Adapting to change - again

True to form, I’ve changed jobs after only 3 months with the forestry office in Jeneponto. Not my fault, I swear. One of the things I’ve learned about development work, from my placement and through talking to other volunteers, is that the work partner’s perception of appropriate employment for a volunteer often conflicts with CUSO & VSO clear understanding of our role. We’re employed to build capacity & share our skills with the work partner and employees of the organizations in which we’re placed. Unfortunately, many volunteers are frequently expected to just do the work themselves or, as in my case with the forestry office, to simply be present & add “prestige” to the office simply by being the “pet” foreigner. The outcome was that I was assigned no tasks, no people to train & no resources with which to train them. Imagine my confusion when one of the reasons my work partner stated for wanting a volunteer was to train employees to use the GIS system for mapping & I arrive at the office to find that there are no computers. None. Tough to accomplish the goal. The forestry office simply had no practical use for or plan of how to employ a volunteer, but had applied anyway, and been assigned one (me). VSO staff have told us that often organizations in countries that are international aid recipients will simply apply for anything & everything - money, resources or people - and see what they get. And a volunteer is not the grand prize, with the requirement to house us & ease our adaptation to a different culture & language. I’m sure most work partners are thinking “just send cash”, particularly when they realize that we have an expectation of meaningful employment, which means that they should have some kind of long-term strategy for development of their activity areas. We often feel more like the booby prize - especially after our morning bath with a bucket of cold water.

It’s actually rather a grim commentary on awareness & planning by international aid programs, and the overall effectiveness of volunteers.  Work partners that have no plan, recognition of value of the resource, or ability to effectively employ volunteers are frequently failing to take advantage of the valuable knowledge & skills sitting at an empty desk in their offices. Often, the result is that volunteers leave placements early with a sense of having failed to accomplish even the most basic goals in passing on skills that are patently lacking in their work partner’s organizations. And probably go home with a jaded view of international aid itself. 

Luckily (I think) an alternate placement in Indonesia was available, and I’ve moved to the province of Maros (still in South Sulawesi) to a small community called Bengo. It’s in an area of karst ecology, limestone hills & thick forests. I’m living in the Learning Forest owned and operated by the Forestry Faculty of the University Hasanuddin (UnHas), which is in Makassar, 2 hours southwest of here. My job will be to assist the forest manager in creating a long-term plan for use of the forest, and perhaps in a few months teach a couple of courses at UnHas. That makes my inner bahasa-Indonesian-speaking self quail a bit, but it’s certainly motivation to improve my language skills.  

So, will my employment in this placement fit the volunteer role of sharing skills & capacity-building? Maybe. When I say “it’s not just me”, I know - because almost every other volunteer I’ve talked to in this country and in a couple of others have run up against the same brick wall. Another example: An application from an organization states that they need a volunteer to train local staff on how to create video training materials. But they find it’s easier just to have the volunteer videographer film the material themselves, rather than motivate local staff to learn the skill. Then the volunteer leaves after a year, and the organization applies for the next one, failing to realize, or not caring, that the opportunity to have the knowledge in-house & on an ongoing-basis has been lost, again. It’s a problem. It needs to be addressed. How is a question for aid experts to answer, but the first step is recognition. Otherwise, we’re all wasting our time.