Tag Archives: Bogor

Thoughts on my trip Part 3

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As mentioned in my last blog post, I will be discussing my reflections on the my course abroad. Without further ado…

Overall, I am extremely happy with my decision to have applied and participated in this program. This program allowed me to experience a new culture and perspective which I hope to carry with me in my future endeavors. For one, the course taught me how to live more independently. Living in the dorm, I learned how to do seemingly simplistic tasks on my own, such as taking care of myself when I was sick from terrible food poisoning. While I had friends and TAs to help me through challenges such as food poisoning, I was still able to learn how to take care of myself at times when I thought I couldn’t on my own. As well, I learned more about myself throughout the trip. I learned about what I was comfortable with and what I was not, as well as what my own limitations are. For instance, throughout the trip, I always tried to take advantage of every opportunity and put 100% of my efforts into everything I did, whether it was an academic task such as research or a leisurely activity such as exploring the city. I left little time to give myself a break because I wanted to make the most of my limited time in Indonesia and did not want to waste time resting. Halfway through the course however, I quickly learned the importance of giving myself enough time to rest. At one point, I began feeling extremely fatigued. I could no longer concentrate on the work ahead of me and started getting headaches and nausea frequently. I finally took the time to take care of myself, such as making sure I had a nap on a long day or eating more healthy foods, and soon enough, my fatigue and sickness departed. While I still tried to take advantage of the new and exciting opportunities in Indonesia, I also remembered my own limitations and need for rest.

Throughout the course, I also learned about the importance of understanding a different culture. When my group was first trying to understand the success of the development projects within our village, it seemed that all the projects implemented were a complete success. However, it wasn’t until we gained the trust of the local villagers that we realized many of the projects implemented had their failures. We soon realized that within the local area, it is uncommon to speak poorly of others due to societal norms. While this may seem to be a positive trait, this proved to be a challenge when trying to assess the development projects because villagers were unwilling to provide constructive criticism on the failures of the projects. Had we not realized this, we would have had a very different assessment on the projects in our village. In this way, it is important to understand the context of the culture you are working in.

In addition, I learned about other implications of aid work throughout the course. For instance, I learned about the importance of clear communication between aid donors, designers, or implementers, and beneficiaries or partners. Within our village of Situ Gede, it was evident that little training or follow-up was prioritized throughout the development projects. In the case of the briquette making project, the IPB professor who designed the project was unaware that the local villagers did not use the technology beyond the one training workshop provided to them by IPB staff. IPB staff seemed to do little to initiate follow-up discussions on the development projects while local villagers were afraid to critique the projects because they did not want future development projects to be discontinued in the village. Thus, it is extremely important to maintain clear communication between stakeholders in order to better ensure development projects are successful and sustainable.

The course also taught me many other lessons, such as the importance of implementing initial needs assessment, of focusing on quality versus quantity, and the importance of addressing knowledge-practice gaps to name a few. Ultimately, I have realized the importance of undergoing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) within development projects and aid work in general. M&E by independent elevators is important to support existing and future aid projects because it seeks to discover whether vulnerable populations are actually getting the resources and help they need in an efficient, sustainable and culturally appropriate manner.  While there are limitations to M&Es, I hope to use the lessons learned from this trip in my future career path.

 

M&E in Indonesia Part 2

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Welcome back to my blog! If you are tuning in, I hope you are excited to read about the next chapter in Indonesia because we are jumping right into it!

Within the first week staying at IPB in Bogor, we soon began learning about monitoring and evaluation. We learned in about an hour how to create problem trees and logical frameworks. Once this was covered, we learned about Monitoring and Evaluation in a Timely Response in detail. We also split up into groups and began observing development projects in rural villages which had been initiated by IPB. Many villages had several projects occurring at the same time so each trip we took to a village took nearly all day or several days. Personally, this experience on its own was very eye opening because I had never been directly exposed to rural poverty. It was humbling seeing how villagers lived day to day and seeing how they treated us with such generosity and kindness with the little they had.

Once we visited all the villages, it was time to decide which group and village we would work in for the remainder of the term. I decided to work in a nearby village called Situ Gede with several other group members. As a group, we decided to focus on three projects in the village, namely briquette making, taro processing, and microfinance. Within our group we each focused on one of the three projects. I predominantly focused on briquette making, which involved manually making rice husks into briquettes using the technology provided by IPB. This project was particularly interesting because of the failures our group discovered in the design and implementation of the project in the village. For instance, one of the major design flaws in implementing the project in Situ Gede was that the village did not have many rice fields, which meant that there were little rice husks available. Thus, rice husks had to be imported from other nearby villages, adding to the cost of the briquettes, which ultimately was one of the various reasons that led to the failure of the project.

Throughout the month, our group would visit and interview various people involved with the three chosen projects, speaking local villagers and IPB professors who were involved in the design or implementation of the project. We also visited nearby villages of similar environments and socioeconomic status in order to assess the effectiveness of the results of each of the projects. Moreover, other research consisted of online research from scholarly articles and papers. At the end of the month of May, each group presented their evaluation of the projects of their given village. We presented to a range of people, from IPB professors to local village leaders and everyone in between. It was extremely interesting to listen to the responses from the local IPB professors and villagers, as well as listen to the other groups discuss the projects within their villages. In general, it was fascinating reflecting on the various effects of development projects within the villages we worked in.

Stay tuned for my next post as I reflect on the course as a whole!