One month in

Posted by Ali

I'm getting restless. I want to be here with a purpose. Know that the work I'm doing is helping someone.  Be able to use my skills to touch lives. So far I haven't felt that. I sit in an office working my hardest to stifle the creative side of writing (a skill I worked hard to improve all last year at school by branching out and taking Creative Writing classes instead of just the AP-style journalism ones that I excelled at). Max often says, "Now this is where your creative side can come out," when we start working on identifying the results we'd like to see at the end of these upcoming projects. To me that is not creativity. That is educated guessing. And I'm not good at it. I've never been good at estimating and I'm even worse at guesstimating. And I'm definitely not educated, at least not in the areas that matter in proposal writing. I don't know this country inside out like the others that work here at ADRA. I don't know understand all the aspects of these proposals (although I'm slowly catching on). I honestly can't see anything about grant writing as creative. It's business, pure and simple. And I'm not saying it isn't necessary for an organization like ADRA, just that I am definitely not the right person for the job. This past month I have learned tons about how ADRA works and seen how vital grant writing and designing proposals is to the work we do in this country. But I feel like if I have to do this for too much longer I'll get burned out. And I'm only one month into a nine month commitment here.

What I really want to do is leave campus, get out into the villages and schools and health centres, and meet the people. My heart longs to get to know them, hear their stories, feel their hunger, thirst, hurts, worries, and pain. And then, once I understand just a little bit of their lives, about the hardships they've lived through - no, survived - I want to come back to my little office and free my creativity. Let my fingers release the stories I've gleaned from these people. And make people around the world realize the struggles of these Tanzanian people - and know that their lives have been changed by the work being done here.

Hopefully soon...

______________________

PS - I've been here a month! Well, technically it was exactly four weeks on Tuesday night and a month yesterday (got here the last day of August and yesterday was the last day of September). Any way you want to look at it, I know it's been a month because today I used the last pair of contacts from my first box of one-a-day's that my optometrist so insistently recommended when he found out I was coming to Africa. Little did he know that I would have access to perfectly clean drinking water 24/7, thanks to a nearby spring and pump system. But I can't blame him...I had no idea about the water quality either until I got here. Plus, life really is simpler without contact solution.