Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Haiting the uncertainty

Still no apartment.
Still no job.

I am however, continuing to look. I have seen a couple of other apartments since my last update, and while they have been rather lacking, each apartment has been an improvement on the last. I don't think it's necessarily my fussiness that's letting me down, rather it's my desire to be able to access a full bathroom and not suffer from exposure just by getting into bed.

I'm also no closer to figuring out what this pro bono/volunteer/internship job thing is about. But here's what I know.

I'm helping out a lady who's also the Vice President of an organisation called "Yele Haiti" - a non-profit that's dedicated to the economic development of Haiti, founded by Wyclef Jean (but that's not what I'm doing). She's interested in initiating several development projects in Haiti, as well as in other developing countries, and she needs people to research these projects to see if their viable or interesting.

"So you're a research assistant?" I hear you ask. No.

She has some research assistants, yes. But that's not what she wants me to do. At the moment, there's a lot of showing up to the office and sitting on my laptop (which is now fixed by the way - sans any documents or photos that were on there before!), researching papers from the World Bank on Community Driven Development, or looking up the latest uses for protein powder in emergency food relief (answer: protein powder is used as an emergency food). This research appears designed solely to keep me occupied until we can brainstorm 'corporate strategy'.

I think the problem (aside from my not knowing the first thing about 'corporate strategy'), is that she's running around trying to manage 13 different projects at once, without a clear idea about what she wants to achieve out of any of them. This results in a very directionless suite of projects, and some very confused interns/research assistants/kiwis. I think what she wants me to do, maybe, is to give her some advice on project management, and keep her on track for what she wants to do.

I'm not sure if I'm on the right track with this, and this whole project thing could be a bust. Or it could just be completely disorganised. But then I'm used to disorganised projects; I've been living one for the last 28 years.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, that's almost your whole life! Who's the dodgy project manager for that one?

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