Leap

For the past 4 years, the end of September and early October has caught me in a very reflective headspace – noticing that something is missing, trying to figure out what it is, and then trying to fix it. Maybe it is left over from that back-to-school time, wanting to start fresh with good intentions and big dreams. So I wasn’t surprised when it showed up again this year, but I was maybe a bit more cynical. I’m good at making plans, coming up with elaborate solutions to thoroughly analyzed concerns. I’m less good at following through (partial exception being last year, which brought me an awesome extended roommate family, and then to Malawi with EWB, but still failed on other counts).

This year, it started with a break it routine, which underlined a lot of things I wasn’t happy with.  That turned into a whole mess of reflection – excerpts below.

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…I’ve been deflecting questions about how I’m doing, how I’m liking Malawi, how’s work… (I think that I overestimate my ability to do this subtly.) Why? I’m not entirely happy with myself, how I am working, what I am learning. Talking about things makes them more real, and it might just be a bad day/week/month that would go away if I don’t label it as a thing. It’s looking like it’s not though.

…When I move into a new place, I like to know where I’m living. In Canada, I explore the basement, find the fuse box, and figure out how to get to the roof. It’s easy to get a lot of details without much effort. Doing the equivalent here is much harder. Now it isn’t basements and fuse boxes, it is the geography, how to get through the market, where to buy cheap soap, which neighbour lives in which house, which kids belong to which parents, where I can borrow electricity, where the spare water is kept… there are a lot of details, some of which can be a direct question, and others that quickly make me a strange white lady with crazy ideas so I try to be more subtle. But I think I’ve taken it a bit too far with details, and missed some of the bigger pieces. I should know how the classes at school are run, where the garden is, and how to cook that maize porridge. I need to get better at dropping in to visit the neighbours, playing with the kids. I know the landscape, but I’m missing a lot about how people fit into the context.

…I know way too little Chichewa. I kick myself every time I have to say “Small small Chichewa” or “I don’t understand” or mix in French prepositions because maybe that will somehow be understood if English wasn’t (completely illogical, and I keep doing it).

…I don’t have a handle on government decentralisation policies, I have made near zero progress with the office where I’m working, and I haven’t figured out how to collect evidence from this team of APS. It’s a learning curve, and progress is slow, I know that, but I need to make the exponent on the curve higher. I’ve been here 5 months – when people ask me, I still say 3.

…It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing, I think I’ve just been focusing on the wrong things. Missing the trees for the forest, or the forest for the trees. Or maybe I’m seeing a leaf and how the ecosystem has been impacted by climate change and missing the parts in between.

And now what? I tend towards making plans and elaborate analyses (like this), and have a harder time actually getting moving with them. And I’ve never managed to change 3 things in my life at once – so which 2 do I pick?

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From there, I was back to thinking about how my elaborate plans rarely work. Frustrated, I called it a night. I woke up with a solution – kind of. Don’t plan. Maybe it’s a cop-out, but maybe the analysis and fix-it map would just zap the energy away from implementation. Instead, just do, and see what happens.

Well, do it tomorrow. Today, think about whether “just doing” is a good idea. (Yup, really.)

And then so many things were going great. I was productive with the right things – reading documents, connecting dots, and minimizing the urgent-but-not-important. My counterpart is setting up the meeting I’ve been trying to have for 3 months (well, a slight shift in casting, but close enough). I managed a particularly decent Chichewa conversation, and lots of Chichewa-isms that were appreciated. I met a stranger and talked about Malawian and Canadian politics. I helped a colleague set up his first email account, and learn how to use it on his phone – because he asked me to. And a past project is calling to loop me in on how they’ve made progress.

They’re only evidence of baby steps, but baby steps in the right direction, and I found them exactly when I needed them. So I’m going with that – no plan, just think and do and be better by thinking and doing and being better. And expecting better. Maybe it will work.

 

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Last night, this seemed like a brilliant plan. In daylight it looks flaky. No metrics for “better” is probably a setup for failing. No new brilliant ideas yet, and this is a lot of rambling-Kristina’s-head thoughts, but I liked the writing so I’m still posting. Who knows, maybe you’ve got ideas!

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