First of all in trying to describe what I find myself doing for a living, please forgive me any past transgressions in person or through this blog, since I am surrounded by people who know - more or less - what it means when I say I'm "on such and such project" or "I came here on a short term contract for so and so." And who do not find it at all bizarre that I spent today in a room talking about the international development aid system and its implications for the Indonesian and global feminist movements, or that I did it as part of my official work duties.
While yes I realize that may seem like hell to many people, I can't believe -- literally doubt the veracity -- that I can get paid a salary to sit in a room of smart extremely accomplished extremely committed people and talk and think about challenging ideas for a day so someone can write a memo and submit our collective recommendations to the UN. I'm pretty sure there's a catch that I'm overlooking.
You'll recall I haven't always been too up on my job. It helps that I haven't had the same one for more than 6 months at a go since I've been in Indonesia. But even the jobs that I detested key parts of -- and I should say here my job now only officially started on Feb 1 -- so there's time yet to find those things for this one -- I was and knew that I was very privileged to be doing. In each case my job was to
- learn as much as I could through talking to people, reading a lot, and pouring over financial or other quantitative data about a given context (an organization, a program, or a set of organizations);
- make sense of what worked well and what didn't in certain key areas of interest (e.g., organizational management, engaging poor women actively in community decision making, approaches of donor agencies to working with NGOs);
- come up with suggestions for what could be done better and some specifics on how, usually to the detail of how much it might cost to act on said suggestions;
- sit down and write about all of the above;
- give presentations to and discuss all of the above with people who have interesting things to say and challenging questions about it.
The above is what an international development consultant does on a day to day in a nutshell, or so I've gathered.
Now that I'm in a staff role -- meaning that I'm paid whether or not I have a project funded by an outside entity (typically a government development agency) going -- I have a teensy bit of breathing room to give inputs into the workshop like today's, to read articles and papers, to "take meetings" to discuss ideas and meet new people, to think of projects I'd like to do and talk to people about finding the money, to facilitate discussions and give coaching and guidance to a team at my company working on a project that I designed, to rewrite project reports to be published in a scholarly journal. (And again: I get PAID for it. ... ?!?!)
Ultimately my performance at the company will be judged as to whether or not I bring in projects that earn the company money. Very strange and quite unforeseen based on my previous work history, but I'm strangely serene about it. I've gotten the jobs I have had here so far through (1) knowing well-positioned people and getting to know others out if a genuine interest in knowing them and what they do, (2) talking to said people intelligently and forthrightly about topics that interest me, (3) working my ass off and having the results to show for it. And that was when I was getting offered jobs by accident. So I figure I'll more or less keep doing what I've been doing and see what happens. If nothing comes in by June I'll start to panic a bit, but in the meantime fuck if I'm not going to make the most of having in at least some small way already proven myself. Especially since I'm still pretty sure it's all going to be a misunderstanding on my part in the first place.
Love you
M
