Things have a way of working out

So, I just received a very interesting bit of news today. G-man is receiving a promotion of sorts, and will therefore no longer be involved with this project!! Quite unexpected, I must say, but the best news that I’ve had since discovering that I was going to Vietnam (still no details, but I think I leave in a couple weeks). Apart from the obvious reasons why this is a great thing for me personally, this will make my job easier if they decide to hire someone who has any actual experience in doing community development work. Clearly, they may not decide that, and the person with whom I end up working could be just as clueless as G-man, but at least the door is open for some improvement! Now what I would really like to see is if we could modify the village selection that has already been made in order to select villages that are actually near the project roads designated for improvements, instead of the villages his landlord buddies control that are nowhere near the project roads. The landlords will be the real ones benefiting from the first stage of the project as it currently stands, which bugs the crap out of me.

I doubt that changes are possible at this stage, and the villages chosen could still stand to benefit from assistance, as most of them could in this area, it’s just that the ones chosen have no relation to the project, and it rather defeats the purpose. (This may be a little confusing, but I figured that too many details would bore you all to tears. But if you want to know what the heck I’m talking about, I’m happy to explain a little more.) The short version is this: we're making improvements to the road network and want to measure how improvements in rural roads can help alleviate poverty in rural villages. Well, it's hard to determine the impact of road improvements when the villages are nowhere near the roads.

Apparently, G-man’s superior, who had been told about his behavior, decided to take the opportunity to speak with him yesterday and basically told him to watch it and behave himself. I would be curious to have known what his response was, but at this point, I no longer care since he’s not my problem anymore. I just hope that he doesn’t become someone else’s problem, although I'm probably being a smidge naïve on that one.

I had a feeling that something was up, however. I’ve been trying to meet with him since he returned from his last trip to the district last week, and he’s cancelled on me four times. Yesterday was the best excuse, where he told me that a friend’s mother had died and he needed to go to the funeral or something. Later that day, several of my colleagues came back from a meeting at which he had been present. Why he couldn’t just say that is beyond me, but again – not my problem anymore. HURRAH!!!!!

I’ve been thinking about how excited I am to go to Vietnam, and how much things have changed. 36 years ago, the best news my parents ever got was that my father was not going to go to Vietnam, and for me to find out that I am going has put more of a smile on my face than anything has in quite a while. I still don’t have final word on timing from the project manager, but I expect that shortly. After my “it’s okay if you want me to work with someone else” e-mail, my boss came back, replying to all, and said that it was NOT okay for me to work with someone else, and he really wants me to take ownership of the process. And…now I’m nervous. You know how, when you think you can do something, and someone more experienced than you says “I don’t think you can handle this”, there is a tendency to think that, perhaps you’ve missed something and it will be more complicated than you had thought? So I’m second-guessing myself a little (lot) now, but I’ve warned my boss that I may be testing the limits of his “there’s no such thing as a stupid question” policy, and I hope he stays in Dr. Jekyll mode, instead of busting out the time-honored response of “I’m really busy right now, you'll have to figure it out yourself. Welcome to the world of development!”

On the way home yesterday, I stopped at a fruit stand to buy some mangos, as they’re in season and…well, I’ve already declared my love of mangos more than enough, so I’ll just assume that my wish to purchase them isn’t a huge mystery. In any event, I mimed to the nice man how many I wanted, and he tried to mime the price (ever try miming prices? It’s not as easy as you would think, particularly when your miming buddy thinks that miming in Urdu will be helpful.). Finally Hamid got out of the car and helped everyone to decipher and move on. Good times. So we got back in the car and Hamid said that the price was 30 rupees per kilo. I asked him if that was a good price or a bad price…and he laughed. I took that to indicate the latter. However, since that still works out to less than $.15 per pound, I’m not going to pick a fight with anyone over it – especially not some old guy missing a few teeth who earns a living selling fruit an d can certainly use the extra cash. Although I have a feeling that if we’d asked Hamid to purchase them for us in the first place, it would have gone a little differently.

In any event, things are looking up on a number of fronts. I’d still describe life here as “interesting”, but yeah…it’s definitely getting better.