Care work decisions

I got a job offer last month that I feel ridiculous about having turned down. It should have been perfect. It was a part time job. It was flexible. It paid well. I said no. At that point, I hadn't arranged child care (I still haven't), and they wanted someone to start immediately. It was for 8 months - which isn't long in the scope of my career, but seems like forever in the childhood of baby. The problem is, I'm going to have to make the decision at some point. As I'm starting to reconnect to the work world, some things I'm learning seem quite obvious:

- Leaving your child with someone else is really hard! I suppose this is to be expected. But….holy cow! It's really hard! I feel like that ought to be a sign that maybe it's not the way to go….

- One of the blessings of living in South Africa is that good quality child care is readily available, and affordable. Finding it is tricky, since crummy child care also abounds.

- Taking care of a baby is work, even when it's so fun it doesn't feel like it. It's amazing how much you can get done in the 15 minutes snatches where she hangs out on the play mat, but basically, large tasks (and scheduled meetings) have to happen after bedtime (happily, I've now entered a baby stage where there IS a bedtime!). *This* is why mothers are sleep deprived. That may get better when she has a nap schedule? Or a nanny...

- I feel like I'm in a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I can't make arrangements to work without child care, and I can't arrange child care without knowing what my work arrangements will be like. At the moment, I have a corps of babysitters that are great for occasional gap-stopping, but nobody who's slated to come on a regular basis. Obviously, that suits me for the time being, but won't as I step up work commitments.

- I want to raise my own child. And I want to work. It seems like this is just not done. What a bizarre world we live in! 

A Day At the Office

I just spent half a day at an office. A real office! It was the first time in years (honestly, 5 of them), and I found it exceptionally enjoyable. Doubly enjoyable, because I could be there, and not share in their stress. Everyone is preparing for a big conference, and tensions were running high. People were running up and down, there were last minute meetings with raised voices as the details of everything were being finalised. The telephone switchboard quit working mid-morning, and Telkom had to be called in. There were only 25 people in the office, but from the buzz, you'd swear it was twice as many.

Through it all, I got to sit in a quiet little corner, and plug along at the piece of work I had to do, offering occasional sympathetic head nods as people ran by upset and tense.  It made me realise how much organisational bandwidth gets consumed feeding the organisation. I felt that in my previous job - like I only spent half my time actually doing things and the other half being consumed by vague organisational imperatives (circular email conversations in which everyone and their dog is cc:ed. Trying to schedule a teleconferece, in which a minimum of 2 attendees are travelling at any given time. Trying to figure out who has the mandate to make a decision about whatever) I don't have a solution to this - when organisations grow, they need switchboards (which sometimes break, and cause havoc), cooperation (which takes time) and systems (which are sometimes slow). I was just happy to be around it, and not part of it for the day, and hope to continue sitting smuggly and productively in a corner. 

Waddling to Work

I thought the next 2 months would be the perfect time to sneak in some short term work projects; to make sure the bank account doesn't deplete too rapidly before the arrival of Blob, and to savour the last few days of professional focus, before my life becomes a blur of diapers and sleep deprivation.

I am very thankful that I've managed to find a piece of work to fill some time. What I didn't count on is how un-charming a time in my life this is to be meeting new people and doing new things. I huff and puff up two flights of stairs. I can't be more than 100 metres from a bathroom at any given time. 8 months in, and garlic still makes me nauseous. Everyone is admiring my 'healthy glow', which I do definitely have. To everyone else, it seems to be a cheerful reminder of some sort of shared humanity. That's great, but to me it's mostly constricted capillaries (read: constant sniffling - imagine a 9 month cold, and spontaneous nosebleeds).

I'm always amazed at how many people gush over their pregnancies - that it was the most amazing 10 months of their lives, how they cherished every second....and with a bit of prompting, will also remember the nausea and heartburn, confess they didn't sleep for months, or were emotional wrecks, or had weeks of bedrest.

Philosophically, I'm having a fabulous pregnancy, and I understand what everyone gushes about retrospectively - it really has been grounding, made me feel centered and focussed on what's important, much more in touch with my body, and so on. But on a day to day level - it's relatively irritating to have to leave a workshop 3 times a morning because of some bodily function. It seems like every time I'm introduced to someone I'm ridiculously out of breath, and it's a good thing I'm not inclined towards passionate speeches, because I start panting after 3 consecutive sentences. I start squirming after 20 minutes in the same chair. Things itch, and twitch, and ache. For the first time since returning to South Africa, I see the appeal to kicking back and putting my feet up. I guess the lesson is that I should be careful about what I wish for; and a reminder to be thankful for what I get! 

M&E Course at the University of Stellenbosch

Last year, I did a postgraduate diploma in monitoring and evaluation from the University of Stellenbosch. Since I had been working as an MandE practitioner for several years, I was quite excited about the course. My work environment really had the feeling of a social startup - a very dynamic and creative environment. While it was great to feel on the cutting edge of innovation on M&E, I was also familiar with the less exciting donor log frames, and wanted to get a sense of what more traditional M&E work looks like. The course came well recommended by some colleagues who had taken it a few years ago. It seems to be nearly the only offering of its kind in South Africa, so I jumped right in. The demand for the course is clearly high, with nearly 100 of us enrolled, ranging from new graduates to mid career professionals, many sent by government or their employers to learn a much needed skill. It's a shame the course was largely by distance, since networking with other students would have been one of the more valuable aspects of the course. 

While I did learn some monitoring and evaluation basics over the course of the year, I was tremendously disappointed by the quality of the course as a whole. The syllabus and readings were solid and thoughtfully selected; but that's pretty much the end of the good news. There were 3 contact sessions throughout the year. I went to the first two, but by the time the third one came around, I was so disillusioned that I gave it a miss. The lecturers were totally unresponsive, and we were graded more or less exclusively on how many references to various readings we used in each sub-section of assignments. While I'm all for objective grading criteria, this smacks of the demise of the American primary education system! At the post graduate level, such discouragement of original thought is ridiculous. 

Instead of spending the year learning about how to conduct a good evaluation, I spent most of the year trying to figure out what the lectures wanted.  After some very poor performances on assignments, I realised the quality of my argument was irrelevant, and it was better to submit something long, pedantic, repetitive, and obvious. This strategy served me increasingly well, and in the end I wrote a very, very long final evaluation report….It stuck religiously to the guidelines of the assignment and the best examples from previous years - and beyond that, I very little thought into it. It had about 10 times the organizational background and one tenth the analysis I would expect of any professional evaluation. The final product was so unhelpful that I rewrote it completely to be of use to the organization that volunteered to be evaluated. It was picked as one of the 'best examples' from the course, and will be passed on to next year's students. This was one of the few times I was horrified to have done so well on an assignment - I would have much preferred to fail! But instead, I lost any remaining faith I had in the value of the course. 

This course exists for people who will be working on M&E in our country - an absolutely crucial skill with service delivery crises at every turn, and with a newly created ministry of M&E. I feel like this new cadre of professionals is being sent the message that M&E is a tick-box exercise. That it's more important to cover your back by nitpicking about details, than to step back and think critically. 

I'm sure the explanations for my experience of the course are many - the course grew at a rapid rate (several years ago, when my colleagues who recommended it were studying, there were about 30 students). The professors were overloaded, trying to balance teaching with consultancy work. Since a large contingent of the students were foreign and it was mostly distance education, it may have been seen more as a money making tool for the university than a serious academic endeavor. Whatever the reasons, for the future of the profession in the country, I hope the university steps up its game in future years! 

Meeting Day One.

I've been very excited about organising a conference this week, as a first departure from my job of many years....

After the 'reliable' driver arrived 45 minutes late, we were nearing our destination in Braamfontein, when some random man reached in the minibus's open window, unlocked the door, and got in, made the driver pull over, repeatedly shouted at us to stay inside and keep our doors locked, and an 'animated' argument ensued with a whole gang of people who were waiting. As it turns out, we had 'rented' a minibus who usually drives a normal route, and the taxi association wasn't impressed by his deviation.

We went on to watch Dear Mandela, a documentary about the ANC's attack on Abahlali.....It was spectacularly made.

I'm afraid the combination of experiences may have managed to terrify the visitors I'm supposed to be hosting....I'm hoping the next few days will be much less eventful, and allow me to feel better organised.  This is not a great foray into working independently....

Job search with a belly continues

With a baby on the way, I find myself in the very strange position of actually not knowing what I want to do professionally. It's definitely the first time in my life that a fast-paced, all consuming job seems like the wrong choice (even if financial stability and maternity leave would both be very nice!). The problem is, I've never seriously considered an alternative. I've suddenly found myself on the 'mommy track', and have never really thought about such an odd idea before....I think that's hindering a job search more than anything else. There are so many things that look perfect-but-not-right-now. Knowing that my life is about to change in unfathomable ways makes it very difficult to figure out what *is* right for now. I'm sure that comes across in interviews.

I'm not quite sure what the solution is, except to spend a few weeks in denial, baking a lot, trying not to worry too much, and hoping everything will become clear in time...

On a side note, the blob has opened its eyes now, and if I shine a flashlight on my belly, I can feel it lift its hands to cover its eyes. This is supposed to be bad for the eye development, so I won't make a habit of it, but it's almost as entertaining as shining a flashlight through geckos used to be when I was little. I think the amount of time I can spend watching my stomach jiggle is probably a sign that finding a job sooner rather than later would be better for my sanity.