ve been busy. Why? Busy working, act-ually.

But you’re only a volunteer? Erm, well, it’s not been quite like that. Please shed your kind optimism (I haven’t got a job –don’t be silly)…I’ve just been spending the last five months filling in someone else’s.

Upon my arrival in Haiti to begin this placement, it transpired that my so-called ‘coach’ (let’s called him P) who is supposed to provide on-the-job training, support and a shoulder to cry on, was due to leave that very same week. During my first three naïve days in his presence, P kindly wrote a few pages of handover notes, introduced me to various faces as the “new Reporting Specialist”, passed me on his responsibilities and uttered some apathetic words of contempt for the job.

So what exactly do I do here? I’m the Report Specialist for all Save projects running in Haiti, which is about 50. In simple terms, every few months donors need to know the details of how we’ve been spending their money and how the programmes they're funding have been going, for example school reconstruction grants, hygiene promotion activities, micro-enterprise initiatives and education programmes.
I am responsible for coordinating, editing, translating, nagging for, and at times, supporting local staff/writing/re-writing these reports. I need to make sure they get done, and get in on time, and that they include all the essential data before I send them, gleaming and legible, to the Country Director for her comments and review.

This whole NGO project reporting business risks sounding like a fairly simple and straightforward process. It’s not. My workload and stress-levels have varied enormously so far, and aside from hosting donor visits to the field and collecting a few case studies, it's a hugely (99%) desk-based job. To be brutally honest, some days I often do wonder what I'm doing, doing this?

Thinking back to my hand-over, P evoked in me this mixed feeling of self-pity and trepidation; he had this aura of greyness to him, as he half-guiltily packed his belongings from his desk. Exhausted by the role, his last words were “good luck with everything you’ve got coming. It’s a burn-out job to be honest, but see how you go, maybe you’ll like it”.

Other staff I met in the early days compounded my feelings of dread with not-so-uplifting responses: “oh reporting? I don’t envy you”
“ouch -hard job”
“egh, good luck”
and my personal favourite “Reporting officer? I hate reporting. If I had that job I’d kill myself”.

I don't know if you can relate, but when you start a job, nothing feels quite as foreboding as being entirely responsible for something that you really don’t fully understand. This, combined with being driven hours away to a totally different office from which to work, and dealing with steady stream of emails and attachments flooding your Outlook inbox. Emails emails emails. Emails and attachments from people who are in which position, from what field office? Talking about which report? Giving me drafts for when? I was thrown straight in, writing emails in French, navigating my way around who was in what role, trying to pick up Creole*. The first two weeks remained a little like this, with an elegant 'Reporting Calendar' displayed across a spreadsheet which silently screamed approaching deadlines from a bright screen. Deadlines which meant everything and nothing to me, glaring away. Combined with the 'no walking' security policy, you can trust my first month in Leogane was a bit of a tricky one.

The lagoon, just down from the house

However, whilst sounding like a broken record, I am increasingly coming to appreciate that my environment and my freedom to explore has the capacity to change how I feel about so much. The breakthrough arrived when I was relocated to Jacmel, Haiti’s rare little paradise on the south coast. From this moment onwards I have believed myself the luckiest girl around to have the role of Reporting Officer, here. I live in a beautiful house a stone’s throw from a wavy lagoon -complete with its very own huge white dog to take me running, a blender in which to conjure mango and banana-peanut butter smoothies after work, endless rocky paths and village smiles, lizards everywhere, security rules that allow you to walk as you please, weekend treks to waterfalls, grinning locals under swaying palms to greet me on the way to the office.

I could go on describing life in Jacmel, but it'll only make you envious, and perhaps raise moral questions of the expat-local inequality divide, and the guiltily luxurious lives NGO workers can lead. Rest assured I have been mulling these over myself. Instead, I'll leave you with photos to replace the words, and summarise that it's a little bit like this....

Sometimes: the job really really sucks.
But all of the time: the location/house/life I’m living here, it’s so beautiful.
One not so unlikely day: I am likely to find myself under a tent in scorching South Sudan, or living in fear in restricting Afghanistan (albeit hopefully doing a job I love).
So in the meantime: being a Reporting Officer in Jacmel, je t’aime.

Coconut break at the office in Jacmel

* Creole is the Haitian dialect here. It is what Afrikaans is to Dutch – imagine a baby trying to speak French and you’re almost there. A car is simply known as “une machine” (at term which also applies computers, washing machines and any other big electrical device), a pen is “une plume” (literally: a feather), and I wont touch on the verbs, but lets just say that as a lifelong French teacher, Creole would probably give my mum nothing short of a grammatical cardiac arrest. On aller!

Jacmel living, in pictures.
Haiti’s little paradise.