A rather frustrating day in the field monitoring local health examinations for The Survey, I've experienced for myself the great benefits of a strong top-down model of organization and the terrible inefficiencies that poor horizontal collaboration across departments produce. It's a little tongue in cheek to say that they PRODUCE inefficiencies, but it feels that some people truly do go out of their way to make their own work more difficult.
Yesterday, I spent the day in FC, KT with the KC CDC and was impressed by their experience and thoroughness, not only in planning and arranging schedules and children for their health examinations, but also in their work verifying that the children were indeed our sample children.
Today, I bounced along more dirt roads with the QYS CDC in EC, JT monitoring the health examinations. This is where many of the problems begin. They made no effort to get in touch with the local SSB and tried to go it alone on old data from 2000 with only the help of the township level hospital head. At one point, they could only identify 9 out of 20 of the sample children from that village! They were working up a sweat and getting absolutely nowhere. In addition, they people actually doing the examinations were poorly trained.
I have also just changed my plans for the next week. Instead of going to XX XX and another P as I had been planning, I will be continuing my work monitoring different counties in GP.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Lessons learned, thoughts thunk
Here is to the start of Helena sitting down and documenting her daily musings and lessons learned in the field. Some entries will consist of simple facts learned that add texture to the bigger picture of development and growth here. Others will be my own opinions and interpretations of what I see. All this plus a sprinkling of the dour hilarity that presents itself in everyday life, like the back of my bus catching on fire last week. To be honest the real reason I haven't started this blog until now is because this is the very first broadband internet cafe I've found in the backroads of GP. Updates are pending on internet access.
Here we start in GP. I will begin by trying to place each experience within three contexts: local, national, and international (mostly with respect to my own experience living as an Asian American in the United States). Having been to 10 P and 3 M, I hope that I can offer a perspective grounded in both experience and books.
GP is not a p well travelled by foreigners. The major tourist attraction is the XX XX in northern GP and no one usually comes for anything else, and much less for the P capitol. Much of the population in the P capitol, can not call it their ancestral home. Migration movements in the 20th century make P capitol the city it is today. By now, many the state owned enterprises have been shut down due to ineffiency and poor quality output. A necessary step for the central government but has caused a noticeable shiver in the state social security system. In the words of a cab driver (where many foreigners seem to get their information, reliable or not), the laid off workers with skills go on to big business and the laid-off workers without skills go on to little business, like peddling goods on the streets. Logically, it's usually the unskilled workers that get laid off first. The overall population in GP is poorer but not as dense as that compared to the eastern coastal P. In some areas with extremely limited natural resources, like DX, there's a saying that claims that the families are so poor they can only afford one pair of pants. The mother must wait for the father to come home from the fields so she can put on the pants to go to market. However, a cab driver, again, told me that, even in DX, things have improved in the last five years.
My raison d'etre at the moment is The Survey. To say that this survey has been my life for the past month would be an understatement. I won't go into detail here, but be warned that The Survey very much colors my experiences and thoughts about GP thus far.
Here we start in GP. I will begin by trying to place each experience within three contexts: local, national, and international (mostly with respect to my own experience living as an Asian American in the United States). Having been to 10 P and 3 M, I hope that I can offer a perspective grounded in both experience and books.
GP is not a p well travelled by foreigners. The major tourist attraction is the XX XX in northern GP and no one usually comes for anything else, and much less for the P capitol. Much of the population in the P capitol, can not call it their ancestral home. Migration movements in the 20th century make P capitol the city it is today. By now, many the state owned enterprises have been shut down due to ineffiency and poor quality output. A necessary step for the central government but has caused a noticeable shiver in the state social security system. In the words of a cab driver (where many foreigners seem to get their information, reliable or not), the laid off workers with skills go on to big business and the laid-off workers without skills go on to little business, like peddling goods on the streets. Logically, it's usually the unskilled workers that get laid off first. The overall population in GP is poorer but not as dense as that compared to the eastern coastal P. In some areas with extremely limited natural resources, like DX, there's a saying that claims that the families are so poor they can only afford one pair of pants. The mother must wait for the father to come home from the fields so she can put on the pants to go to market. However, a cab driver, again, told me that, even in DX, things have improved in the last five years.
My raison d'etre at the moment is The Survey. To say that this survey has been my life for the past month would be an understatement. I won't go into detail here, but be warned that The Survey very much colors my experiences and thoughts about GP thus far.
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