overdue update

I realize it's been a little over two months since I have written on my blog. When I decided to keep a blog for my internship in Burundi, I thought that I would need something to help me reflect on my experiences but quickly things got routine and nothing seemed noteworthy. In any case, as I am now in the second half of my internship I will make more of an effort to write regularly and not take my experience here for granted.

Work has been pretty good. We have a new expat staffmember and she will surely make our work better. The CEP project that gave us so much stress in 2009, seems to finally be on track in 2010. We are having our donors from Australia visit the project and this monitoring visit should go even better than the one in the fall (CEP is funded by three donors from Finland, USA and Australia, in the fall we had a monitoring visit from our donors in Finland.) I will be going up with them to the field, and my boss might be with us for the first couple of days. I feel so much more confident this time around as I am much more familiar with everything. As we wait and prepare for their arrival, I have a good amount of work to do as we write up our first quarter report and organize their visit.

Last week, I asked my boss to write me a rec letter and he wrote me what I thought was a very generous letter. Asking him to write me a letter made me think about how good of a job I was doing at work and if I am honest with myself I don't think I am doing my best. To be fair, I do have quite a bit of responsibity and I carry the burden of writing all the reports for CEP and making the other reports better. I know the field pretty well and I work well with the staff and I know my co-workers appreciate working with me. When Aili, piaf director, came to visit me I was touched by how gracious my co-workers were as they raved about how much of a good job I was doing at work. The reason I feel as though I am not really doing my best is simply because I don't think my heart is into what I am doing. I have become more preoccupied with meeting deadlines, making our partners happy and avoiding problems than about making sure our project are the best they can be. When I signed up for this job, although I was skeptical of ngos, I was looking forward to doing something that made a difference. If I stayed in the States, I could have made much more money but in Burundi I thought I could do something worthwhile. I could not have asked for a better work place, where although I am just an intern, I have the opportunity to do many important things and shape our projects. For the remaining months of my fellowship, I am going to take more initiative to be creative, take more personal responsibility over the projects and try and use more of my skill set to help LWF Burundi because I don't want to leave feeling like I could have done so much more.

On a personal note, I took a 3.5 week vacation and went home in Feb. Landing in snow covered Fairfax was quite a contrast from hot, humid and green Bujumbura. It took me a few days to get used to the cold weather, long car rides, everyone speaking English and a few other things. In comparasion, I got used to life back in Bujumbura rather quickly, the bumpy ride home from the airport was a quick re-rentry to life in Burundi. The 3.5 weeks flew by and I very much enjoyed seeing my family and friends again.