Sustainability vs Service Delivery
on Marika VSO-ing in Namibia (Namibia), 18/Jul/2010 18:45, 34 days ago
This past week demonstrated an example of our dilemma between sustainability and service delivery. 50 years ago when VSO first begun to send volunteers out, they often just provided a service delivery, for example a teacher would just go out to teach. Now their vision is to provide a more sustainable service that empowers the people by sharing skills so the work we do here as volunteers somehow continues after we have left, often through a counterpart, or in my case is hopefully spread out through a larger number of individuals. In my opinion, this is more preferable as many singled out counterparts often end up moving on to a new job after a volunteer has invested all his/her skills in just that one person, therefore there is a higher risk in the investment.Following from the Science week in Windhoek, the same sort of arrangement then takes place at the regional campuses this week including the Caprivi College of Education (CCE), now coming under the University of Namibia alongside an expectation of them having to‘pull their socks up’. So for a number of recent years this appears to have mostly been organised by Scott’s predecessor (Science Advisory teacher with no counterpart), and now Scott, who continues to have no counterpart and is trying to hand over to the College. As we attended a meeting a couple of weeks ago with maybe half a dozen college staff members (of which some were walking in and out at intervals and others only whispered to each other rather than make any contribution to the meetings), I quickly realised that no one of the college staff actually wanted to be involved in any part of organising this event. Who is forcing them to do this I wondered? All these ‘educators’ were very reluctant to accept any role given to them. They argued that the college is only there to provide the venue and the Regional Office are the ones who should be organising the week and yet no contact was made with the Regional Office to get them involved in any way, not even to arrange transport for the learners to come in from the rural schools. They Regional Office play the ignorant card. The college were allowed to choose the week this event would be held, yet complained that theywere busy with a moderating course that week (of which we saw no evidence of). It’s hard to be judgemental as I probably don’t see the whole story but after having just been to the Windhoek Science week, I saw that it was the university that organised it, and their own lecturers that were running the majority of the sessions bar a few guest presenters.Here they managed to have two guest presenters, Scott running the Road Show and the Fair and me running the Maths quiz. They seemed quite happy to cancel the debating sessions that were planned, to have an unworkable programme re-designed by a Windhoek representative despite our input in the last meeting, and the supposedly Science Quiz for Science Week became a Maths Quiz as the delegated lecturer failed to prepare anything and conveniently disappeared for the last two days. In the meeting we agreed that I would do the Maths part if he did the Science part and we spent a whole afternoon together where I showed him exactly how I would put the Maths one together and even looked at some websites together with Science problems he could use. At the end of that day I was pleased as I thought that we had made some progress in liaising with the college for the first time, and we’d even managed to have a long talk about the teachers he is mentoring and how we could work together on this (we’ve often hoped that we could intervene at this level of training teachers). Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed as two weeks on, he hadn’t put a Science quiz together and theone I was asked to design for student teachers was of no use as Monday morning they tell me there will be no student teachers visiting and instead I should make a quiz for the learners. Tuesday morning I arrive to find a designated dirty room full of litter, and with just a few tables and chairs and nothing set up. As I spend the morning setting up the room and tracking down a projector, laptop, tables and chairs the lecturer insists I design a Science Quiz he failed to do (about 20 minutes after the due starting time). I asked him what he did beyond what we started together and clearly haddone nothing, yet he seemed to not see the problem with this picture here.So having realised now that I’ll be running this, I still hoped he would facilitate or at least be present to see what I’d be doing. He disappears. I request from the lead ‘organisers’ that I can cater for all the Grades but they must keep the Primary and Secondary groups of learners separate. Every day they sent mea mixture of learners (with no notification of what Grades they’d be) despite being reminded every day that it is a challenge to run various levels of quizzes at different levels simultaneously. Each morning I arrived, I find the room that I had spent arranging needing to be re-arranged and the daily search for tables, chairs, projectors, equipment etc begins and repeats each morning. From 30 to 60 children show up at a time, mixed Primary and Secondary learners and as soon as I squeeze them into this small room their teachers disappear despite my invites to join (I see them basking in thesun outside or looking for their promised lunches). I obviously enjoy doing this for the sake of the kids, but if all possible counterparts disappear during the times where any involvement (dare I say work) would have been required with the expectation of us to do everything, what will happen nextyear when we’re here? As we kept trying to remind the team of this, it seemed crazy that we were even thinking of next year and preventing a repeat of this chaos. Most Namibians I have worked with (and other volunteers have confirmed) seem to have a reactionary rather than a preventative attitude. We feel like we are left to pick up the pieces in typical last minute fashion. This feels parallel to the expectation for me to perform miracles with my Grade 10 examination class with results as I try to compensate on 9 years of poor teaching with learners who are such a pleasure but have no foundations or even a basic sense of number.On the other hand, the lecturers managed to appear for the formalities (Opening and Closing ceremonies and I wonder if it was to appear to get the credit) whereas the rest of the week they were hiding in their office guarding the lunches they received. I did not witness an ounce of work being done the whole week in this office. The volunteering students alone provided more assistance than the whole team put together. It’s hard to work out why this resistance exists. They have good salaries, but obviously seem to have no interest, let alone passion in these events that could be so inspirational to some learners. Do I continue trying to work with the college after feeling so infuriated by their attitude by the end of the week, or am I flogging a dead horse?On the contrary, this week I have started to sympathise a bit more with the more capable, yet seemingly externally unmotivated teachers as they express their frustrations when obvious corruption leads to incompetent individuals getting undeserved promotions resulting in poor management, teachers teaching and leading subjects they are not experienced in, simply because they have the‘right’ community links. As I think I've said before, it feels like we are just trying to treat the symptoms of bigger problems that underline the system as a whole. People need to start making a fuss, but this isn’t easy. I see our role here more for exposing and challenging these seeminglyfundamental issues, but I don’t always know how to go about it. My position means I have the advantage of being able to call a spade a spade which others maybe cannot, but on the other hand it also means that what I say has little weighting. At the end of the day it’s the children who are suffering and that’s usually enough of a motivation to keep going when you get too bogged down with whether what you’re doing is sustainable or not or just feel like giving up.The water for the whole town was off from Monday to Wednesday and as rumours were flying that it would be for 3 or 4 days, Mavuluma decided to cancel the afternoon sessions as it would‘seem like a punishment’ when the whole town had to flock to the River to collect water (an interesting sight). Luckily we are prepared for these instances with bottles of water stocked up but it was an eye-opener to see how much gets wasted just by trying to flush toilets. The week ended with arelaxing weekend including cooking experiments with Chie (JICA - Japanese volunteer) who is too getting frustrated by being limited by a narrow-minded principal to the work she could be doing.