Today I had to go to see a weaving factory in the outskirts of Addis Abbeba (Ethiopia... just in case). It's pretty impressive to see how those things you haggle for at the market are made
the color string is put on a little wooden boat like vessel that gets pulled and pushed from side to side by forcefully pushing and pulling a rope hanging on top. While the feet push pedals sequentially so that the right strings are on top or bottom. The new string gets tightened in with the rest manually.
Sophisticated designs can require up to five foot pedals
it was the sheer number of sticks and strings and levels that I found overwhelming
the intricacy with which each detail is made...
painfully slow step after painfully slow step
even the thread has to be hand weaved onto those little sticks
PS: honey, I bought those curtains you said we needed......
there's something about this photo that I really love. I don't know if it is the colors or the texture... BTW, in the back the hood is up and someone is trying to get the motor running
Apologies
for the radio silence. I'm stuck in a time machine, after
several days run up where my left brain was preparing a dinosaur
party while my right brain was trying to ensure that I was fully prepared for
my mission to Ethiopia.
In short,
my left brain rocked, my right brain did not.
I thought
I was arriving 2 pm Monday and decided to take it easy and start on the
following morning. Instead I arrived 2am, which gave me a full day to myself to
prepare and maybe even go for a stroll before getting on the conveyor belt.
Unfortunately, it was 2am on the following morning, so a couple of hours after
I’d gone to bed I got a call from the Lobby as I was already late for my first
meeting.
"but
it's Monday??"
"no
mam, it's Tuesday"
when's
the last time you had that conversation...
My clothes are completely inappropriate. I went with
the “I’m going to Africa. I will be warm”
Africa - 2
Right brain
- love
I brought
no socks and no back up flu meds, and have of course picked up the flu on the
time machine (otherwise known as plane), as well as a sensitive tooth…
I am attaching a photo of the crank needed in order to open and close
the window in the car that is providing me transport….
I’ve
been meaning to write about the Occupy Wall Street protest but haven’t because,
well, because I feel very ambiguous about it.
I
know that if you are a liberal you are expected to support them, but I don’t
feel comfortable supporting something
that defines itself in the negative. I don’t feel comfortable doing a blanket
approval, even if I agree with a lot of what they have to say. They are
protesting against a system with many flaws, but also many benefits and
privileges that should not be taken for granted. I don’t feel comfortable
supporting a movement that criticises but does not offer constructive
alternatives, we already have too many politicians doing that.
Amidst
all this ambivalence I decided to go and have a look first hand.
The
first thing that shocked me is how small Zucotti park actually is. It is tiny, and
that is something that the media –which has been so criticised for not covering
this “historic event” properly- at no point has made evident in my view.
The
second thing that called my attention is that without a doubt if you put
together the photographers, media and tourists they outnumber the actual protesters.
The multiple signs asking for donations were equally disturbing. For what? For
whom? One such sign was quite specific:
“to
take my girlfriend out for dinner”
not
the most convincing politically argument.
I
walked around amidst an excited atmosphere. It was a weekday, so the weekend
hordes were at bay, and us curious passer bys as well as the media could go
about our business fairly comfortably. Tourist busses passed by snapping away what
might become a new tourist attraction.
There was a drums band, a jazz band, and towards the end a classic band set out with multiple violins and other instruments.
On
that particular afternoon there were Queers Occupying Wall Street, Muslims Occupying
Wall Street (about 80 of them, and the women sat in the back during the speech,
which is a system that I would like to protest against myself), and once the
Muslims where finished, the praying mats
were replaced by bright green foam to make the space child friendly for the
Parents Occupy Wall Street sleep over.
That these three groups can coexist in such a small space is both exciting and confusing. I can’t imagine they would agree on too many things were they to actually sit down with each other. Still, they were all there, that says something.
Back
at home going over the photos I continued to feel equally confused and excited.
There were artists about. The idea of a street library seemed grand. The
atmosphere reminded me of the many pacifist protests that I attended in my
student days in Spain.
Spain
has an amazing tradition of pacific demonstrations. Actually, many would be
surprised to know that before OWS a similar thing took place in Spain earlier
this year. On May 2011 a pacific demonstration turned into an overnight stay at
Madrid’s main square, the Puerta del Sol. Their slogan was “indignados”
(outraged), opposing the same system flaws.
They had sofas, libraries and cafeterias with food donated from the
restaurants around the square, and were soon organised into action groups, both for mundane tasks such as clean up or more
strategic ones such as communications with the media. The movement soon spread
to other cities: Barcelona, Segovia, Valencia…
On
May 27 hundreds of wounded were reported as the protestors were evacuated in
order to clean the Plaza de Catalunya, sound familiar?
Eventually
it was disbanded. Nothing happened. I’d heard nothing about it since, which furthered my sense of
futile endeavour around OWS.
In
trying to understand what is going on I’ve been reading around and recently
discovered that the occupy puerta del sol has continued, albeit not as a
protest but a civil political movement #acampadasol which
still functions through monthly open popular assemblies putting forward
specific political agendas. Not sure how much of the 99% is involved but
certainly seems like an interesting and efficient civil action proposal.
Although
still confused generally I can say this: Zucotti park is clean, the protest is
not violent, there are people of all ages, creeds and gender.
But
there is another aspect that is
increasingly becoming clear as a result
of all this. The state/police reaction to what (to me) appears to be a
pacific and harmless civic action
is worrisome to the point of
ridiculous (see arrest of Naomi Wolf for
… well, obeying the law).
[....that guy is never going to hear the end of it.]
More
worrisome is the fact that she was diverted to another police station to keep
her lawyers away, and that “homeland “ security was invoked when people asked
to approach the police station.
[click on video to hear full explanation by Ms Wolf herself]
This
otherwise irrelevant incident has exposed a weak rule of law that can be
trampled over “a couple of middle aged couch potatoes” who haven’t broken the
law.
I find that unveiling this trend is so far the
most important achievement of the OWS movement. Ironic that this is coming out
just as the Arab spring is taking place
Responsible citizens need to keep watch, listen, read and
make sure that the basic freedoms America so proudly declares as her birth right
remain intact.
Don't read too much into it. There isn't some deep meaning to this photo. These masks were given to the monkeys last christmas and I think they are amazing. I had been planning this one for a while, and quite chuffed with the result.
This post is part of this week's forum on admitting failure
When I first joined the “aid world” coming from the private sector, one of the first things that struck me was to see how off-the-cuff calculations were presented as numbers, as opposed to what they were, estimates, (for example, gender breakdown for families). When I suggested we call them "estimate" in the reporting I was received with a look of both shock and horror:
-"then they’ll think we don't know what we are doing!"
Anyone who understands anything about development will know that in most situations it is almost impossible to know the gender composition of family that is benefiting from some type of assistance. You can estimate according to country statistics how large the family might be, as well as the gender composition, but it will always be that, an estimate. So why the concern of stating it as such?
At least part of the problem is (me thinks) that development is a relatively new social science. As any new science, it is learning by doing, which necessarily implies doing mistakes. As any social science, there are no hard and fast rules, no laboratory situations that can be replicated. 2+2 only equals four in a maths class, anywhere else it will depend on the context.
So why do we have this big chip on our shoulder about being something we are not? Didn’t medicine (actually, doesn’t medicine) learn by doing? Didn’t NASA drop a couple of spaceships? Why are we expected to be perfect from the start?
Donors and the public alike need to be educated about this, which actually really means we have to stop assuming they are dumb and can’t grasp these concepts. They can.
also, we also need to understand this ourselves. We need to have enough confidence to give ourselves space to learn, to sit down and think:
“ok, what went wrong, how could I’ve done it differently, how could I do it in the future?”
which brings us back to the part where we educate donors and the public, because in order to do that not only do we nee them to understand, but we also need for them to support and fund that part of the process.
I’m constantly shocked to find projects without the support of a Monitoring & Evaluation (or reporting) officer. The requirement to monitor and report is there (always), but the funds are assigned to the implementation, and the implementing staff is expected to design tools that will capture the relevant information, document, collect the data, and put it into a report, (as well as implement). None of which they are trained to do, and which usually translates into process monitoring:
“how many x did we do”
as opposed to: “what do we want to achieve by doing X, and how can we measure that we are having an impact on that?”
The requested report gets written and filed. Box gets ticked. No one has the time to analyse the information, to look for synergies, to see what other organizations are doing and how they can reinforce each other, or what we can learn from them. The lessons learned get filed away, hidden or camouflaged if possible, no one really benefitting from them.
Admitting failure isn't about marketing or a mea culpa, it's about incorporating the
process of learning from our mistakes as part of the management process.
Anything that gets brushed under the rug does double harm: first when you did the
mistake, and then every time someone else has to make it because they couldn’t
learn from you. Which to me sounds like a highly inefficient and expensive way
to move forward.
