Dump, from the right side of the brain

(Friday, 27 February 2009 – incoherent thoughts before going to bed)

Account books back in order. 3 basic forms to be filled in everyday – one by each person – to keep track of the business and ensure everything adds up. Daily cash flow projections until end of June, with payment schedule to eliminate all debts until then. A proposal to improve financial performance: 3 initiatives on the cost side plus 3 on the revenue side. 3, not 2, not 4 – 3, the credibly round number for any consultant.

This is how I left things with UPAVIM’s bakery before I headed to Antigua last Thursday. On track, I felt. Time to work on the soya project and go back to Reforzamiento to be with the kids, I thought. No way…

I’ve said this before, but things do move slowly around there. The need to help out with the bakery and soya production was pulling me in and out of Reforzamiento all the time so, to focus and avoid spreading my efforts too thin, I’ve decided to temporarily pull out of the work with the children and be fulltime with the other 2 projects, where I think my help is most needed at the moment.

That’s a tough trade-off to make. My days have been looking more and more consulting like – a radically different context, but still consulting like. You aren’t helping the kids with their school work, you aren’t playing Lego with them. You’re working with some of their mothers. You’ve meetings, you explain the forms, you add the numbers, you coach on the process. You’re not the smile and hug of a young boy, you’re what keeps his mum half hour more at UPAVIM…

Yeah, that’s a tough trade-off to make. What’s being a volunteer after all? Do what you’re most passionate about (so that you can keep doing it and help for a long period of time) or do what you think has higher return on invested time for the community (even if that means you’re less enthused with it)?

I don’t know; right now I’m betting on the later. So, I’m doing work which is surprisingly close to the one I wanted to run away from – for half a year or so at least.

Spending time with Excel, and not playing creative games with children – including some of the stuff I learnt with theatre and improvisation – naturally undermines what I emotionally take out of my work here. And that, of course, undermines my desire to stay at UPAVIM for a long period of time.

But, still, it feels like the right trade-off to make: do what you think is most helpful, even if it makes you less thrilled on a daily basis, and it may make you move on sooner than otherwise planned.

Does that sound reasonable?

Of course, life is not everything or nothing, black or white – there are shades of grey. I’m working towards dedicating only half of my time to the bakery and soya production – concentrate the work only on a few hours, so that I can go back to Reforzamiento in the afternoon. I’m also trying to keep in touch with the folks in the city centre whose work I’d like to know more of: theatre writers, artists, workers at cultural and youth associations. It’s being tough to juggle all that, but it might work well eventually…

But, even if I have moved on already from thinking that “I have to”, to start thinking that “I chose to” make this trade off, this is how I’m felling at the moment and I cannot really avoid it.

Yeah, things move slowly, and I’ve to get used to it. When finally I think I got the speed at which everything happens around here, I’m surprised by the events and find my aspirations over-ambitious, unrealistic. It’s the meeting with the woman who will start doing the accounts with my help and coaching that gets postponed 3 times – it should have happened on Monday but it happens on Thursday, sometimes because of no-shows, other times because the books are locked in a room that no-one has the keys for. It’s the coaching process that is slower than expected. Are the things everyone agreed to but that don’t get done.

Patience is important. Coaching and capability building is the key. There is no point on things being spotless while one is around, if it means they will fall apart once direct voluntary supervision is no longer here to provide help.

Success is the work to be done right and independently by the women. Long term sustainability. People actually knowing what they’re doing. Fishing, not being given the fish.

If that implies all the trade-offs I’m making at the moment, I think I’m cool with that…