breaking the silence

So I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what’s been happening these last four weeks I’ve been back in Kenya, and honestly so have I. Whilst I am so thankful I was able to come back here and “finish up what I started” I am definitely looking forward to coming home again.

Source - tumblr.com

The above quote is from “27 Dresses” where Jane (Katherine Heigl) discovers that her favourite wedding reporter “Malcom” is actually “Kevin”, the disgruntled unromantic wedding hater who stole her Filofax from the taxi they shared home one night. And for me, it perfectly sums up what I feel about my dreams of working in Global Health; that my perceived ideas of this career are now reduced to a level that is as romantic as a sandwich.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving up – I didn’t bloody do all this studying for nothing! – I think it’s more that I have seen it and discovered that I can’t do entry-level ground work (due to several reasons) and need to gain experience back home in order to re-enter the field at a manager level.

This idea started when I was creating that phone app (see here if you want to read about it); I was acutely aware of previous mobile phone projects that had occurred in my area which had failed as they were “mzungu projects” and as soon as the white person left, or the money dried up, or people just stopped caring, then that innovation stopped, and I didn’t want that to happen to my app. However after piloting the project I discovered that that’s exactly what was going to happen – the pilot flunked with my workers only reporting approx. 20% of their supposed normal monthly target. The excuses flowed fast and freely, not just from the workers, but from the managers, and it was then I realised that whilst it was a brilliant idea that would introduce accountability, timeliness and accuracy to this community-level surveillance system, unless a bigger NGO local-coloured workers and money aplenty took up this cause, it wasn’t going to happen. But again, I’m not giving up, instead I’m writing up my findings into a report and giving it to my supervisors so they can source funding partners to potentially grow this project.

Yes, you did read it right, I said local-coloured workers. It seems so absurd to be writing about this, and let me say straight out that the majority of Kenyans here are not maliciously against white people, it’s just that they’re more likely to listen and implement the actions from locals than me. So rather than me train the local community directly, it would be more effective if I trained local staff to then train the community i.e. Project Management. That was my career plan anyway eventually, but now I see that if I want to make an effective change it a community then that’s how it needs to happen.

Sounds good right? I thought so too. But alas it is a disaster – no-one is going to hire someone with 1 year cultural experience and less than 3 years project management skills (I have project management skills, but really it’s managing myself do the projects hahaha). Yeah, exactly, no-one not even someone in the Western world.

So whilst I have loved this experience, there are definitely things I wish had gone differently and would reconsider if I were to do this again, it was definitely worth it and I thank you all for your support and prayers and encouragement. So the countdown is on – six more weeks at work and then another two weeks being a tourist and I’ll be back in Australia on January 2, 2016.