Week 3

This week was yet another very long one. By the time Friday rolls around, we're usually too tired to actually go out and do anything. Last night Justine, Geraldine and I made dinner, drank some wine, and watched Sex and the City 2. Good god was that a horrible movie and borderline offensive. Anyway. Every three months us expats need to leave the country in order to get a new three month visa upon re-entry, so Ali left for the DR yesterday and comes back Sunday. I'm pretty jealous! I hope to get over there at some point. I would also love to get over to Cuba while I'm here, but that's obviously a bit more tricky as an American.

Things are really ramping up, work-wise. During the month of September and through the beginning of October my organisation is doing two huge campaigns. Justine is in charge of the indoor residual spraying campaign. Over the course of four weeks we will (in theory) have 100 volunteers spray the inside of 18,000 tents, shelters, and houses with insecticide that kills mosquitoes and lasts about 6 months. The logistics of this operation are absolutely nuts since each person spraying needs about 20 litres of water a day. And we're an organisation of 5 expats with a total of four cars to our name. Then, at the same time, we're also doing a massive larviciding campaign, which is what I'm in charge of. Over the course of ten days we will have 250 volunteers putting a powdered insecticide in containers used for water storage in over 70,000 tents, shelters, and houses in 6 different areas of Port au Prince. The chemical kills the larvae of the mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever. The logistics of this project will also be nuts due to the sheer number of households we're looking to cover, the fact that we're covering 6 different areas of PaP (unlike the IRS campaign where we're doing one area), and the fact that it's going on at the same time as the IRS campaign. We're also working "hand in hand" with the department of health for both of these campaigns, so the realities of just trying to get meetings with them that they remember we're having usually results in a lot of time being wasted. Also, for my larviciding campaign, we're hiring 6 new national staff members. On Thursday and Friday we finally started interviewing people. It's pretty hit or miss, and right now I think we have two people we would hire. We only have 4 or 5 more interviews left on Monday, so basically they all have to be awesome and they all have to say yes in order for our schedule to work out the way we've planned. Stress!!

A lot of this past week was spent driving around with our department of health contact and Geraldine trying to visit the different mayors of the areas we'll be conducting the campaign to a) inform them, b) ask them to find us a training room and a storage space for free, and c) ask them to find the number of volunteers we need from each area and make sure it's 50% men and 50% women and make sure they can all read and write. Times that by 6 and the logistics of just trying to get this off the ground seem almost impossible. It's pretty overwhelming, so I've just had to put my head down and think it through one step at a time to feel like I'm making any progress. If we had more time it would be fine, but we're on a very tight schedule as our project is only funded until the end of November, but everyone's contracts are ending before that, which means that by the beginning of October, as of now, it will just be me and Justine left. Not really sure how we'll pull these two projects off without at least a logistics person. Stress!!

So that's sort of the long and short of my major work here. We have some other smaller projects as well, like mosquito net distribution, but those are either winding down or are just much, much smaller. For some reason our internet connection does not like letting me load pictures onto the blog, so for a link to some photos I've posted on facebook, click here. Again, feel free to let me know what you're interested in hearing more about. You lose perspectives on these things quickly.

Overall things are going pretty ok. I'm feeling a bit more on top of the work in terms of understanding what needs to be done, although that doesn't necessarily make me on top of the work itself. It's the type of job where there just literally aren't enough hours in the day and where your to do list is always twice as long as what you have time for which makes you feel like you're constantly doing triage rather than having some organised system to your work. In a really backwards way, though, it's a challenge I like having and one I hope to someday feel like I've conquered. Another huge challenge is just staff management. Right now Justine and I have a team of 5 national staff members. While they're great in many ways, they are not at all independent. So whenever they're in the office it's basically like babysitting. You can't just give them a task to do and come back at the end of the day and expect it to be a) done and b) in the way you wanted. So the amount of planning and hand holding that goes into staff management takes a LOT of time and effort. And to think that we're going to be more than doubling our team in the next week is a very frightening thought sometimes. But we do need them and they are invaluable to our work, so I think I just need to get better at managing them.

This weekend we've got a random night out at some Argentinians (?) on the cards and maybe a day at Heather's pool tomorrow. Exciting stuff. I hope everyone is enjoying their ability to go where they want when they want and to walk freely in the streets. The things I'll never take for granted again....