The World Bank

So I had the interview with the World Bank today. Took the bus down to DC from NYC in the morning, met an old friend for lunch and then hit the interview.  Headed back now on the bus.  Bottom line is that I don't know that I could pass up this opportunity, but that I don't really want to go, nor do I know that I am actually the right person for this job.  But I suppose I should start at the beginning of the interview. 

It was myself and two other guys. We hit it off right off the bat. Immediately developing a report. It turns out that I was pretty much hand picked out of the stack of resumes. This project in Kenya has apparently been having a problem in relation to the government. Apparently they usually take people for these positions that are phd students in economics that can just come in and do the research. This position in Kenya is apparently different though, and they want someone a little older with management experience and the capacity to either demand or garner respect more readily both through demeanor and experience. They seemed to think I was an ideal fit for this on paper, and expressed mid-way through the interview that I seemed just right for it.... then... they started asking the technical research based quantitative questions.

Basically, the job itself would be to oversee a huge operation. I would be overseeing the entire field assessment project for to educational programs in this region of Kenya and all of the data collection. Over 50 schools for just one of the two programs and a research company with a team of some 50 plus people, and several local personnel directly working with me on the local environment and cultural aspects of the study. Then additional, I would be working directly with the Kenyan government, the World Bank, their implementation team, local universities, researchers in the US, and who knows whatever else.

This project has also been going on for 4 years and has yet to have an impact assessment due to these issues they seem to be facing with the Kenyan Government. My roll would be to be able to come in and "play hardball” and get this thing done.  I actually kind of think this may be a great thing for me managerially and in terms of my interpersonal skills and ability to softly be assertive, but it also begs the question "why?"  Why do you need to play hardball with the Kenyan government?  This needs a lot more research and assessment.  Also, while I am managing all of these people, I would still have to be setting up and running a data collection operation using quantitative skills that I have not used in a number of years. I have spent most of my time working with qualitative methods and more culturally sensitive approaches. Listening to people rather than giving them questionnaires and codes. My job here would be to set up the questionnaires and finalize them. I would have local assets to help bring cultural relevance to the project. Most importantly though, I will be working on generating the sample sizes and and orchestrating their adherence, helping implement and design the entire research project. This is something that I have not done on this type of level.

I suppose I need more information as to what type of support structure I would have there to get this done before I could say that I felt comfortable that I could definitely succeed in this job. I of course believe that I can do anything. I can learn/refresh these research skills quickly and easily. I also think that they would be tremendously benefited by the other skills that I bring in research terms and my ability to think against the grain and outside the box. But ultimately, they need the data sets to be flawless. Can I guarantee this will happen? Can they be certain of this? This is the crux of it all and I'm not sure what they will think. But if they chose me, it is because they think that I am the best person for the job. I would have to take that as confidence in my capacity to make this research project happen. I know I could manage it. And I know I could be a part of designing and implementing the research design. However, if I am responsible for doing this on my own, then I would have to think about whether its the best thing for me.

There is of course another factor with this: the compensation. I was thinking that the World Bank would send you abroad with a solid support structure behind you. An expat type structure with housing, stipend, etc. Nope. They fly you there and put you in a hotel for a week or two while you find your own accommodation and get things set up there by yourself. Really? The World Bank?!?! And then they pay exactly the same as the admin assistant job I just interviewed for in NYC? $40-45?!!? Really?!? That project described above and the same pay to shuffle documents and flight itineraries for three executives? Yeah the cost of living is obviously different, but still, it's a temporary position that I don't even think now comes with benefits, insurance, a computer, whatever. I have a lot more questions about this. Is there an office? How do I set up a life, internet, communications, etc. You just want me to be able to drop myself down in Kenya and make shit happen at the high level that the World Bank requires? This can't be right. Any company I've ever known of any salt helps you get set up, or at least outsources it for you. Some assistance.  If is that's ll you get though, it truly must take one hell of a special breed of person to be able to do this in random and different countries in the world. I just don't think it can be right and goes against what I've heard about them in the industry.   There must at lest be someone there to help.

But that is to be seen I guess. When I am offered a job, I can start discussing that. But it is a discussion I will definitely be having if offered. Because if I have to set up my whole life there on my own from day one, jet lagged, unfamiliar, and with no support, their project is going to suffer. It is one thing to show up in Prague and figure it out, China, Sierra Leone, etc, when you don't have anything you have to get done that day. But there..... I step off the plane and its go time. Get the project up and running, while you look for a place to live and a life all with no help. Would be amazing. If I could do that, I could do anything.

I've got skillz!

Where I am with life right now.

So I'm feeling like I'm just going to step back and do a quick assessment of life as it exists for me right now.  I graduated from college in 1999.  I spent about four years figuring a little bit of life out, worked in NYC, went to Prague and got some invaluable experience both personally and professionally, and then came back to the US to look at schools and the Peace Corps, while doing odd jobs until settling on school in England and another football season in Prague.  That gets us up to starting school in 2004. 

Going into school I had some good but eclectic business experience including managing a non-profit in Prague for a couple years.  2004 started a 5 year rather specific career path that really moved me forward.  I spent two years working on a masters that focused on post-conflict reconstruction and post/socialist societies.  After a summer in China I went back to Prague and got a job working for two years on post conflict areas doing research, development, management, etc.  I was really moving things forward even if the job itself and the company was an absolute and complete  nightmare.  I was getting valuable experience. 

When this job ended I went for more schooling focusing on anthropological perspectives on international development with a continued focus on post war areas.  Five years straight working towards one end which was going to culminate in getting in to  PhD program and keeping things moving forward.  It was a struggle for sure and I didn't always know that it was the right thing.  But the point was, at that point in my life I was carving out a niche for myself.  I applied to Phd programs for 2009 but didn't get in anywhere.  At that point I had little money, my EU work visa had expired, and I felt like I wanted to come back to the United States, get some stability, a job, and spend time with my elderly Grandparents.  It seemed like a good plan.  There would be no language issues, no visa concerns, no cultural variances.  Things would be simple right?

So here I am three plus years later.  What do I have to show for this?  During this three years the best I've done is 15 dollars per hour working with people with disabilities in Connecticut.  I was driving an hour and a half both ways every day (22,000 miles/35,000km in 6 months) and couldn't afford to keep the car going and pay rent.  I was living with my grandparents.  Over those three years I sold running shoes, I officiated girls lacrosse, I volunteered in local government, I tried starting several businesses and non-profits, and even lived in the woods for a brief time.

At some point in there, I said fuck it, and planned a trip and went to Sierra Leone.  I was wallowing away in suburbia, doing nothing.  Applying for hundreds of jobs, getting no where, and figured hey, if no one is going to give me a job, then I'll just go out and make my own.  I fundraised, I planned, mapped out a walking tour of the country for three months and just did it.  It was invaluable and I set up some amazing opportunities that you can read about in this blog.  But of course I got malaria and spent much of the next six months trying to get right.  Everything in Africa went on hold, life took over and I just tried to find work.  Yet I remained underemployed, disheartened, and disappointed.

I worked hard at it and put in a number of Phd Applications again.  I put my focus back into academia and a PhD.  I did an amazing amount of research on the programs in the US.  I was all ready to apply.  Then Occupy happened.  A broad based systemic critique of american and global society.  Exactly what I had been carrying with me my entire adult life.  I, like so many others, had been trying to make things work in our little American Utopia, yet it had been a disaster for me.  The country had been spiralling downward for decades and it was time to take a stand and try to make things happen.  So I left the underemployed shitty ass suburban existence I was meandering through and went all in with Occupy.  In the first few weeks I was engageing in incredible things, talking to truly important and exemplary people .  I was networking myself into a great community and surrounded for the first time in my life by people that shared my views of the world and my values.  It was amazing.

Now here we are almost a year later.  I have been steadily looking for work since January.  In that time I have been a failed political fundraiser, an unpaid hiking store employee, worked at a farmers market until it went under, and as a Nanny.  Luckily I have had a free place to stay due to some of the best people out there.  However, that time is up.

All this while I have been trying to work on Occupy.  Everything was supposed to be temporary until school started in September.  But then I didn't get in anywhere.  I found out April 15th, and have been working on what the heck am I going to do.  Do I apply next year, again?  Do I look at a new career choice?  Push for my Africa stuff?  Legitimize the Occupy Think Tank?  Just look for any work?  The bottom line is that on April 16th I started perhaps a new phase of my life.  Most profoundly I decided to start networking myself in to the development community here in NYC.  As I got back into my Africa work I realized how much I love and am passionate about all of these things that I had been doing for years.  It was what my PhD work was going to be about and what I have always wanted to be a part of.  Occupy, gave me a domestic outlet, but my heart has always been in international issues and injustices.  So be it.  Network network network while trying to peice things together here is where I came to.  Combining them would be great. 

But there just aren't a lot of jobs in this arena.  You don't just go out and start helping people around the world fro one day to the next as the glacial pace of my Africa project shows.  You have to eat, you have to have housing.  Also in the midst of all this here I am going through a tough break up as well.  It really sucks.

So I find myself today on August 8th, with no job, the several interviews I've had over the last couple weeks having fallen through or morphed into unsustainble things, my nannying work has dried up and I have no housing come September 1st if I still have no job to pay for it.

I have been back in this country for over three years now and I have nothing to show for it professionally.  I can't even put Occupy on the applications for the UN that I'm putting in.  Yes, the Sierra Leone thing is a huge thing from the last few years, but only because I left here!!  So what is the point.  I had this wonderful progressive carreer going, step by step for five plus years and then it just fell off a cliff, and now I have nothing really to show for the last three years of my life.  The worst thing about it all as well is that people look at me and they see an unfocused person.  They see someone that is thinking of a new thing to do every day.  One day I'm a nanny, one day I'm an occupier, a writer, a development expert, thinking about africa, a phd, organizing, food justice, athletic training, whatever.  I must seem like my own three ring circus.  But I'm not, I'm just desperate.  I had a plan and I was working towards it.  Then I came back to America.  In three years, it all just disipated into the fumes of an ever more marginalizing American and global economy.

So at what point do you say enough is enough?  For how long do you keep fighting the same fight and expect differeent results?  I want to stay in NYC.  I want to just get a job here that matters, that does not compromise all of my moral and ethical standards of human dignity and such and just work away on a career.  But that isn't happening.  I want to wake up every morning at 6, do chi gung, go to work all day, excercise and come home and work on Africa and Occupy stuff.  But its not happening.  When do you say fuck it and reavaluate what you are doing and what your expectations of 'the self' are?  At what point do you give in and just get some shit ass job and work for the man's system hoping that you can have a family and TV to distract yourself from the everyday bullshit that has become human life in America.

I'm not there yet, I still have hope.  I will hopefully never give up.  But it is about as low as it gets rigth now.  I hurt on every level.  I am not eating enough, I have no home, I have a car I can't maintain but am stuck with, no job, and little reason to hope on most accounting of the last few years.  But I have skills!  A lot of them.  It's just too bad they are skills only an employer couldn't like... 

They haven't eaten all day...

Hhmmm... Can't figure out what to write for the title. I'm hungry. But not as much as these kids I'm staying with must be. I came home and usually there is food cooking or ready. Not today. No money was left for food today, so no food was to be had. They havn't eaten all day. They needed 7000 leones, $1.75 for all ten of us to eat. I gave them 10000, and it was like the alarm at the firestation had just rang. They all scatered, some for water, some for food, some to get the fire started. They were hungry, but with no complaints. This is life, their life. As the one person here said, we eat when there is food. Up to now there has been plenty, but not today... And now as I write this, it is raining. They cook outside over a fire, now they cook outside in the rain... Insult to injury...

It seems wrong to write about the other worries of my day now, but I will as it is one of the main things i'm here to do. Oh.. And pouring now!!

So I started early this morning. Straight to reading how bricks are made. Fun stuff!! ;) but whether I like bricks or not, I want to help, I want to rebuild, and this makes me a brick man for now!! I went over to the expat hangout again today. Its the only place with power, and I can blend in as if I'm a hotel guest. Pretty much only white contract workers there - to expensive for everyone else.

I spent the day reading about this machine we will hopefully get and taking this information and turning it into a business plan/costing sheet for Kaps and Kevin to research this week. We've got to get someone in here that knows how to make bricks though. It all has to be just right. They seem to think we can just make it happen, but we need expertise. And that is exactly what it is all about with this type of thing, its not whether you can do it, but whether you can get people together that can. I'm trying.

Otherwise it was like little England today. I was surrounded by bright white brits baking by the pool, and english premier league football (soccer). I wish I was surrounded by american football!! No such luck.

Very interesting these expats. Always talking about how great the "package" is. Here for short high paid stints. Not for a cause, not to help - at least much more than themselves. Not all, but virtually all. And not all brits here, but virtually all.

Africa minerals is building a single use train line from their Tonkolili iron mine (aparently will be the biggest iron mine in the world) straight to Freetown. No one else will use the train, only them. And it's immense. Looks like they are building a full interstate highway. And that's actually what the locals think. They think they'll get to use it. Nope. It is strictly so Africa Minerals can take down an entire mountain set, cart it to port, and ship it off to the highest bidder.

They've brought in workers from all over the world, even others from Africa, but don't seem to be using much from Sierra Leone. Rumor has it they will provide 11000 jobs, but I see few so far, I'm sure they will come. They will pay laborers to mine for 5000 leones a day - $1.25 - and then they will sell the iron for billions and make lots of people in the UK and wherever very rich. Taking Sierra Leone's resources and leaving only a few dollars behind for the people while they watch football and drink imported beer. There is something wrong with this, at least to me...