****ing NAWEC!
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 23/Jun/2010 10:56, 34 days ago
(Written 22/06/2010 22:45, My House, Janjanbureh)NAWEC is the nationally-owned company responsible for electricity and water supply. Today, for the first time since I’ve been here, they dropped the ball big style. We had no power for most of last night (it came back briefly several times, only to go off again within a minute), and the power continued to be off through most of today. We’ve had a fair few short power cuts, and there’ve been plenty of times when the power’s been a bit late coming on, but this was our first extended outage. For some reason, the generator wasn’t switched on until well into the afternoon either, so after I’d exhausted my laptop battery at ten, most of my “working” day was spent playing cards with Pete, Liz and Fiona. Yay productivity! At least, in a situation like that, you can’t feel bad about the fact that you’re doing no work, because there’s no work that you could do.I’ll be fair though, NAWEC has been a bit more reliable than I’d been led to expect, and I didn’t know the office had a generator until I arrived here either. Electricity hasn’t been too bad, not that that stops everyone slagging them off when there is a problem, myself included. And I thinkother places have more problems than us: Soma apparently went without electricity for a full week earlier in the month. As seems to have happened all along the line, we in Janjanbureh have got the good fortune while all the bad breaks have landed on Kate, Lucy and Kanti in Soma. Kate and Lucy visited us again last weekend, and some of the attitudes and problems that they describe, at their compound, in the town and at their office, would be just unthinkable in JJB or at RED5. I think maybe we’re reaping the rewards of VSOs having been in this region a lot longer; the relationships have beenbuilt up much more strongly and people have a better understanding of how to treat and, most importantly, how to use volunteers. Fiona was among the first batch of VSOs to come here five years ago, and she claims to have spent most of her first year sitting under mango trees talking to teachers after classes, getting to know and understand the people and the culture. She had a pretext (doing baseline research into the state of schools), but her focus was on building the relationships so that she could work effectively in the latter part of her stay. And although it may not have seemed very efficient or useful at the time, the efforts that she and her fellow VSOs put in back then are paying dividends now, as Pete, Liz and I can slot into our roles relatively easily. And that’s the VSO way: building effective relationships between people and organisations.To an individual volunteer, it can be hard though, when you come with a job description which is completely task-oriented and find that actually, you can’t do very much work towards your assigned tasks after all, because people aren’t prepared, the communications are terrible, the resources aren’t available or whatever. It can create real issues when you feel like you can’t do your job properly, and I think that’s what a lot of volunteersfind the hardest thing about working here. I myself have issues at work, but I’m a bit better off because I know that most of my problems are to do with my personality and the way I’m used to working, rather than anything external. To be a bit less vague, I’ve finally worked out that if want to get anything useful done in the office, I have to take the lead on it. And I hate having to push and drive people, so I try to avoid doing it, so nothing happens. It’s an adjustment I have make, and I’ll get there in the end, I guess... but even as I’m trying to drive my own agenda, I’ll try not to forget the value of “mango tree time”.