Mission complete!

I am writing this blog sitting in a cafe in Colombo sipping strong coffee and eating carrot cake, having finished my placement, having said goodbye to my colleagues, and having bid farewell to my Sri Lankan family. The people at the next table are speaking in a mixture of English and Sinhala. The man across the room is shouting down his mobile phone in French.

Already it feels a million miles away from the rural Sri Lankan life that Olof and I have been immersed in. But sitting at my computer with palm trees around me and the sounds of Sri Lankan birds is a reminder of my daily routine at work when I used to sit out on the balcony working away (and sweating) in the humid heat of the south coast. So I thought this blog was the perfect opportunity to reflect on my placement in Tangalla – what I have achieved for my NGO, what difficulties I faced, and what legacy I have left them as I move onto new places and countries .

In my first week at my NGO in Tangalla I worked out my objectives with the Chairperson of the organisation. I was to support the organisation in filling its communications gap through report writing, articles, proposals and training staff in improving the organisation’s communications in the future. One of my first tasks was to write the organisation’s annual report (you can see a copy here).

I quickly realised that “writing” the report involved collecting all the information, researching it, writing everything – from the director’s message to the staff list, designing the report, taking the photos (or asking Olof to take some), and arranging the printing. Staff at the organisation were asked to leave me alone while I “worked my magic” on their report. I was happy to do this as it was a new opportunity for me, and design was something I had always wanted to try out. But I also realised that spending my whole six months in this way would only serve to take the organisations communications further from the staff’s capacity. And that spending six months “working my magic” alone would be pretty boring for me.

Speaking to other volunteers, I have found that this is something that is quite common in developing countries. An organisation gets a foreign volunteer in to help in a particular area but the volunteer finds it difficult to integrate into the organisation, and the organisation views the volunteer as an expert who is to be left alone. The danger of this is that once the placement comes to an end and the volunteer leaves the country, the staff are left to try and pick up where the volunteer left off with little training or knowledge of how to do it.

My sending organisation, CWW, tries to encourage volunteers to deal with this by working hard to train staff on developing new skills, and placing an important emphasis on capacity building. So faced with this problem, and having completed the annual report in an effective but unsustainable way, I decided that I would make training and capacity building in communications my priority for the rest of my placement.

I ran a series of workshops for staff in all aspects of communications – from report writing to photography, grammar to oral presentations, and also did individual training sessions for staff according to their needs. I spent the last month or so consolidating this into a manual which staff can use as a kind of guidebook for staff, and paid for ten copies to be printed for staff. It was hard work, partly because training was not something I had much experience in (and people who know me well will know that I am not the most patient person in the world), and also because innovation, creativity and communication skills are often drummed out of people in Sri Lanka by their extremely academic “one size fits all” education system.

I also helped the organisation launch its website, which was another big challenge. Most of the content, design and layout had already been produced before I arrived at the organisation, so my priority was to get the site live, and tweak the content later. Sounds easy. It wasn’t. Things happen very slowly in Sri Lanka, and I have learnt that the British attitude of not wanting to cause any trouble or interrupt people just doesn’t really cut it here. So eventually after some nagging and persistence, the site went live.

But despite the challenges, the work I did was incredibly rewarding. As the workshop series went on I was able to see staff develop and increase in their confidence about communicating in English and using methods they had never used before. I found that all the way through people were extremely keen to learn and were very grateful for the help I gave them in learning “nice skills”, as one of them put it. It was also extremely satisfying to be working with people to produce PR materials for an organisation that does such good work with people with disabilities, and to encourage them to tell the world about their achievements.

So I left work on Wednesday feeling like I had managed to break through the barrier of the foreign volunteer as an expert, and happy that the organisation was in a better place in terms of communications than before. I was sad to say goodbye to colleagues that had become friends, and the wonderful Chair of my organisation who had been so kind to me. I also knew that I had been incredibly lucky with my placement, as my organisation was doing some really impressive work with some very disadvantaged people, and was somewhere where I was able to add real value. But I was also a little bit relieved to walk away from a difficult, often frustrating, and confusing working culture in Sri Lanka where teamwork is a novel idea, deadlines are as flexible as rubber, and time management is a mysterious concept consigned to people from Colombo or foreigners.

Working here has been a wonderful experience, and I will continue to offer support through email to the organisation’s staff, who were so eager to learn from me. But now it is time to begin to reintegrate into a more western style of working – complete with wireless internet, rigid timekeeping and caffe lattes...