I Believe in Yesterday

Friday August 27th 2010

My time in Ghana has come to an end—I can say it aloud but my brain still won’t compute it. Although the logical side of my head understands that this experience was never going to become longer than 4 months, I’m still struggling to understand how this is all wrapping up so quickly. These past few months have at once felt as brief as a two-week whirlwind and as long and spanning as my entire lifetime.

The goodbyes I experienced in Hohoe were both beautiful and painful. As we parted ways, I was touched by the love sent to me from the families I connected with in the Volta region. I tried to justly communicate the magnitude of my thanks to them, but often had trouble finding the words. I’ve realized that there’s no easy, clean cut way to say goodbye to this experience. It’s bittersweet: you do what you can to tie up loose ends, make trade-off decisions when necessary, and try to remember to breathe and smile along the way. My goodbyes in Hohoe already feel like a lifetime ago—a beautiful memory tucked safely in my pocket as I follow a partly confusing, partly exciting, but absolutely certain path back to Canada.

It seems like now more than ever I’m looking back and thinking about what I could have done, should have done, or would have done differently with my experience. I could have invested more time in my family. I should have worried less about the timeline of my experience and more readily embraced the pace of progress here. I think that I would have felt more at peace with my leaving had I done so. I’ve come to realize that you can spend all of your energy thinking about the things you could have done better, the things you should have done but didn’t, and the things that would have altered the course of your placement for the better. I’ve thought about it, but have come to see that going through that process isn’t the point of these concluding days and hours. I think it’s natural to have regrets; it’s indicative of my inexperience making decisions in the ambiguous environments so often encountered here, but not of my lack of trying.

In retrospect things could have gone different. I could have chosen a million and one different forks in the road. But, I think that’s okay. Realizing things could have turned out differently and learning in hindsight from past decisions can cloud your sense of accomplishment quickly, but only if you allow it. Right now I’m concentrating on coming to terms with what I’ve accomplished in these few short months and keeping an open mind as familiar life in Canada barrels towards me like a freight train. Although there are areas in which I could have done more, I’m proud to be going home feeling like I’ve been successful with my time in Ghana.

This week, on the first day of in-country debrief in Cape Coast, the JFs were challenged to depict the story of our placements. I’ll share with you now a stream of consciousness style story I wrote in response to the challenge. There have been many monumental realizations along the course of my junior fellowship placement this summer, and certainly this does not describe all of the events in which I encountered, but it does hit on many of the big peaks and valleys.

Arriving was a rush, and I was surprised by how quickly I became independent. I can see now that Medina market scared me into believing in my own abilities. I remember meeting Ben on my first day in Hohoe and thinking that he was someone so different from anyone I’d ever known before in my life. I asked myself how I’d ever honestly get to know this person and I couldn’t come up with an answer. Days in Hohoe turned into weeks. My networks expanded, I found my footing, and I started feeling like I was functioning well on my own. Not long into my placement I began hitting walls I had never anticipated or had even known existed. I was trying to take off full speed ahead, but was continually brought back down to earth by a big heavy blanket called complexity. I started questioning my abilities and losing hope in my work. I teetered back and forth between being stagnated by scale, and seeking venues for optimism. I began investing a lot of time in my family. I found their acceptance and happiness comforting. I ran myself into the ground trying to explore opportunities in too many conflicting directions. I became a little jaded and had a chip on my shoulder at mid-placement retreat. I left and regretted it. I struggled for a period of time without a clear direction when what I really wanted was a tangible win. I eventually recognized that my contributions to the project’s direction would not be earth shattering. I travelled to many different areas around Ghana, learned an incredible amount about agriculture, and fell in love with the beauty of farming over and over again. I started feeling happy with the pace of my personal development. I recognized how powerful my personal relationships were on my perception of the progress of my placement. I started regretting not making more of myself available to my community. I spent my last week re-investing in my relationships in Hohoe and learning as much as possible from my individual connections there. I finished strong with work, but left realizing the personal impact I want to measure is not found in the bureaucratic side of development.

Right now, with my last few hours in Accra, I want to table my big questions, let myself simply enjoy being in this place, and come back to Canada brave, without answers, and looking forward to the incredible potential the future holds.

Thanks for reading,

Erin

Listmania

Friday August 13th 2010

10 Things I’m Surprised to Say…

1) I’ve made more solid friendships in 4 months overseas than I have in my entire time thus far at UNB
2) I’m more excited by thoughts of returning overseas than by thoughts of going home
3) I think that I’ll miss the taste of palm oil in all of my food
4) In only 4 months I’ve learned an incredible amount about management and organizational change
5) I’m more empathetic than ever to Ghanaian individuals who ask me for money
6) Cheesy R&B music now has a whole new meaning to me and I love it
7) Coming to Ghana has made me a more patriotic Canadian
8 ) Hohoe and its vibrant character feels more like home than ever I thought possible
9) Coming to Ghana has made me a (slightly) more relaxed person
10) I’ll miss Hohoe market, even if it does smell simultaneously of smoked fish, fermented maize, and urine

10 Things I’m looking forward to in Canada…

1) Choices
2) Re-connecting with the Canadian side of EWB, especially my chapter
3) Drinking delicious real coffee and tea without truckloads of sugar and condensed milk
4) Having access to multiple sources of credible information 24/7
5) Watching all of the EWBBC episodes I’ve missed
6) Spending time in New Brunswick with people and things I love
7) Recalibrating my healthy food meter
8 ) The crispness of the Fall season and all of its beautiful colors
9) Fast internet, tabbed browsing, regular email access
10) Living life with a relative level of anonymity

10 Things I won’t miss about Ghana..

1) The stink of sewers, open defecation, and street butchers often within a few meters of each other
2) The lack decent of customer service everywhere you go
3) Eating and drinking so many preservatives and artificial colorants
4) The more-often-than-not sketchiness of trotro travel
5) The general disregard for punctuality and time management
6) Disrespectful male Ghanaians who heckle me because I’m a young white female
7) Travelling on dusty roads for long enough that you arrive at your final destination covered in red dirt
8 ) The fact that the lights always seem to go off when I’m in a rush and quickly need to find something
9) Being an anomaly 24/7 and attracting ridiculous amounts of attention everywhere I go
10) Bathing with cold water day in and day out

10 Things I’m Thankful for..

1) My Ghanaian family and their openness to sharing, concern for my safety, and willingness to accept me for who I am
2) My coach/friend/mentor/ right hip, Colleen
3) The opportunity to work with so many different types of crops across Ghana
4) My miraculously good health over the past few months
5) Helpful Ghanaians. From navigating trotro stations, to getting a bike lift from a complete stranger, I’ve been incredibly blessed to meet SO many honest and helpful people
6) People back in Canada who have kept me grounded throughout this process
7) Foundation Learning and pre-departure training. Looking back these were both incredibly useful
8 ) My awesome counterpart Ben: at once a teacher, guide, role model, and friend
9) The opportunity to visit so many diverse communities across Ghana
10) Amazingly supportive friends

Thanks for reading,

Erin

Networks and Needs

Wednesday August 11th 2010

Q: If you had to pick one thing about Ghanaian life, culture etc. to bring back to Canada what would it be? In other words what can Canada learn from Ghana?

I’d like to start by saying that this was a really tough question for me to answer, for a multitude of reasons for that I’d prefer not to raise online. If you want to explore this question further, simply find me and ask when I’m back in Canada and I’ll be thrilled to continue the discussion. Also, hat tip to Duncan and Kaitlyn, both of whom helped me sort my thoughts out on this topic prior to posting.

A: Social networking: a phenomenon millions of Canadians think they know a lot about. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn— those places online where “friend” is more of a verb than a noun. In this post I want to talk about a different kind of social networking. One in which the friends are live and animated, the networks encompass entire communities, and the purpose of the network is multifaceted.

In Ghana, social dynamics are extremely important, and community member’s lives are often highly intertwined. Extended family networks are much more integrated into one unit than in Canada– it’s as fundamental as the physical layout of compound households. Multiple families live in the same place, so right away you have many people relying on each other every day to accomplish tasks. Kids grow up fast here, and are given responsibility at a much younger age than in Canada. On any given Saturday at my compound, you can find every member of this multi-family household sharing the burden of weekend chores. Young children will be fetching water and fanning charcoal stoves for the women who are making lunch, teenage girls will be washing everyone’s clothing from the past week. Often, 1 year old baby Akwa runs around, largely unattended, giggling and playing. When she gets into trouble or starts crying, it’s never her mother who rushes over– it’s Jessica, her 7 year old cousin. Jessica spends a disproportionate amount of time taking care of Akwa because both her mother and grandmother are too busy tending to other aspects of the household to do it themselves.

Social networking here is like weaving fabric. The more people you involve in your network, the more threads you weave into your social fabric and thus the more resilient and reliable that fabric becomes. One of the most prominent driving forces behind social networking here is financial security. Most people don’t have bank accounts with savings to draw on when someone dies, when someone is sick, or when a big purchase needs to be made. More often than not, you visit members of your community and they help you deal with these types of situations. People generally feel that what goes around comes around. They’re obliged to help their community members out now, so that when they need help down the line they’ll be able to receive it. Playing into the needs of your social network doesn’t always have to be in the form of leading money. It’s just as equally when a store owner hires his nephew instead of hiring whomever has the skills bests suited for the position, or when church members choose to patronize fellow church-members shops, regardless of the fact that those shops may have poor selection or low quality goods. People here depend on each other for success, and for better or for worse, that isn’t perceived as a weakness.

Most of the Ghanaian’s I’ve met have an inborn sense that values community, whereas in Canada I think we put limited emphasis on social fabric. It’s more like social patchwork, where the patches generally only encompass our immediate family. Someone in Canada is largely free to act however they wish in response to risks and shocks, taking into account the needs and wants of only their immediate family. This provides a greater amount of space in which the individual can realistically act without repercussion— people can change professions, move to far away places for school, or take time off from work to focus on other areas of personal development with their actions only directly affecting their immediate family.

I’m not trying to say that in Canada we should learn to let 7 year old children babysit toddlers or that we should start distributing our personal wealth to extended family members. However, I do think that there are lessons we can learn from communal living. People here don’t try to do it all, to be everything to everyone, to control each and every aspect of their lives. Social networks share burdens– be it a weeks worth of washing, school fees, child rearing, or funeral costs. In Canada, we’re quick to try to do it all– in our own personal cars, with personally hired babysitters and nannies, with pre-made dinners and individually wrapped lunches. Maybe if we slowed down enough to really know our neighbours, colleagues, and community members we’d find that we can improve each other’s lives by sharing the weight of our commitments. Maybe efficiency doesn’t always have to mean doing things on your own.

Thanks for reading,

Erin

An International Achilles’ Heel

Tuesday August 3rd 2010

In this post I’d like to share some of the big picture issues I’m seeing in development as well as some of the recent questions I’ve been asking myself. These thoughts are my own and aren’t necessarily shared by EWB Canada, my Ghanaian partner organization, or any of the other individuals with whom I’m working. Also, keep in mind that the opinions presented in this post are reflective of three months of personal experience with agriculture value chain work in Ghana, and may not be aligned with the experience and/or opinions of individuals in other segments of the development industry.

I’m working on a small piece of an agriculture development project, which in itself represents a very small piece of the development industry. Because of the nature of my placement, I’ve been able to learn a lot about three different levels of this project’s hierarchy– field realities, middle management nuances, and overall project implementation. I think this has been one of the most exciting aspects of my placement, as I’ve been able to learn from different sources of information, triangulate, and form my own hypotheses.

Now that I have three months of learnings under my belt, I’ve started to compare and contrast these different sources of information. When I look at the operating conditions and assumptions for both the agriculture development industry and my field-level work, however, I see very different, disconnected pictures. Recently, I’ve found this tension confusing as I’ve struggled to map out and attempt to understand some of the complexities of Ghana’s agriculture development industry.

Development projects occupy a small sphere within the larger sphere of the development industry. I think of it using a Russian doll analogy, where the development industry is the largest doll, implementing organizations are mid-sized dolls, and development projects are one of the smaller dolls stacked inside. Sticking to this analogy, the differences I see between the big doll and the smaller dolls is perplexing. It’s like someone has taken multiple different Russian doll sets and mixed them all up, such that the outside doll is stacked with multiple mismatched smaller dolls inside.

Let’s zoom in on a piece of what I’m working on. A portion of my work advocates for competitive advancements within the agro-input industry in Ghana. This means that we seek out willing partners amongst the many unspecialized, small-scale agro-chemical entrepreneurial initiatives, and support their adoption of competitive business tactics. Ultimately the goal is that the success of the few entrepreneurs with whom we’ve partnered will prompt industry copycats to shift their business practices similarly in order to stay in the game. Over time, the hope is that the agro-input industry will move towards a state where behaviours like risk taking, innovating, and searching for strategies that benefit their clients, are rewarded and result in an industry that sees continual business upgrading as a competitive edge. Despite the setbacks I’ve seen in my work, I believe in the approach and am optimistic about the scale of its impact.

Now, let’s zoom out. Picture the entire agriculture development system in Ghana– inclusive of everyone from big donor agencies like CIDA and USAID, to small local NGOs, to the Ghanaian government. International development practitioners rarely seem to fully agree with one another, but from my experience one topic goes without debate: human development is complex, context-specific, and dynamic. Additionally, development is further complicated by the ineffectiveness of the aid industry. In Ghana, agriculture focused aid initiatives distort aspects of the private sector, making it less likely actors will engage in commercial trade. Initiatives like free seed to maize farmers or subsidized fertilizer to rice farmers are examples of this.

The aid industry is rife with ‘entrepreneurs’—splinter organizations who write project proposals filled with new jargon to appear innovative to the big donors, who often distribute funding based on the organization’s perceived level of sophistication, creativity, and willingness to be flexible. However, it appears to me that are no overarching mechanisms in place through which implementing organizations compete based on their results. Because this isn’t happening, comparable data is often unavailable to members within the development system, thus removing our ability to classify and interpret industry-wide results. And thus, in my estimation, it’s currently extremely difficult to tell what approaches have or have not worked. If our industries aren’t learning from each other, valuing knowledge sharing, or feeling pressure to upgrade approaches, I have a hard time seeing wherein lies the incentives to improve the development industry.

If the system is not complimentary to its components, it’s not surprising to me the industry is often ambiguous, and that failed projects tend to outnumber the successes. In my opinion, the enabling environment for success in agriculture development projects is absent– innovation and upgrading aren’t going to happen organically because no one (both internal and external to the system) is putting consistent, unified, unwavering pressure on the industry to value context-specific, knowledge driven interventions, to be accountable to its mistakes, or to dynamically manage the course of its trajectory such that the probability of project success increases over time.

I have a few questions to share that I have recently been exploring. Feel free to respond to any of the following:

Set One: Is international development a service based industry? If so, what services are being rendered and to whom? If it is a service based industry, what has allowed industry progression such that the service recipients have little choice what types of services are rendered or how they are delivered, and such that recipients lack the mechanisms to provide critical feedback to the service provider?

Set Two: Is the aid industry both too complex and too distorted to repair, or are there solutions to the system’s challenges that haven’t been explored/implemented/supported? Do we have too many cooks in the kitchen, and if so what would streamlining aid look like? Alternatively, what effect would increasing competitiveness amongst actors internal to the aid system have on our beneficiaries? What are the set of incentives that would help translate competitiveness into to better service delivery?

Set Three: What can and/or should we do to address the systemic flaws within the development industry that stand in the way of making real, sustainable, healthy progress at the community level in Africa? What are the trade offs in working from the bottom up verses from the top down in agriculture development? Realistically, where is EWB best positioned for impact?

Thanks for reading,

Erin