Questions from Guelph Chapter Members

A while back Guelph Chapter members had the opportunity to write down a question that they had about our time (myself and Madavine) in Africa this summer. There are many questions, and I intend on getting to them all, but here are some basic ones to get it started.

What are you the most apprehensive about your placement?

The thing that I am most worried about for my placement is not being able to do a good job. I am going with the hope of being useful and helping the REP become better at helping the rural poor. I am also worried about big picture development issues. For example, am I actually doing good development work, or am I merely having good intentions with a terrible impact? I am worried about getting sick, and not being able to run to the doctor to check it out whenever I feel compelled. Finally, I am worried I am going to cry a lot. I am very emotional, and I feel like I am going to be confronted by a lot of things that will really frustrate me and there won’t be anything I can do about it, and in situations like that, I cry. Not because I am a big baby, but just because I am super emotional. Finally, I am worried about finding a family to live with, and the inevitable language barriers. HOWEVER, I am excited for all the same things I am worried about because of the challenges I will have to overcome and how much I will learn.

Will you be part of a variety of communities during your placement?

There is a chance that I will travel around with a field officer to different communities to evaluate and implement projects related to the REP. However, right now, I am still lacking enough details to know for sure. Even if my work doesn’t require it, I am going to make an effort to travel to different communities by visiting other volunteers on weekends. I want to be able to see as much of the country as I can. Also, we are encouraged to stay in a village for a couple weeks to better understand rural livelihoods and the people we are working for. (For details on my placement, check the previous post)

During, After, Before going: what impact did you have or expect to have in your placement?
There are many areas in which I have thought on my impact, my friends and family in Canada, my friends and family overseas, my workplace, the Guelph Chapter, myself and of course Dorothy. Dorothy is someone I have not formally introduced yet, and it is definitely important that I do. Dorothy is a concept based off of a real person. She is person for whom we are all working. She helps us at EWB have a focus on impact. For example:

What is the difference between digging a well, access to clean water and improved health?

What is the difference between building a school and ensuring that children get an education?

What is the difference between having a public display and making Canadians aware of the challenges faced by the world’s poor?

The difference is a shift from thinking about what we want to do, to thinking about what we want to achieve. More specifically, it’s thinking about what we want to help Dorothy achieve.
Dorothy is the mother pounding fufu in Cameroon. She is selling oranges on the street of Accra. She is tending to her kids in Tanzania. She is trying to sell some crops in Senegal. She is the bright school boy who dreams of being a doctor, who is working through high school as a subsistence farmer.
She is our boss. The one to whom we ultimately report. I want to better understand who Dorothy is, and find my own Dorothy. Every volunteer comes back with a story of their Dorothy. The person who inspires them to keep on trying to make the world a better place…to keep on caring when it is so easy to ignore the realities of the billions of people living in extreme poverty and to continue exploiting them with our casual and consumptive lifestyles. I want to have that person, or those many people whom I am working for. For whom I can inspire those yet to find their Dorothy’s to work for in the mean time.

So that is who Dorothy is. In my placement, I will be working to improve Dorothy’s life, therefore, my impact plan for my placement will be slanted towards her.

Before: Learn as much as I can and humble myself as much as possible with how little I really do know about the world. Care. It is so important to care about her even though we have never met. Be open-minded. Clear my head of what I expect from her and her situation.
During: I want to meet her. I want to learn her motivations and her aspirations. I want to understand what is suppressing her into poverty, and what I can do about it. I want all my actions to be guided by how it will impact her. I want her to understand that there are people who are trying to improve her world, that there are people who care about her, all the way in a small village in Africa.
After: I want to share with as many people as will listen, and even some who will not, who she is, and how anybody can have an impact on her life. People cannot relate to figures in the billions. Not even figures in the tens. But one person has the more power to move and motivate change in the masses in our world. I hope that I can share her story and cause more people to care about her and do something about her situation.

Rural Enterprises Project!

Hi everyone!

the news is in...this summer I will be working on the Rural Enteprises Project (REP) in either the Northern Region or the Upper East Region. I was thrilled to learn that this was my placement, and another exciting aspect of it is that my coach for the summer (a longterm volunteer with EWB) is Gwen Henderson, an amazing women that I met briefly at the National Conference in Montreal this past January. She has been working in Ghana since the summer of 2006. She has learned a great deal about REP and has been immersing herself in Ghanian culture so I am sure I she will be a great example to follow and an amazing resource and support.

Here is a quick intro to the REP in Ghana:

The Rural Enterprises Project (REP) is a poverty alleviation organization in Ghana that supports the creation and growth of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the rural regions of Northern Ghana. I will likely be working in an office that is responsible for coordinating training services, credit services and business counseling for women and underemployed youth in the rural districts of the Upper East, Upper West and Northern Regions of Ghana.

What will my role be?

I will likely be working in a Business Advisory Centre, counselling micro enterprise owners in the local rural areas, and assisting in running training programs for micro and small scale enterprises owners in the local rural areas. This can be accomplished through participation and planning of workshops, working as a team with local staff, and contributing to the work of REP in a way that enhances their own work. EWB's involvement with REP has moved beyond the monitoring and evaluation stage and now the goal is to encourage our REP coworkers to put the learnings from the trainings they received, to get the clients to come up with their own ideas (possibilities of improvement), and to help them make them a reality.

Am I excited!?!

Of course! Its very exciting and relieving to learn what my placement is, it just makes it that much more real. I am still waiting on details of my exact location and will be arranging a conference call with Gwen in the next week.

The description of REPs gives me shivers. One of the reasons I felt so moved by rural poverty was because of the toll it takes on women. Born a fighter for women's rights, this struck a deep chord in me. I am passionately moved to be working on a project that will directly benefit women who are rural subsistence farmers and suffer the worst. From a link found below on the right discussing rural poverty, one of the funders of the REP, IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development)

"Women are among the worst affected. More than half of women who are heads of households in rural areas are among the poorest 20 per cent of the population – the poorest of the poor. Women bear heavy workloads. They are responsible for 55 to 60 per cent of agricultural production. Women work at least twice as many hours as men, spend about three times as many hours transporting water and goods, and transport about four times as much in volume. Yet they are much less likely than men to receive education or health benefits or have a voice in decisions affecting their lives. For them, poverty means high numbers of infant deaths, undernourished families, lack of education for children and other deprivations."

REP is a project that I feel I can contribute to. A lot of the projects EWB is involved with involve knowledge of agriculture, which I am limited in. I will have the opportunity to learn about rural livelihoods and agriculture, without pretending to know more about it than I actually do. I am eager to learn more about the project and similar ones to it around the world. Those findings will come shortly.

Just a month before I go! I took my first malaria medication today (because I am want to make sure I don't have negative side effects with Larium, and want to take it soon enough to switch to Doxycycline if I need to.)

Can't Wait!

Development or Volunteer Work?

Another Engineers Without Borders JF heading to Ghana this summer, Steph, posed an interesting question:

Do people's reactions vary if you say you are doing development work vs volunteer work in Ghana?

What do you think?
Here are some of my intial thoughts, and I would love to hear what yours are.
Volunteer work implies that you are going to help people in need. For the most part, we are all familiar with "volunteer work" as this term is used widely in Canadian society and we can immediately identify activities that constitute volunteer work (i.e. volunteering at a hospital, old age home, helping ESL kids learn to read, volunteering at a food bank, etc.).
Development work, on the other hand, is less clear and harder to define. How many people have experienced development work firsthand?
This summer, I will be doing development work. I will be working with local organizations (non-governmental or governmental) with the aim of having a positive impact on the country's development.
But what is development?! "Development work" is still unclear.
Development, to me, means bridging the gap between the developed and developing world. Not in terms of material possessions and economic status, and this doesn't mean making "them" more like "us", it's a two way exchange. Just as I hope to improve people's lives in Ghana, I hope to develop Canada immensely from this experience. I think development means increasing peoples opportunities and choices in life. To me, it means learning how to create a world in which we find a balance and can live sustainably, happily and peacefully. Ambitious?...Of course, but what else are we going to strive for!
Just to complicate things...I will be doing development work, but I also will be a volunteer. I will not be paid, and will have the priviledge of being able to be focused on improving the organization, and not be worried about losing my job by questioning what is currently being done.
Your thoughts please!

Learning about Ghana, my summer home

Ghana is where I will be spending my summer and hopefully learning and impacting to the max, but how do much do I actually know about this country? One of the things that I want to do is to slowly and manageably learn about Ghana and have my lovely Guelph chapter learn with me. What I have decided to do is to focus on one aspect of the country per week. Here we go!

Week 1 - (Reading Week) Ghanian Culture

• major ethnic groups: Akan, Ewe, Mole-Dagbane, Guan, Ga-Adangbe
• no part of Ghana is ethnically homogenous
• the south has western influences and is primarily christian, the north has more of an islamic influence
• Naomi Chazan: prolific writer on modern Ghana
• President: John Kufour
• one of Ghana's foreign policy principles is to be a friend to all
• food: fufu (mashed cassava, plaintain or yam), ground nut stew, fried plantains and magoes!
• sports: football (soccer) and boxing
• textiles: Ashanti well known for kente cloth, in a distinctive basket-work pattern. the colour and design is a way of indicating status and clan allegiance. only men weave the kente cloth
• Population: 21 million
• Capital: Accra
• former UN secretary General Kofi Annan is from Ghana
  

Week 2 - Ghanian Geography and Climate

• neighbouring countries: Cote D'Ivore, Burkina Faso, Togo
• 539 km of coastline
• the size of Britain
• only a few degrees north of the equator!
• very flat and close to sea level (the whole country is below 1000m)
• world's largest artificial lake, Lake Volta (when the Volta River was dammed in the mid-1960s
• climate: tropical
• the north (where I will be going) is hot and dry and I will be there primarily for a dry season
  

Week 3 - Music!

• Check out some radio stations from Ghana:
  http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/live-radio.php?popup=1
• Ghana is known for its fusion of musical genres, including of American hip-hop and gospel rap!

Week 4 - Language

• Twi ("chwee") is the most widely spoken African language in Ghana, where its the official language of education and literature
• Hello: a-kwa-ba (response) yaa
• Goodbye: ma-krow
• Please: me-pa-wo-che-o
• Thank you: may-da-say

Traits of a Development Worker!

This is from the Guelph Chapter's working partner, Alanna Peters. She is currently working in Burkina Faso (West Africa) as a long term overseas volunteer (referred to as OVs or LTOVs) working on the improving the mango value chain. This is her response when we asked her for some traits of a development worker...its pretty funny.

Alanna Peters:

1. Patience - as things will always take longer than expected and your working in a context that doesn't always make sense to you



2. Ability to laugh at yourself - you are bound to make cultural blunders



3. Ability to self motivate - Often you are left alone to make you work happen and it is not always easy to see the point and purpose, but you need to value the little successes as much as the big ones. Also nothing/no one is going to come to you it's up to you to find friends and things to do so get out there.



4. Balance - ability to keep all aspects of yourself in balance: mental, physical, emotional and social. To know when one area is taking too much of your energy and how to bring yourself back to a balance. This has tobe one of the hardest parts and is constantly being challenged.



5. Curiosity, desire to learn - you learn sooooooo much while being overseas and working in the development context, it's great but can betiring



6. Constant questioning - it's the only way to understand!



7. Be humble - Know that you really don't know that much about the context and the complexities, know that your judgments are culturally learnt and may not apply to the new context/culture, be willing to say you don't know - people will respect you more if you are honest about your ability/knowledge than if you pretend you know and get caught later



8. Have a strong stomach - You are going to get sick as food, water, germs are all different, be ready to be acquainted with the latrine on more than one occasion, and laugh if you have an accident, I think the statistics in EWB is that 90% of OVs poo themselves at some point - so far I've been lucky, but keep your fingers crossed, just don't let it phase you



9. Determination - constantly push yourself, this is not always easy as you are tired some times, but with language it is absolutely necessary



10. Keep criticism in check - This is your criticism of yourself, of others and from others. For yourself try not to be too hard on yourself when things don't work out or are slow. Of others, try not to compare ways of doing things with ways you are used to back home. From others, be ready to accept criticism and to let some of it roll off your back. Here people are less gentle in their opinions as they are in Canada, in other words they are direct despite your feelings, but don't take it the wrong way



11. Dedramatize - it is never as bad as you think it is, you just need to take a step back and relax then you will see it for what it is



12. Have fun and enjoy the experience and exchanging with people!

*I hope that helps.

Alanna

Questions Questions Questions

Have some general questions about what EWB is all about? Here are some classic questions and their response. If you have more specific questions, let me know and I will answer them as best as I can.

What is Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada?

EWB is a registered Canadian charity dedicated to human development. The goal is to ensure that people in developing countries have access to the technology they need to improve their lives and opportunies. EWB works overseas with partner organizations in local government, NGOs and other community development projects. In Canada we address our goals by building awareness and encouraging change at the individual, corporate and government level.

What kind of work does EWB do overseas?

Engineers Without Borders sends both long term and short term volunteers to work with established organizations to build their capacity in the rural sector in primarily the areas of water and sanitation, food production and processing, and energy. EWB parnters with these organizations through long term volunteers (LTOVs) and short term volunteers. LTVOs spend a minimum of 1 year in a community working on understanding a project in order to have a positive impact. Short term volunteers, or Junior Fellows (JFs, that's what I am), are university students who spend 4 months working on similiar projects to the LTOVs. EWB works mainly in rural Africa in Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Zambia and Malawi.

What does EWB do in Canada?

In Canada, EWB works to ensure Canada is a role model among 'developed' nations in development - reducing the barriers facing developing countries that exist from our own policies and actions. This is done through:

• encouraging change in individual actions through public outreach and advocacy and school outreach
• corporate practices through corporate engagement and engineering curriculum enhancement
• government policies and actions through public outreach/awareness, petitions and advocacy, and direct engagement on development topics

An example of some of the things that have been done at the Guelph Chapter:

-high school outreach presentations on topics "Food for Thought" "Energy Matters" and "Water for the World"

-GROW highschool conference on international development

-Bill C-923 in canadian foreign policiy

-Promotion and education of Fair Trade

-creating the foundations for the curriculum enhancement at the School of Engineering and corporate outreach

-weekly education sessions on anything from workshops on the root causes of poverty to speakers on the role of engineers in appropriate design overseas.

Pre-departure Learning

Although my placement doesn't begin until May 7th when I step foot in Ghana, there is a significant amount of learning and preparations that need to take place beforehand to ensure we are the most effective and make the most of the learning experience when overseas.
The major preparations come from:

1. Personal Development Plan
2. Past Junior Fellow (JF) coffee shop discussions
3. Foundation Learning
4. 1-week pre-departure training prior to leaving

The personal development plan is to help us identify what our strengths and weaknesses are and see how they line up with what knowledge, skills and attitudes we will need overseas in our placements. From there, we just have to take advantage of the time we have to try and improve and fill in the gaps of our knowledge.

The coffee shop discussions have been the most helpful so far. The two JFs from the Guelph chapter, Janna and Kyla, and myself and Madavine, the other 2008 JF from Guelph who is going to Zambia, meet every wendesday in the Daily Grind and they help us through our learning and preparation. They answer all our questions and tell us stories of what to expect, its lots of fun.

Foundation learning is a series of assignments for all of us JFs to do. There are different levels of learning, and an example of some things I have completed already: interviewing a past JF and seeing how their expectations lined up with their realities overseas, reading the book "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe, reading about rural livelihoods and agriculture in Africa, to name a few. We discuss our findings on myewb posts with the other JFs and our JF support Staff, Cat Dorval.

Then there is a whirlwind of a week where we learn as much as we can before we jump on a plane and disperse throughout Africa!