Today’s Adventure: All That Work….

Here is an example of something that happens a lot in Peace Corps: About 6 months ago, a couple other volunteers found a free program online for scheduling that had a Romanian setting. This was a huge breakthrough because the schools struggle every year to get the schedule for classes done on time. It’s a big mind-warp because the teachers all have particular days and times they can work and have to get so many hours or each subject in per week and we only have so many classrooms. It’s like trying to do a Sudoku puzzle but if all the numbers were constantly coming into your office and whining that while they CAN go into that box, they really don’t want to because they have a kid at home or they want to go to the raion center that day. So these volunteers (bravo to them!) organized a seminar to teach other volunteers and their partners to use this program. The program lets you just plug all the availability information in and it will generate a schedule for you with no thinking involved and it takes about an hour as opposed to like 6 days. My adjunct director (vice-principal) came to this training last spring with me. We spend a 5 hour day in the capital learning how to use the program in preparation for the beginning of this year. Starting two weeks before school started this year I started poking my head into her office every morning and asking when we could start working on the schedule. My goal was to stay on her long enough that she would get the schedule finished before the first day of school, which is an unheard of feat in Moldova. This would allow all of the teachers and students to actually know their schedule starting Day 1. Sometimes in the first week or so of school, the directors will literally swoop into the teachers lounge every hour and tell the teachers what lessons they have with which classes, leaving them literally 30 seconds to prepare themselves to teach. This can go on for up to 2 weeks until they manage to find the time to wrack their brain over the schedule and get it all the way done. So I started hounding my director, thinking we could take advantage of this program and get it all done on time. We finally sat down (on the second day after school started already) to go through all the information and get something put together. I had her enter the information, which was slow going because she is not used to working on computers, but we were making progress. We worked for an hour or so each day until we were just about done. I was waiting for her in the teachers lounge for us to meet for what I figured would be the final day, when she blows in and pats me on the back and says, “The schedule is done!” I stupidly thought for a minute that she’d managed to finish all on her own and I was really excited. Then it slowly became apparent that she had done it by hand as usual. When I asked her why she would do that she just shrugged and said it was easier than entering all that information. Remember, this is after spending a whole day at a seminar and about 3 days entering a ton of information into a grid. We basically would have just had to press a button and it would have been done. I can’t really fault the Moldovans sometimes. I understand that sometimes even though the program would be easier, it’s not really if you have to learn a whole new skill in order to use the program. But it did feel like a spectacular waste of everyone’s time, although my director didn’t seem to think so. In fact, she invited the director from the neighboring village’s school to come and learn how to use the program because she thought so highly of it. Despite the fact that she didn’t’ use it herself. Ultimately, using technology is something that medical centers and schools in the villages in Moldova are very new at. As Americans it can seem completely insane that they wouldn’t’ immediately embrace this because it seems obvious that it will make their lives easier. But this is a common mistake when doing this kind of work. Sometimes people will choose the way they have always done things over the “new” way simply because “easy” does not necessarily mean that you do the thing in less time, but that you can do it without needing anyone else’s help. Many of us (Americans and Moldovans) are willing to sit for a period of time to learn a new skill in order to get certain tasks done, but there is a limit. One of the challenges in the work that volunteers do in any country with the tech aspect of our jobs, is trying to make a host country national believe that sitting long enough to learn these skills is going to benefit them in the long run. As Americans we are conditioned already to believe that a computer program will always make our lives easier, but for people who are not used to using computers every day it can be seen as an added complication to a task that they know they’ll manage to do without the program. This if just part of the job. Sometimes you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Noapte buna!