A typical day?

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I've been asked to write about a typical day at work as an AFID accountancy volunteer. As soon as I heard that, I wondered what on earth a typical day was. I can only think of atypical days: they seem more common, and are surely much more interesting.

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So, there follows some of the types of working days we've had here: the many unexpected interruptions, the unpredictable changes of direction and the brilliant or baffling surprises.

As an example, today Friday 7th of June was a 'typical' day at work, and it went a bit like this:

Rhona left the office at 10am to head to the school in neighbouring Camotan (by tuk-tuk of course) for an end of term party. By arriving only 5 minutes late, Rhona was of course about 20 minutes early.

Meanwhile, the internet was being slow, so I had reset the router. Oops! I broke the new 2nd wireless network (which we had recommended be set up to put more computers online). Meanwhile, Rhona was to discover that once again in Guatemala you don't get a party without there being speeches, and with zero warning had to give a speech of thanks in Spanish to several dozen schoolkids and 10 teachers. I think that may have been a bit of an adrenaline rush! The Guatemalans, including a few of the kids, also gave off-the-cuff speeches, which were all apparently flowing, eloquent and quite impressive. Public speaking seems to be a practised art here.

Then, when Rhona returned, I was busy using the working internet to learn how to reconfigure a router... I had hoped to work in the morning with Juanita on the new electronic Clinic registry I built, but that was not to happen as the Clinic was full of patients. The router taking a bit of time and concentration, I was too late to order lunch from Virginia the hospital and staff cook, so when the internet was fixed Rhona and I popped down the road to "Coffee" for lunch. Coffee is the nearest, and probably best restaurant in town.

Then, as we ordered and ate, the clouds rolled in. The look of rain got set, and the hills began to crackle and fizz and roar with sharp bursts of lightning as we excitedly watched. Before the eating was done, we had to rapidly abandon our table in the semi-open air as the wind brought spurts of rain into our faces. Sheltering against the inside wall, we forgot our manners and didn't ask before we shared a dry table with another diner - forgetting to ask permission a minor Guatemalan faux pas. The meal soon finished, we watched and waited for the storm to pass. The storm didn't pass, and we were late.

Coffee is about 5 minutes walk from Bethania. We'd have been soaked through in 1 or less. So we thought about getting a tuk-tuk back, but of course.... you can never find a tuk-tuk in the rain! When the first ones did go past, they just couldn't see us waving from where we were, set back from the road. So, to get back to work, I had to run out in to the road in the torrential rain, which was coming down with all the force of a tropical storm, and flag down a young Guatemalan lad in a green-housed motorbike, only to have him drive us a few hundred yards so we could get to the office. We made it back, but we were still pretty damp.

And today would be the day I'd chosen to hang my washing up outside...

Dried out, we decided to get back to work, when la luz se fue - yup,when the power went out. Power cut 1. The power came back, and then went straight back off again. Power cut 2. No power = no internet & no desktop computers, and hence no work. We chatted to Alonso and the Mani Tese crew and read to kill time. At ten to 4 (on a Friday, no less) when the power came back on, we started working again. Just when I had made the first few changes to my spreadsheet, the power went off. Power cut 3, changes not saved. It came instantly back on, and then off again 10 minutes later. Power cut 4, some changes saved. Then, within the next hour, power cuts 5, 6, 7 and maybe 8. It's like Russian roulette for spreadsheets: if I write this, can I save it before the power dies? Finally, the power came back on and we were able to do about half an hour's work. Not a bad achievement all told. But still a wee bit discombobulating for a work day.

Work wasn't quite finished though, because we'd arranged another computer training session with one of the nurses for 7:30pm. Fine, except she was with a patient and hadn't been told by yesterday's nurse that we were coming to train her then. Finally, at about 8 we sat down, and in the next half hour, quite proudly managed to get 5 patients entered into our new data system, and all by a nurse who only today turned on a computer for the second time ever. Success. The end to a typical day!

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More typical days

So, your typical day in rainy season will be probably involve losing work due to a micro power cut. Half a second off loses all your work if you're not on a laptop, so that I now compulsively save every spreadsheet after every line of typing. It's so compulsive, that I find myself trying to save webpages, music,...etc.

(Incidentally, it's not called a power cut here, it's not even a thing, it's a situation: "No hay luz", literally "There is no light". It takes grammatical contortions to talk about a power cut that's just happenend "Hace poco, cuando no habia luz...", literally " A little while ago, when there wasn't light". We want to make it a noun and refer to there having been a no-hay-luz, but that would be nonsense.

A typical working day might finish at 5 or half 5, and then surprisingly restart later, eg when a nun asks Rhona to help with a flyer for a 50th anniversary celebration, or when Oscar knocks on your door in the evening to ask for some help with formatting a report in Word.

Or your day could be interrupted by Rudy from Casa Damian coming to make use of your Excel skills to check the homework of one of the students in his hostel.

Other interruptions could include people coming into the office to try to sell you vegetables - what are we going to with a yucca, or a muta!? We knew exactly what to do when a guy came round last week selling cashews. Yum! And also, I can't forget to mention the haggard old woman who comes round from time to time to beg a quetzal or two (10 or 20 pence). She frightens me with her weathered face and voice like that of an evil cartoon dame.

Equally, there could be a planned municipal day-long powercut... When there was, We tidied the medical warehouse.

Another possible surprise in your day could be that you get invited to visit a village. Optional of course, but as poverty in the villages is really the root of everything here, it wouldn't be right not to leave the spreadsheets behind. Nevermind that the work in the villages is a real source of pride for everyone here, so is important to see. The villages are fascinating too.

Alternatively, maybe you'll decide you need to sneak a few days off to go "overseas" to Belize on a visa-extension run, or some other such trip. Of course when you come back, you won't really be able to talk about it because Guatemalans don't believe in Belize. To them it's just the 23rd province, the one "Los Ingleses" stole, however historically selective that idea may be. But not talking about it becomes just another part of a typical couple of days at work.

You might have set your day up with the idea of working with Elder, Juanita or Marlon, only to find that they are dragged away to Camotan to chase cheque signatures, to Chiquimula to try to let a flat, or to visit the tax office, or to the aldeas (villages) to view progress on the creation of veg gardens.

Maybe your day won't be very typical because it involves a mammoth meeting of the Board of Assajo to try and find ways to make the budgets add up. If so, it could involve an entire afternoon, or evening, spent explaining a budget model you've created, in Spanish, to 10 or so interested, bright and rapid-speaking people. You'll have to try and teach budgetary discpline to some, as well as advise where extra income might be found, or costs chopped, squeezed or flattened. Those will be exhausting days - Spanish overload can fry the brain. Though I am pleased to say each mammoth budget meeting was less exhausting than the last.

Maybe, on those occasions when we've worked in the evening, like Rhona the other day fixing a computer in the office, we'll be visited by Campeon the over-friendly guard dog. Nothing like a German Shepherd joining you in the office while you write a blog!

Perhaps also your day will be interrupted by the screams of pigs being loaded in a lorry to head off to the butchers. Just another day on the compound.



But I suppose there is a pattern to some of our days, and so I'll write about it below, but first another little work story.

We teach nurses

Today (29th May) we have just taken on what is going to be a bigger task than we imagined...

Between us (including two solid weeks or more of data entry), we have digitised the hospital patient register since 2005. Bethania isn't a hospital in the conventional sense of the word, with patients coming and going all the time, instead it focuses on recuperation, with lowish numbers of patients often staying for months: most commonly kids with malnutrition and related diseases. The data entry effort was initially motivated by trying to understand why the number of patients is declining (no one thinks it's from lack of malnutrition nearby), but we came to realise that the information could be used in so many more ways than has been possible. Up til now, the registers have been on paper. It must take days and a lot of reading bad handwriting to produce the annual reports for the health department. In IT terms, its back to the 90s.

Armed with the data of a few hundred patients a year for 8 years - name, age, village, illness etc - we have created a simple spreadsheet system to receive the data and automatically produce reports about patient trends eg the incidence of malnutrition in kids by village, or equally, who has paid and how much they owe. The next step is to train up the users on how the 2 spreadsheets work. Juanita the hospital's accountant offered to be the one to do the input, but she already does all the administration here, so we thought it would be better to get the nurses involved. Better still, it was very clear that filling in the patient book was causing the nurses lots of grief. There would be benefits to them of doing things electronically other than just supplying better information.

There are 4 nurses. There were 5, but one of the changes on the cards was to reduce the number of nurses to save money. It was the right choice, the analysis backed it up. But it might have taken my agreement for it to happen, so tension from the nurses was a worry. Nevertheless, today we set about teaching 2 of them how to use the spreadsheets.

It turns out they've never used a computer before.

So a challenge has been laid for us! In the three weeks that we're still here, can we teach 4 Guatemalan women enough about computers for them to be able to enter data into a spreadsheet?

Today's lesson was how to apagar, how to incender, and how to manejar. That's switching on, shutting down, and "driving" the mouse to you and I. With explanation about un clic and un doble clic and the like, a tiny bit of typing, and how to open and close a spreadsheet.

It all seemed a bit touch and go when they both quite naturally said "There used to be 5 of us, now with 4, we just don't have the time to learn something new". Fair enough, you've got us there. But we persevered gently and it turns out even though they don't have time, at least one of them (and hopefully more) is keen to learn. So it'll be lunchtime and evening training every day if we can, while Rhona uses the internet to build a Spanish guide to computing for absolute beginners.

And if it doesn't work, Juanita can take over the data entry, at least it will save her time analysing it.... But we're confident we can get somewhere. Even if we can only get one of the nurses up to the level of entering data, that should be enough to bring the others along.

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Back to that typical day

Breakfast is at 6:30 down in the nun's house. As it's early, it'll be with more coffee and less chat. Working hours are 8 to 5 or half 7 to half 4, but when we start work, it will be 8, or 8:30, and we will work to probably half 5 or occasionally 6 - we're slipping back towards British time. We walk out of our room and 1 minute later get to the office.

Having the pleasure of goodish wifi, we might spend a bit of time warming up with facebook - because of the time zone, there's no point being online in our evening. And then it's down to work.

Work has involved working with people, and working solo. Largely due to beginning with weaker Spanish, Rhona has chosen to structure her work to mostly be solo. Poco a poco, over time she's been getting better and more confident in Spanish. Good enough in fact that I was proud of her the other day when she led a 2 hour training session on aspects of her IT guide. And good enough that in the 2 weeks remaining, Rhona will mostly concentrate on further training.

I too have spent a large part of the time working solo, like Rhona following the project lifecycle (discuss, analyse, build build build, discuss, rebuild rebuild rebuild, discuss, train!). There's plenty of interaction, but it comes in fits and starts, and so most days I have been building a model. So on a typical day, I'd either spend it building a budget model, preparing for a big budget meeting, or designing a way of putting a patient register book in electronic format. A typical day will probably involve a blether with Marlon the food security projects boss (the source of many jokes and much of our knowledge about malnutrition issues here), a short chat with Elder the main accountant about the new accounting reports David created, or a few minutes with Juanita trying to find time to work through one of the new spreadsheets. A slightly less typical day might involve spending a whole morning with Elder chatting through whatever work topic is on his mind, or a day with Marlon taking his next Christian Aid budget out of Word and making it a DIY budget template in Excel (a real success in terms of improving efficiency, and great to see it so well received) , or equally I might spend a whole afternoon training Juanita on a patient register. Our typical day rounds off with us watching a rainstorm, or cooling in front of our fan.

Welcome to our Guatemalan working life!

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Photos

Thanks to "Seño Rona"
From the secondary pupils of El Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Anunciacion

Rain coming?
Yup, it sure did.

It's clearing up
We made it back....

Nunmobile
This is how Rhona got driven to the convent to help with creating a flyer for the 50th anniversary

In the pickup
On the way to Rodeo village

Inspecting gardens in Rodeo
Marlon teaching us what they are helping get started

Campeon
Ferocious.

The Hospitalito
We've fixed an old computer and have begun training the 4 nurses on using it.

Storm watching
One of our new favourite hobbies