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This summer I went to Guatemala to do monitoring and evaluation for a development project there,
and I was linked into that organization through Seven Hills Global Outreach, which is a foundation
here in Worcester. I began working with them as an undergraduate student in a Monitoring
and Evaluation class here, taught by Dave Bell. So I arrived in Guatemala to this very
very rural town called Loma Linda and there I worked with an 25 members of an assoiation
called ASODILL to implement a program that would effectively judge the strengths and
weaknesses of the association as it is, and the ways that the association can move forward
in strengthening those positive aspects and in improving the weaknesses.
The association works on eco-tourism, mostly, but it also works on food security and it
works on a sponsorship program for kids in the town.
The collaboration part was a really important piece of my experience this summer, mostly
because I realized that it wasn’t going to work for me to go into an organization
and assume that since I had learned a lot on this topic that I would be the expert.
So I found that working with people who I met and who had never been trained in evaluation,
or in participatory rural appraisal, were actually much better at collecting data than
I was. So it was very humbling. It gave me renewed hope in how each person brings their
own knowledge to the table and if you honor that knowledge, you can collect a lot of interesting
data. I was able to create a very – what I considered
to be an excellent plan. I actually sent it in the form of a document over the internet
to ASODILL so they could have an idea of what was coming at them. And so I felt very, I
felt very prepared and I felt very knowledgeable on the subject. And then as soon as I hit
the ground I realized that I had to start from scratch again.
Every day was a different obstacle in small ways. I found that instead of doing a participatory
model of evaluation, where everyone not only participates in the creation of the evaluation
but also the analysis and the results, I thought it would be better for me to just go about
the data collection and do regular checkups with the members of the association on what
I was doing. This was a very big step away from what Dave
and I had planned originally, so I wrote to Dave and said what do you think about this.
And he said "you know what, it’s fine, I completely trust where you’re coming from."
So knowing that he had my back and that he trusted my decision was a really key element
to our relationship this summer. I would love to go into this kind of work.
I think I need about five more years of some kind of experience somewhere where it’s
not influencing the lives of anyone else.