Did you ever have the feeling of a total meltdown? Well, I did sometimes consider hot summer holidays or in general working during the summer as exhausting but it was not until the last four days that I got a glimpse of an idea of the true meaning of the word ‘meltdown’. During this period I was involved in monitoring and evaluation of WFP’s field operations. A task that is more easy said than done, and anything else than physically comforting.
On the one side this meant going with a fancy climatized UN Toyota 4x4 some 100-150km outside of urban areas into the African bush, with nice background drum music, getting away for a while from the country office, seeing interesting landscapes, meeting rural communities, testing the unpaved, brown-red-colored bumpy and neck breaking roads, more often than not driving through mud, waterholes, bushes and fields, waiting for cows to painfully slowly leave the road, seeing the greenest of green palms, baobab forests and rice fields, passing by WFP trucks carrying food aid for the rural school feeding programme and finally reaching the smiling faces of the many children and families benefiting from WFP’s food aid, with the latter being the most rewarding of all the observations.
Yes, even though it is somewhat far from Indiana Jones style it does sound like a nice adventure with many human faces on it and it is definitely an enriching experience in every possible respect. However, the other side of the fun medal is that (yes, indeed) it does involve hard work, which on the surface might seem to be quite straightforward, quick and easy to do, but given the climatic working conditions it is far from being a piece of cake. In more general, the work is about monitoring and evaluation of the WFP Food for Work project which is aimed at supporting the food security of some 6,000 Senegalese refugees and of their Gambian host families as a result of the 2006 exacerbation of a 30 years old conflict in the south Senegalese region of Casamance. In particular it is about getting empirical evidence on the implementation of the project from village coordinators, visiting project sites and comparing data with that of implementing partners.
True, it seems as if the objectives of the task are simple. But try to get empirical evidence from people who sometimes fail to speak proper English, even though it is the country’s official language, or crosschecking databases which are incomplete or outdated or getting the right picture of the implementation situation if some answers to your question constantly go with a seemingly automatic “yes…yes…yes”, likely lacking any proper substance and rather giving an impression that the question or task at hand has not been rightly understood in the first place, or trying to rightly ‘measure’ the output of various project activities or even access project sites (or whole communities) due to occasional super-rainfall. Yes, sometimes this was a daunting task, a true test for one’s patience and endurance, especially given the constant mix of heat, humidity and time pressure. Still, the work has to be done, no matter what, as the food security and well-being of the people in need depend on this.
On one of the days I was interviewing a village coordinator for nearly two hours, in a mud-house, permeated by heat and humidity, without the slightest wind that could give at least some refreshment, sitting on a rather uncomfortable chair, at the end of the working day, knowing that the water in the car has reached boiling levels, facing a 3-page questionnaire and a language barrier that was luckily compensated by a local colleague. I felt every single drop of sweat pouring down my forehead, face, neck, chest, even heels.
Yes, on that 1st of October 2009, after finishing this very last interview, which was even not as encouraging as it might have left me with the feeling of a successful working day, and after realizing that my shirt was soaked in water as if I was just taking a shower, and with a mounting headache as if my head was heavy like a mountain, I got a better understanding of what it means to go through a total physical meltdown. And this is not yet the end of the climatic adjustment process…Wondering where I am right now? Well, it's friday evening my 30c apartment, writing this blog before going to bed in my 35c sleeping room, having to listen to the damaged fan on the sealing characterized by a ‘ratatatah’ hammering wing rotation. Home sweet home.. Good night.