In my experience, a volunteer organization's ability to help others hinges on its organizational structure and culture- its formal leadership, informal leadership, meetings, etc. Most groups really focus on the formal leadership and hierarchical decision making, at the expense of mentorship, consensus building and the input of the least powerful.
Many people claim that mentoring volunteers and getting their input takes too much time. In our Engineers Without Borders chapter, which has a membership of 40+ persons, it seems like that idea only holds up in the short term, if at all. In the mid term, including others and taking the time to build trust with them saves the organization many meetings, headaches and drama. In the long term, it takes less time and produces better results.
Intuitively, the emphasis on formal structures e.g. president, vp etc. running the whole show, and hierarchical decision making makes a lot of sense to many volunteers. It takes most people many volunteer hours to realize that hierarchical decision making is not a very efficient model. It prefers the loudest voices and the people who are most privileged in this world. It causes many organizations to lose the skills and volunteer hours of those who don't have the loudest voices or deepest pockets. Thus using it as the m.o. of an organization that aims to serve poor people in Kenya doesn't make much sense to me.
The problem is that there are not a lot of well-known alternatives to chose from, especially when it comes to running meetings for organizations with a large membership. This summer Quinn and I came across this handbook "On Conflict and Consensus," at a bookstore in Philadelphia. Most of it fits with the lessons about running a volunteer organization that I've learned from volunteering with EWB. We'll see how it goes. We are hoping to be able to try it out in EWB this fall.
http://www.ic.org/pnp/ocac/
wandreilagh.org/consensus.pdf for a free copy in PDF form
Monday, August 16, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
Restaurant Review: Haandi Udupi, Indian Food, Westgate Mall, Nairobi
Haandi Udupi is an Indian restaurant in the food court of Nairobi's Westgate Mall. I had never visited a Kenyan food court before. As soon as we arrived, waiters from each of the food court restaurants raced over to us and handed us about 10 laminated menus. We were in it for the Indian food, and Haandi Udupi had a very extensive menu. Northern Indian, Southern Indian, Indian that I'd never heard of. Five pages of it, all with their authentic names and no English translations. It overwhelmed me and all I could remember was that paneer is tofu-like cheese. Quinn and I both settled for vegetable dishes because we thought it would be safer to experiment with veggies than meat.
Vegetable Korma (pictured in front of Quinn)
Vegetable Chaana
2 orders of warm, crispy, buttered naan
2 large passion fruit juices
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1,000 ksh approx. $12.50 USD
The food was served on tidy white plates, and I was in Indian food heaven.
Cultural Norm
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This is an angry post.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. e.g. I'm standing in line, putting in my dinner order at the hostel in Nairobi. I've been waiting in line for five minutes. Some guy walks up to the counter. He has a crumpled bill in his hand. I am just about to open my mouth to tell the waitress what I'd like for dinner, when he extends his money to the waitress and she promptly stops paying attention to me. She takes his order. I look at him, momentarily surprised that he’d budge in line. Frustration wells up. The scenario is all too familiar. He did such an obvious job of budging. I stare at his face, trying to make him look at me, trying to make him uncomfortable. He won’t meet my eyes.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. At first, I wondered whether I was missing something, perhaps there were details in the systems for buying or ordering food, bus tickets, groceries etc. that I did not know about because I was a foreigner. I noticed that none of our male, Kenyan partners budged in front of us, in fact they were very courteous. Then, I started thinking about whether the guys who budged in line were simply jerks. You know- jerks, just like the American version. People who, for some reason, nature and/or nurture, consistently behave in rude ways.
A couple weeks ago, after being in Kenya for two months, I was standing in line to buy airtime for my phone. A twelve-year-old Kenyan boy of Indian descent used the small size of his body to get in front of me and cut me off. Budging in line, I soon realized, is a cultural norm amongst many Kenyans. So is treating women as second-class citizens. It's a complex topic that I'm only familiar with of because of these frustrating scenarios. I apologize for the oversimplifications- I'm annoyed! For the moment, all I know is that many females, such as the dinner waitress who took the guy’s order, are also implicated.
This is an angry post.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. e.g. I'm standing in line, putting in my dinner order at the hostel in Nairobi. I've been waiting in line for five minutes. Some guy walks up to the counter. He has a crumpled bill in his hand. I am just about to open my mouth to tell the waitress what I'd like for dinner, when he extends his money to the waitress and she promptly stops paying attention to me. She takes his order. I look at him, momentarily surprised that he’d budge in line. Frustration wells up. The scenario is all too familiar. He did such an obvious job of budging. I stare at his face, trying to make him look at me, trying to make him uncomfortable. He won’t meet my eyes.
This kind of thing happens to me all the time in Kenya. At first, I wondered whether I was missing something, perhaps there were details in the systems for buying or ordering food, bus tickets, groceries etc. that I did not know about because I was a foreigner. I noticed that none of our male, Kenyan partners budged in front of us, in fact they were very courteous. Then, I started thinking about whether the guys who budged in line were simply jerks. You know- jerks, just like the American version. People who, for some reason, nature and/or nurture, consistently behave in rude ways.
A couple weeks ago, after being in Kenya for two months, I was standing in line to buy airtime for my phone. A twelve-year-old Kenyan boy of Indian descent used the small size of his body to get in front of me and cut me off. Budging in line, I soon realized, is a cultural norm amongst many Kenyans. So is treating women as second-class citizens. It's a complex topic that I'm only familiar with of because of these frustrating scenarios. I apologize for the oversimplifications- I'm annoyed! For the moment, all I know is that many females, such as the dinner waitress who took the guy’s order, are also implicated.
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