Today is my first real venture into "the field" for work. Of course I was a part of 2 field visits last week, but they hardly seem to count. Today was full of chickens and goats, bumpy roads, dirty kids and a lot of waving as we passed rural villagers who called out "Muzungu! Muzungu!" when they saw our foreign faces. (Those of you who followed my life in Zim may remember that the term there – murungu- was quite similar)
For the next 3 days this will be life as I conduct monitoring visits in the central region of Malawi with Isaac (my counterpart, aka my other half for the next 16 months), Cole (a student from Vancouver who is also working with MANET+ for 4 months) and Paul (our driver, and thank god for him cause you should see some of these roads).
Malawi is divided into 3 regions: North, Central and South, and I’ll get to see them all. My homebase of Lilongwe is in the central region, so we actually haven’t gone very far, but what a difference 100km makes.
My organization - the Malawi Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS - is a country wide organization that aims to link support groups of people living with HIV to resources, information, training, donors and each other. To do this, we have the secretariat (where my office is), as well as a Regional office in each region. Cole’s role in the short time that he is here is to help the Central Regional Office get off to a good start, so he is part of our monitoring trip this week so we can both get a feel for the situation on the ground and talk with our members. Countrywide we currently have 423 member support groups, so we won’t get to visit them all, but a small sample is all it takes.
Quite simply, our 4 days will be spent visiting with a handful of support groups to have a little chat. We want to know how many active members they have, how many are women, men, children, how many are on ART (anti retroviral therapy), what kind of activities they are doing (Home Based Care? Income generation activities? Advocacy and prevention within their communities?), what their challenges are (transportation to the hospitals to get their ART or HIV testing, lack of adequate food, lack of access to capital to start small businesses seem to be the most common) and who else is helping them (so we can try to avoid the duplication that wastes resources and happens so easily in the development world). My job is to figure out:
1) what information we need
2) how to efficiently and effectively collect said information
3) how to efficiently and effectively report back to our donors about our programming with said information
4) what we can do with the information to fill in the gaps and improve peoples lives and then design appropriate projects to help them as well as monitoring and evaluation systems so that donors will give us money and we can show them that we are using it properly and getting results.
It’s a big job, but someone’s gotta do it ;)
We got off to a bit of a late start today, but managed to meet with 2 different groups. I really like this aspect of my job and am happy that I will get to do lots of traveling. Accommodation may sometimes prove to be a bit of a problem though, and it took us some time this evening to find somewhere to stay. We managed to find a guest house in a forest with 3 rooms and no cell phone reception so I feel a bit cut off from the world (but the night sky is amazing).
The best part of my day? I finally got to pull out my new fancy schmancy camera - I love it so much I’m almost convinced it loves me back.
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