Day 54: Moody Toosday

I’m writing this from a conference room in the world class Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens; it is completely beautiful. However, I feel like that is just about the only thing I got going for me right now. I’m here for a feedback workshop for a certain government department that we conducted an evaluation for on one of their programs. It’s a pretty cool program – it gives disadvantaged people skills, hires them on a contract basis to use those skills, and has a social development component as well that educates beneficiaries about issues such as health, conflict resolution, gender diversity, etc. The ultimate goal is poverty alleviation through equipping these beneficiaries and then successfully transitioning them into the economy.

So, when I read the evaluation report and put together the powerpoint presentation of findings for the workshop a few weeks ago, it sounded pretty great. There were clearly a few government admin issues, but yea, cool program. Now though, getting into this workshop, oh my gosh. Its almost the end of day two and it feels like we’ve gotten nowhere. Everybody is on a different page, people don’t want to go with the process, communication stinks, and we just can’t get down to doing the work. Everyone is a critic of the activities that have been planned for developing this strategic plan. I’ve wanted to scream on maybe 15 occasions. Its been a great learning experience for me in terms of watching my supervisors facilitate this whole show, they’re doing an amazing job. Like I said, I would’ve melted down and run to the bathroom crying or something. They’re just keeping it cool and moving on… (where they’re moving on to, however, ultimately remains to be seen).

I’ve been invited to jump in and help out with the group work, but at this point I’m quite intimidated by these obstinate bureaucrats. They’re currently arguing about what the purpose was of the last hour of group work we did before lunch. Whoever ordered the catering for lunch today was a huge failure; it was all platters of fried food. All nice interesting shapes of fried food, but seriously, its all still fried food. I ate two spring rolls, some mysterious fried veggie paste, and a chunk of chicken. Oh wait, the chicken drumsticks weren’t fried, but they were covered in something orange and fattening. So now, after lunch, I’m sipping a cup of nasty instant coffee and trying to keep up with what the heck is going on. I avoided the instant coffee for so long, but I had to get up at 6 today to catch the train out here. I guess seeing the sunrise while running across the CBD to the train station was nice. Geeze, what an adventure.

I have gotten into a bit of a funk over the last few days so its just comical that this workshop has plopped its fat bum on top of that. The Connect program is a difficult social bubble to live in because its all so transitory – people are always coming and going around the beginning/end of each month. One of my best friends, Hunter, left yesterday, and that is SAD. I was supposed to get a new roommate on Sunday (now she’s coming Thursday) and that is nerve-racking. I hope she’s cool since we’ll be sharing a room and stuff. Cailey is leaving in like 3 weeks. I’m sick of being in a long-distance relationship that spans hemispheres. I want a car so I have a degree of freedom. I have too much schoolwork to do and no time in which to do it (since I’m working fulltime and all). And I need to figure out what the heck I’m doing in May. The mere thought of what comes after May is too terrifying to mention, so I won’t. For now, I guess I’ll focus on surviving this workshop. Thanks for listening to my huge whine-fest. Can someone please put my mommy on a plane now so she can come give me hugs and kissies???

Day 49: Training Week at the Waterfront

All this week I have been in a full-time training that Southern Hemisphere puts on that teaches people all about program monitoring and evaluation. It has been absolutely marvelous! Its been down in the Clock Tower, a venue at the V&A Waterfront (so you know its all fancy) that includes the conference center we’ve been using. Let me just get this out of the way and say it – I LOVE THE FOOD. This week has completely spoiled me! We go in and have coffee, then start at 8:30 and have a tea break around mid-morning. This is the best tea break of all because they serve scones and muffins. The scones are what I, the American, refer to as biscuits (although they’re just a bit sweeter than biscuits), and they are served every morning with cream, shredded cheddar cheese, and jam. This may sound odd, but cream tastes good with everything so I just heap cream on my biscuit halves then put cheese on one and jam on the other so I have a sweet one and a savory one. This morning for example, I had 2 biscuits and a chocolate muffin because I just can’t help myself. We then go back in and work until sometime after noon when we have lunch. Lunch has also been SO delicious – we’ve had fish, chicken, shepard’s pie, always lots of veggies, and yummy desserts. Then we were a little more and have afternoon tea break at 3. At afternoon tea we eat biscuits, or what I would call cookies. Southern Hemisphere covered the cost for me and the other intern to go, which was very kind and its been amazing to not have to worry about packing lunch or spending money on it. Oh and I’ve probably gained 5 pounds. The frequent tea break structure is simply genius. Whenever people are starting to lose focus, we just go drink tea, get caffeinated and have a rest, and then work is easy to start again.

The learning has been phenomenal as well. I’ve taken the whole program eval course at UT, which was great for giving me a background on all this, but it was a bit dry. This course, however, has been terrifically engaging. The steps for creating a log frame for guide your evaluation were fun – making a problem tree, doing objectives analyses, setting indicators, learning about means of verification, etc etc. So it turns out, planning evaluations can be quite fun, go figure.

What has also made this course amazing is the group of people that are in it. There are really bright, interesting people from around the country, 10 of us in all, from different sectors. We have workers from NGOs, government, and policy-oriented work. On the first day we broke into three groups in which we’ve been working most of the week on developing a log frame for a project one of the participants brought from their job. I joined the group that has focused on an HIV/AIDS prevention program in schools in KwaZulu-Natal. A woman named Gethwana brought the project. Gethwana is amazing. She is one of those people who you meet and feel blessed just to know.

At lunch the first day we were talking about Oscar Pistorius because everyone here is reeling from it, and that led to talking about violence against women in general. Gethwana told me that she was an abuse victim. She wanted to leave her husband, but everyone told her not to because he would come back and kill her. She responded that if she had just one week of freedom and then he came back and killed her, that would be worth it to her. So she got a good lawyer and ended up making her husband leave the house taking just his clothing. And she’s still here today doing amazing work in KZN and on a national level. She was my hero from that moment, but then as the week has gone on and I learn more about her, I am blown more and more away. The next day I found out she has taken 5 boys into her home who had substantial life and behavior problems, and they’re doing great now. Today, I found out she met Brad Pitt a few years ago. Had a meeting with him when he came to visit KZN and had no idea who he was, but he ended up funding one of her projects. She won’t be at the training tomorrow for the last day because she is flying to Joburg to a meeting of this new government board or panel or something on gender issues. She has been selected as the province representative to this board from KZN. Her daughter came to pick her up and bring her to the airport after training today and they gave me a ride home. We’ve exchanged information and I hope to keep in touch with her, even maybe to visit her in KZN if I can. What a blessing to have met Gethwana. And all the other great people in my course too that I don’t have the space to mention!

My internship supervisory professor from UT, Tammy, also visited for a couple of days this week and was able to attend the training with me on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. I’m so glad she got to be a part of this experience as well. I’ve felt quite disconnected from the school since I’ve been here, in fact I’ve found myself forgetting that I’m a social work student at all. So having her come was lovely. Plus she’s fun and we get along very well. We got dinner with my supervisor from Southern Hemisphere on Tuesday night and it was a great dinner. I’m hopeful UT social work masters students can come to Southern Hemisphere in the future because its been a wonderful experience; as well as one that has been very congruent with the learning in the CAL curriculum.

So its been a wonderful week! I’m not looking forward to going back to a life of no tea times with scones and free lunches next week, although my waistline is. I’ll also get to walk to work again instead of running frantically to the train station each morning to cram into minibus taxis to the Waterfront. I got in the wrong one this morning… but that’s a whole ‘nother story, ha. TGIF tomorrow!

Day 44: Penguin Patrol

I have had SUCH a good week. And I had a great weekend! So I guess I’ll mention by way of great weekend: a group of us went to Boulders Beach and the Cape of Good Hope on Saturday. Boulders Beach is home to a colony of South Africa’s Jackass Penguins. Jackass penguins because of the donkey-like bray noise they make. We start off at this entrance, pay our money, and go through the turnstyles to a boardwalk. As we walk down the boardwalk to the beach, we start to see them: a few cute little penguins doing penguin things amongst the bushes. This is obviously breathtaking and amazing and we all stop to take pictures. The couple of penguins we see at this point are too far away for me to get a good picture of with my Blackberry camera (my primary camera bc my Samsung point-and-shoot is quite awful), so I continue on down. At the beach there is a terrific mass of penguins laying a about, waddling around, snuggling – its GREAT. We take a bunch of pictures and that’s all great and stuff, but I’m getting a bit irritated that we’re stuck on this elevated boardwalk and separated from the penguins. I had heard tales prior to coming of a place where you can actually go and be with the penguins to waddle about, swim, etc with them. Cailey and I are discussing this with each other and we would just like to know, WHERE IS THIS PLACE? HOW can we get closer to the penguins!?? We being to scheme a return trip sometime and all that, and before we know it, the group is heading back out.

We follow along and realize we’re not walking back to the bus but rather away from it… hmmm where could we be going? We look over as we walk and begin to see little penguins swimming and playing on a beach and there’s no boardwalk. We walk a little further and see we’re going down to this beach and if we just swim across this nice calm looking stretch of water, we shall have our change to frolic with the penguins. And, Cailey has a waterproof camera that can swim over with us! We get to the head of the group, and as we enter the beach and everyone is settling their stuff in, Cailey and I strip and jet for the water. The penguins are SO CLOSE. I doggy paddle across and we eventually get to the other side and there they are!! We are amongst them! Commence the photoshoot!!

It’s the weirdest most magical surreal thing: I’m on this incredibly gorgeous beach - clear water, interesting rock formations, white sand - its warm out (no ice) and I’m in a swim suit, and there I’m playing with PENGUINS! They’re pretty chill; they just do their thing as we run about taking photos with them (from a mostly respectable distance). This also adds to the oddity of the whole thing.  Some dude comes over later and sticks his Blackberry in a penguins face to take its picture and the penguin like starts hissing at him and sticking his open beak towards this guy’s phone. And the guy doesn’t quit. I am worried that I might watch this guy get attacked by a penguin. Maybe that would be kind of cool though (and serve him right). He finally backs off though and I don’t get to see any penguin attack action.

After much quality time with the penguins, we head out from Boulders Beach to Cape Point. The Cape of Good Hope, contrary to popular belief, is actually NOT the southern-most part of Africa and is not where the Indian and Atlantic oceans officially meet. This would a bit further east at Cape Arugula or something. I have a cool moment there while running around – I remember learning about the Cape of Good Hope in school when I was a kid; I never thought then that I would actually go to see the it. It is cool to be in the home of the Flying Dutchman. It smells funny there and I read about a legend later on Wikipedia that explains that this is because of a ghost that farts there, like the Farting Dutchman or something. It smelled bad enough out on the actual point to make me a believer. 

Day 35: State of the Nation

This past weekend was very eventful, lots of fun to be had by everyone. On Saturday I wake up before 9 (ugh) to go on a wine tasting trip in Franschoek, a gorgeous wine valley a bit further out of Cape Town than Stellenbosch. I eat breakfast alone and think it odd because my roommate is also supposed to be going on this trip. I finish my bowl of museli and go knock on her door… nothing. Hm. I grab my phone and call her… nothing. I wonder if she came in last night? I go to knock on her door again and decide to open it before I panic. I open it and call her name. I look over and she’s laying in bed looking up at me with a dreamy look at her face. This freaks me out and I’m like, “Woah! Sorry, just couldn’t figure out where you were since you wouldn’t answer the phone or your door. You going to Franschoek still?” She nods and is like, “Dude, thanks for getting me up! Yes, let’s go.” We get ready and as we’re walking out the door, she gets the hiccups and starts freaking out. She is hilarious! And obviously still inebriated form the night before.

We get on the bus and drive out of town. Its rainy out, the first real rainy day we’ve had since I’ve been here. It doesn’t disappoint me though, it creates a relaxing vibe for the wine tastings and the greens of the valley are very intense against the dreary sky. The first vineyard is great, but the second is my favorite. Its called Grande Provence (http://www.grandeprovence.co.za/) and its over 300 years old. The wine is delicious, there is a beautiful garden, an art gallery, and a fancy restaurant. I could stay there exploring the gardens and wine fields all day, but we go on to the next winery for lunch. I split a bottle of Rickety Bridge Semillion (www.ricketybridgewinery.com) with my roommate who is taking the day like a champ, and another girl. For lunch I have a gigantic plate of fish. Probably should’ve gone for something more like a giant plate of bread. By time we get back on the shuttle to Cape Town, I am ready for a nap.

After waking up from my lovely nap, Cailey and I make curry for dinner. Well Cailey makes it while I sit on the couch, she’s been wanting to try out a green curry recipe. Its delicious and this seems like a great night to spend sitting on the couch. Except its Hunter’s last Saturday in Cape Town, so of course we have to go out. Much to my chagrin, I get off the couch and drag myself out. A new girl has joined us from Egypt and she doesn’t drink so I figure she’ll want to go in early like me. I find her and tell her to let me know when she wants to split and we can make that happen. Well what actually ends up happening is we finally find a cool place on Long Street called Joburg. It looks totally lame from the outside, and the first floor isn’t that special. But, somehow, we all get VIP stamps and are allowed up to this sweet room upstairs where a several hours long dance party ensues. Before I know it, Hunter and I are eating Indian and Chinese food at Food Inn at 3:45 in the morning and our other friends are trying to find another place to go out... Am I still in college? Oh well, that chicken fried rice from Food Inn lasted me 3 more meals and was delicious. And I had a great time.

The other highlight of this week has been the opening of Parliament and the State of the Nation Address (SONA), which I am currently watching. We got fliers under our doors, full page front and back, listing all the road closures that would be going on the days leading up to SONA and day of. So I googled what exactly this would entail and Parliaments website said there would be a flyover, horses, and cannons going off. I live right up the street and can see it perfectly from my building so naturally, this was all thrilling news. I went up to the roof a few times and saw them practicing. Its been quite an affair – I saw a troupe of bag pipers (in Africa??) and a lot of soldiers. The South African Air Force flyover practice happened – it was four propeller planes. Then today leading up to the speech, they shut down all the road around us. There was a red carpet rolled out at Parliament, I got to see the mounted police or soldiers or whoever they are doing their march down Plein street, and they fired off a bunch of huge cannons.  Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let us on the roof to watch today (security measure?) so I had to hang out the window to do it. Oh and can I say how annoyed I was that through this whole thing, there was no schedule of events to be found anywhere, or listing for its showing on tv? Yea, so I’ve just had to hang out and watch to see what happens.

The actual address is on tv now (someone had to call and inform me of this as I couldn’t find a schedule anywhere). The president, Jacob Zuma, is (in my humble opinion) a very mediocre speaker; lots of awkward pauses and coughing, weird diction. I haven’t heard many positive things about him since I’ve been here. I also found out today he has 5 (!) wives and 22 children, none of whom have over an 8^th grade education (I haven’t verified this fact). But now he’s going on about education, seems like that could start at home? The president just said something about getting a Facebook message from someone about land redistribution… what is going on?

Anyway, in other news, I got sick yesterday. I woke up with a scratchy throat so I panicked at work and went to Clicks (Walgreens equivalent) and bought the closest thing to EmergenC I could find.  It must’ve been too little too late because I woke up this morning with a full-out cold. I went into work for two hours because there were some things I really needed to get done at the office today and then I went home and slept for 4.5 hours. Bummer. Kyle texted me a happy face for Valentines Day and I finished a jar of Nutella that was sitting in my cabinet stopping every now and then to blow my nose. Happy Valentines Day to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even escape it in South Africa as there were heart shaped chocolate boxes and pink love stuff in the stores all this week.

Looks like its bed for me again very soon and hopefully I’ll get this virus thing under control so I don’t waste a precious weekend. We’re going on a trip to Cape Point this weekend, including a stop at the PENGUIN BEACH. Can’t wait!

Day 28: Fake It Til You Make It

So my blogging capacity has been greatly reduced, and the responsible culprit is work. For two reasons – 1. I sit at a desk for 8 hours just about everyday and there’s not much I can write about that that even my mom and grandma would want to read, and 2. I completely crash when I get off work and cannot make myself do anything that involves thought or a computer. Typing a blog is too much like what I do at work so I just can’t do it when I get home. They work me hard, man. I am one hardworking little intern. This is not a complaint, just a statement of the facts. I would 100% rather have a job where I always have too much to do and stress out about than a job where I don’t have enough to do and am bored.

Anyway, so this week I’m at work and am feeling particularly stressed out about this “evaluation” report I’ve been given to assess for quality and usefulness. I am to do so using a very intense and detailed rating system in a long spreadsheet called the EQAT. I think that stands for evaluation quality assessment tool or something. The particular “evaluation” report I have been given is not really an evaluation of anything, unless you want to use the term evaluation very loosely. Its about 100 pages on how the labour market, in particular, wages and wage formation, is shaped by bargaining councils. It starts with a loooooooong history and description of labour laws and bargaining councils, followed by some descriptive statistical analysis on a somewhat unclear sample of historical data. I’m still hanging in there at this point. Then it goes into a section of multivariate analysis (shoot me) using dummy variables to represent different categories such as people who are members of bargaining councils versus those who are not. Then spits out all these horrific dummy variable coefficients that I cannot for the life of me interpret into tables that take up entire pages and mean nothing to your average non-connoisseur of econometrics. I just sit at my desk and want to cry. I feel a wave of dummy variable coefficients crashing over me and drowning me and I just want to cry.

So I go eat lunch. Oh and I’m really sorry if you stuck it out and read the entirety of that paragraph. But it was therapeutic to write it. Lunch was slightly therapeutic as well. When my supervisor came in the boardroom to eat too I asked her if she understood how to interpret dummy variable coefficients. Not because I thought she would be able to, but just to whine about how hard my work was in a covert manner. And to lower her expectations for the EQAT I was about to produce.

I go back after lunch and finish reading the report, in its entirety and feel like I have a decent enough handle on this thing to do an ok job (for a non-econometric Ph.D. holder) of rating it. Yea so I did, I think I did ok. I guess I’ll find out next week when my supervisor reads it. And the good news is, I didn’t die. But the bad news is, instead of celebrating this small victory, I have to dive into the huge stack of work that I was neglecting while drowning in dummy variable coefficients. Wahh. I finally leave work and just want to crawl into a cave and be left alone for awhile. Instead I make myself go for a run in the company gardens. Its beautiful there, until a big rat runs across the path in front of me with this giant chunk of bread in its mouth! Gross.

Work today, however, is something worth writing home about, so stick with me here. Yesterday, one of the consultants tells me about a workshop that the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME, aka the people we been doing all those stinkin’ EQATs for) is having at the Mandela Rhodes Place, a super nice hotel on Wale Street. Yes, I would LOVE to go and get out of the office! She also tells me she’ll be a little late because she refuses to give up her personal training session for this workshop. I totally get that and tell her I’ll save her a seat. I didn’t know how late she would be exactly, so this morning I find myself chillin’ in this nice hotel conference room with a bunch of government officials, university professors, m&e consultants, and free coffee. Dena is nowhere to be found still as the workshop is underway and we have been broken into small groups to review the evaluation standards document the government wants to adopt.

Something weird happens to me in small groups - it happened all the time in college and especially grad school – my personality just wants to take charge and organize everybody. And I do it again, with this small group of super adult government officials. Its kind of like an out of body experience watching myself do it , but there I go, making sure we all have the appropriate forms and starting discussions. Seriously, I am an intern who has taken one course on program evaluation last semester and have been at Southern Hemisphere under a month… who am I? But I just can’t help but raise points about clarity of some of these standards and appropriateness of placements of certain sentences, etc. Sometimes the other people in my group argue with themselves or with me about points being raised. At times its valid, at other times I think it’s a bit excessive but just sit back and think, “Oh well, if your country’s standards for evaluation aren’t that clear or awesome…..” Ha.

Small group breakout number 1 comes to an end as we’re nearing a tea break. I look at the lady from the Dept of Safety who likes to talk/argue a lot and ask her if she would like to be our spokesperson to report back to the large group. She shakes her head. I look at the next lady from the Secretary of the Treasury’s office. She shakes her head too and says, “You need to do it. You took the notes so you’ll know what to say.” Oh yikes, guess I’m headed up to the podium…

So I go up to the front of the room and get close to the mic at the podium to introduce myself and my group members. I can see in some people’s faces that they are registering my accent. I start talking about what we discussed in our group and it was the ultimate case of fake-it til ya make-it. Good thing I can speak confidently even in situations where I’m not entirely sure about what is going on. When I finish blubbering about stuff we discussed I conduct a questions/comments section and tried to pretend to answer people’s questions. This included some dramatic pauses waiting for someone else to jump in and help me out. And then I go back to my seat and think to myself about how cool yet comical that whole thing was. Oh and my consultant colleague came in in time to see me present.

After all this, we have reached the time allotted for lunch. I think this means we will have to go out and buy lunch somewhere, but then I look over as hotel staff opens the doors to the tea/coffee room which has now been turned into a totally luscious buffet. Yes!!! This is the greatest day of work ever!!

I’m gonna cut this off because its past my bedtime I am very serious about sleep now that I work a killer 9-5. But just FYI – the Mandela Rhodes Place has a FABULOUS rooftop bar and pool. I did not hang out there more than 10 minutes after the workshop however, because I went back to the office to make sure I didn’t get behind on stuff. Oh, and to finish the newsletter, because I’m the intern J