Weeks 16 and 17: Confessions of a Workaholic

Reading this blog you would be forgiven for thinking that I was enjoying a six month holiday in Indonesia. In all honesty, this is not far from the truth. Don't get me wrong - I had every intention of having a meaningful professional experience, but this has proven more difficult than anticipated.

Let me get straight from the outset than I am enormously grateful to the NGO I have been volunteering for. They have been extraordinarily kind and generous and I have no doubt that their intentions are good. However, if I am honest the 'work' part of my Indonesian experience has been dissapointing, frustrating and, at times, infuriating.

The problem, to put it bluntly, is that I have not really been given any work to do. I feel very welcome here - people are thrilled to have foreign volunteers in the office - but they don't seem to want us to actually do anything. I know what you're thinking - why don't I just ask for more work? - and believe me we have tried, but it's not that simple. We have tried to arrange meetings to discuss what the volunteers could do, but even when we manage to get everyone in the same room (no mean feat in Indonesia, I assure you) no progress is made.

One big obstacle is the language barrier. Before I signed up to the placement I was told that the two working languages in the office would be English and Indonesian. However, although they produce English language proposals and reports most members of staff struggle to express themselves in English. From their perspective it is often more effort to explain a task to us in English than it is to simply do it themselves. It also makes it difficult for us to understand the tasks that we are assigned. A cloud of mutual miscomprehension seems to hang like a specre over every conversation I have in the office.

Another factor contributing to this lack of understanding is the reliance on development jargon: governance, capacity building, think tank etc. I'm sure that these terms are useful, but it seems to me that they are often employed in order to avoid specifying what you actually mean, or stating what you actually intend to do. These terms are so vague as to be almost nebulous and when I ask people to elaborate on their meaning their responses often verge on the tautological ('what does capacity building mean?' 'it means building the capacity of the local population', 'what exactly do you mean by a knowledge centre?' 'it's like a centre for knowledge'. GREAT. THANKS).

Most of the time we are expected to amuse ourselves in the office and to sit quietly at the back of meetings that we cannot understand or contribute to. I have also noticed that we are never included in important conversations, even those that relate directly to us. Last weekend Hannah, Raphaelle and I were taken on a trip to one of the regional offices in Serang, West Java. It was a great opportunity and we were, once again, blown away by the generosity shown to us. Not only did they put us up in a hotel but they made a huge effort to entertain us, even driving us for four hours to visit an indigenous community called the Baduy. However, we couldn't help but take issue with the way that we were treated on this trip. Firstly, it was clear that we were just being taken along for the ride and weren't really expected to contribute to the work side of things ('Now we must discuss the project. Would you like to go and lie down in the other room?'). Moreover, we were not consulted about any of the decisions which meant that we spent the whole weekend unsure of what was going on. We were supposed to return on Saturday afternoon but this ended up being pushed back until late evening. This in itself didn't bother me - as I have mentioned before, planning in Indonesia is an inprecise art - but it did bother me that no one thought to ask us if we minded. It simply did not occur to them to include us in the decision making process.

I think part of the problem is difficult cultural attitudes to young people and their status in society. In Indonesia, I am a child. If I were a twenty-two year old Indonesian woman I would most likely be living at home, waiting for a man to propell me inte adulthood. It is definitely an adjustment to have you social status 'demoted' in this sense and I am very much looking forward to being a grown-up again when I get home.

It is a little more complicated than this, however. As volunteers we are treated like a weird child/development expert hybrid. People tend to assume a rather frightening level of knowledge and compentancy based on the fact that you have a Western degree. Working life generally follows a pattern whereby I have nothing to do for a long period of time until someone approaches me to do something for which I am woefully underqualified. A case in point was last week when I was asked to prepare a presentation for the Ford Foundation (a very prestigious development agency). One of the directors of the NGO is trying to set up a research institute/think tank and she was presenting her plan to the Ford Foundation. Unsuprisingly I had great difficulty understanding precisely what her plans were (she plans to set up a think tank which will be like a knowledge centre, carrying out training in order to build the capacity of local government officials). So, I had to bodge together this PowerPoint presentation detailing the (non-existent) plan of action. In the absence of any real understanding of the project I simply reproduced her empty development jargon. What I hadn't anticipated, however, was that she intended for me to actually present it. I was mortified. I just read out what was written on the slides, hoping that he didn't require further clarification (He didn't. Apparently, reliance on jardon is di rigueur in the development field). Afterwards, I cringed as my director explained to him that I had a degree from the London School of Economics. This is, of course, true, but in the absence of any projects concerning immediate return hunter-gathering systems or Foucaultian social theory, it seems to be of little relevance.

The outcome of this working arrangement is (a) that I have no intention of ever working in development and (b) I have a lot of time on my hands. When I reported this state of affairs to a friend of mine he immediately drew a reverse analogy with a Soviet forced labour camp. In a way, he is right - I find myself in something akin to a forced 'un-labour' camp. Whilst I was initially frustrated about the working situation, I have come to see it as a blessing in disguise. As most of you probably know, I have a tendency to overwork myself. For the first time in my adult life I am not exhausted and it is incredible how much clarity it brings. I finally have time to think. However, one of the main things I have been thinking about is great it is to spend your time doing something meaningful, engaging and challenging (if only I had understood how amazing it is being a student when I was one!) As great as it is to have this time off (I can hardly complain when my day to day life is a gruelling schedule of gym sessions and dvd marathons) I want something more. I'm not ashamed to admit it: I like work. I miss work.

What this means is that I spend a considerable proportion of my time thinking about what I want to do when I get home. Finally, I am at the stage where I feel ready to take on a new challenge. This time last year all I felt when I thought about my career was a sort of paralysing fear; I didn't do anything about it because I didn't feel ready to make a decision about what it was I wanted to do. Now I've realised that it doesn't really matter what I'm doing as long as it is sufficiently interesting and challenging. So, I spend quite a lot of my time here making plans, most of them wildly unrealistic (if anyone has a spare fifteen thousand pounds to fund my masters please let me know). My friend Jenna described working as a volunteer here as a preview of retirement - which is very true - but I sure as hell want a career before I sample the real thing.