Oh, the Inefficiency of Not Being Efficient

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It is very difficult living in a world where instinct and intuition are not within your grasp, especially when you have to work in that world. I am still, after almost 5 full month in the CHRA, the green horn, which is unfortunate, because I love very much being good at what I do. Maybe it's a positive work habit, maybe it is a character flaw, but either way I love being good at what I do so much that I always strive to get over the learning curve and to very quickly start working off instinct. That has not been possible here. Though elements of my work have become instinctual, I am very rarely the person who knows how best to deal with a situation. In fact, I suspect that I'm the last person from my office anyone would want responding to their human rights violation.

When we needed a new filing system, something that would accommodate our legal cases, civil cases, human rights complaints files, fact finding missions, network organizations, funding partners, ect, they came to me. The task was handed to me, with a great sigh of relief, I might add, because I was the best person for the job. When it comes to organizing filing systems I can work on intuition, I can look at a pile of scattered documents and, without much thought, know how best to shuffle them together into a cabinet drawer. But when it comes to human rights training, human rights documentation, quick reaction to human rights situations, I can not act without thought. I am the one who hangs back the most: watching, waiting, and trying to decide, what, if anything, should be my role. I know, of course, that the people I work with have been doing this work for years, some of them decades, and so are experts in this field. I also know that they are all from the country, and so have the advantage of intuitively understanding the culture and the history as well. But, regardless of that, I still struggle knowing that I will probably not be able to work from instinct at all in the year that I am here. It is a frustrating place to be when you like so much to be very good at what you do.

I find this the most frustrating when I am working on the Licuan-Baay anti-mining campaign. I want so desperately to be part of the campaign. I am so dedicated to helping my friends and family in the community to fight this impending threat. But I don't know how. I research NGOs in Canada, I read government reports and civil society reports, I research Canadian mining companies, and I send information home to the United Church of Canada in every format I can think of, but I don't know if any of it is actually useful. I don't know if the work I am doing will, or can, make a difference in the lives of the people of Licuan-Baay, or in their campaign. I don't know if I have picked the right actions, or if i should be doing something else entirely different. The people I work with tell me that the work I am doing is good, that it is most important that I get information about the situation to Canada and that I continue to let the community know that I am in solidarity with them. But I continue to feel as if I am groping around in the dark. And so as a result I do the things I would do if I was involved in this sort of campaign at home, knowing that that isn't exactly what I should be doing, or what my coworkers would be doing in my situation, but praying it is close enough to the proper actions to still be helpful.

It is strange for someone like me, who is used to picking things up quickly and to providing good work efficiently to be unable to work on intuition. Often in my work here I feel like I did when I was learning how to drive: every new situation a dangerous, metal threat speeding towards me and every decision a panicked judgment call to control my own dangerous metal threat. I know I will not have the time to get as good at human rights work in the Philippines as my coworkers, and I know that I will always be working in new and different cultures, but I pray that I will eventually start to get the hang of this, so I can stop gripping the wheel so hard, and so I can be sure that I really am doing something to help the people who so graciously host and teach me in the places I work.

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