Wednesday, July 24, 2013

lesson 6: preparing to start to plan to think how to implement a project

Ok,
You have a contract to implement a project written by an intern in Europe.
You flow to the country, met the staff or selected one, and your staff had many meeting to decide if trying a friendly or professional approach. Somebody proudly and altruistically decide to kamikaze with a sexual joke, just to see the reaction.
You met the government stakeholders and the community. Everybody is enthusiastic of you well written project whom expected results are something like "annihilate forever poverty, discrimination, malnutrition, pimps and mcdonalds whole over the universe". You signed Memorandum of Understandings until your pen exhausted and then...
You fill lost.
Lost in translation, lost in eternity, lost in space, lost and in need of mammy and daddy. You feel like a lonely cell in a plasma so far bigger than your human possibility and not strong enough to change the life of thousand, thousand of people.

After years I learned how to emerge from this quicksand of bureaucracy and politeness: you go to the staff and illustrate again the project activities, one by one, and then you say something that sounds like: I want this team to be committed and participating and I want to empower you and give you self-government till the day you fail me.
And then: If you were walking in my shoes, what you would do next?

This always work
this is what happen when you call for a meeting in a Masai community.

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