During our two years of service, PCVs must submit a "quarterly" report to their bosses describing what they're up to, providing numbers and data, and so on. I put quarterly in quotes because it's more like biannually. I've filled out two so far, and while I noted to myself that the data we were providing was essentially useless and meaningless, I kept it to myself. For the Education sector, they asked things such as "How many classes do you have? How many students in each class? How many are boys/girls?" This does give an indication of how many kids we come in contact with, but says nothing about the quality of our teaching or the effect we have on the kids.
In this way, Peace Corps has been operating with no accountability for all of its government dollars for almost 50 years. The hundreds of hours that PCVs and staff spend sending in and compiling the data, sending it to Washington, D.C. is essentially wasted because it really doesn't say anything about the work we do qualitatively. It seems someone else noticed this loophole, also, and decided to start reviewing the Monitoring/Reporting/Evaluation (MRE) process in Peace Corps, starting with ol' Maddy.
Erin and I, both living in the capital, were thus called upon by our boss to attend a workshop/conference on improving our sector's (Education) "Project Plan," a fancy term for the document that says what we do an how we measure it. To do so, two women from Peace Corps countries in mainland Africa came to teach us about the MRE process and help us improve our project plans. The sessions were sometimes gruesomely boring and filled with jargon, and we often felt like we were in an Mobius strip of red tape and meaningless phrases, though here and there I think we made some progress.
For each of the 4 Goals of the Education sector, there is a general objective and then a few "indicators" that tell how this objective will be measured. The ones we had to revise were almost incomprehensible, impossible to measure, and sometimes had nothing to do with the PCVs. Working with a small group of myself and 3 other Education volunteers, we went through the entire document word by word and came up with a pretty decent document by the end. Plus, Erin and I get to go back to the training site in December and do a little training on it with the new group that just swore in. Free vacation, free food! Although there were some bitter fights over semantics, debates over the existential meaning of the Peace Corps, and insufferable "ice breakers" every hour, it was still pretty cool to get a look at the inner workings of this organization, which is apparently going for a face lift in the near future. Plus, we got to meet a bunch of volunteers we had never run into and be paid in delicious food.
On Thursday, after the workshop came to a close, the Education volunteers were taken back to Tana so we could leave bright and early for the Presidential Palace. The Ministry of Education is unrolling a large transformation of primary and secondary schools, with some ambitious plans including textbooks for every child, fifty thousand new schools, thirty thousand new teachers, lunch programs, and school fee waivers just to name a few. The President held a conference/speech at his palace (a real mansion, not like my pretend one) which had a huge auditorium in back with thousands of people waiting to see him speak. Being the whiteys that we are, we were escorted to the front and center, walking past live music, dancers, wall-sized video screens, and the stage and podium. Sitting three rows back, we were about 50 feet from the man himself, President Marc Ravalomanana. (Take it slowly: "rah-vah-loo-MAH-nah-nah"), dressed in a hideous suit. His speech was in Malagasy so I naturally tuned out and focused on taking pictures to prove that I've seen the most obscure President of any country in the world. His face is the definition of ubiquitous here, though, beaming from 1 in every 4 t-shirts, handbags, and billboards. Every volunteer is dying to get their hands on an official campaign t-shirt. Before I leave, I might buy one off of someone's back in the street if I have no other recourse.
The speeches and presentations weren't much to write home about (but here I am writing home about it, again) and afterwards there was lunch on the adjacent lawn, though the Prez was a no-show. I should mention that Ravalomanana happens to own the largest company in Madagascar (Tiko), making yogurt, ice cream, soft drinks, bottled water, and the like. As such, Tiko sponsored the event and nearly cause a few stampede deaths when they broke open the boxes of ice cream. People quite literally went frantic (I know I did) trying to get a cone, because--hey, free ice cream. Erin may or may not have grabbed one from an important official's hands. All's fair in love and ice cream, folks.
And so ends my summer odyssey, which actually took place in the winter here. Tomorrow I board a taxi brousse back to Fianar and then to my town. I'm naively hoping that in the time that I've been gone, they've got cell phone coverage, electricity, internet, and indoor plumbing. I'll actually just be satisfied if my house wasn't broken into. And even then, I'd be satisfied if they just left me some books and furniture. As per the title of a previous blog (and lyrics of a Smith's song), "there's more to life than books, y'know, but not much more."
