As a bit of follow-on from that last post, some internal introspection about a question that's been affecting me a lot: "Am I doing anything useful here?" Sure, I'm busy all day. I write emails, I debug computers, I go to these meetings in the field, I tell people to bring this or that here or there, and I occasionally run some queries in the database. But am I doing anything useful? Put another way, is all of this actually increasing the speed at which some kid is going to get the vaccine that'll save her life? Is the work I'm doing worth the extra hassle caused by having this guy around who can't speak the local language and thus is constantly tying up others with his requests?
I know it's being helpful for me. I'm definitely gaining an appreciation for the comforts of civilization and a bit more tolerance for discomfort/boredom. There's also some minor fringe learnings about vaccines, Hindi, SQL, database configuration, and other technical topics. Plus, there's the broader experience of seeing just what it means to be in a village and how the vast majority of the world makes their daily life. It's pretty sobering. You hear the statistic about people living on $2 per day, and in fact, that is what we pay my data entry techs. It's another thing to see what $2 per day and true subsistence farming mean. I take a lot of comfort in the fact that I'm now more in touch with "real India" than my relatives who have spent their whole lives in city luxury.
The trouble is, I'm working on a huge problem, and I'm working on it for two months. The ability to make an impact on something as big as Indian rural poverty is epsilon at best. Moreover, there's that language barrier, which means that anytime I want to meet with someone, I have to haul along an interpreter. I can handle Hindi for "I want some tea", "Has the newspaper come yet?", "Turn left there", and "You're doing a good job." Understanding a complete description of how someone collects data in her village is a bit outside my capacity. (We won't get into the fact that some of the people here don't even use Hindi, but instead use the vaguely related dialect of Marwari.)
On the plus side, I bring a couple things. First is experience with planning, project management, and higher-order thinking. I'm used to having to grasp the big picture quickly, and so my daily actions are informed by something beyond the task at hand. Second, I can cause things to happen. If one of my staff asks for something that costs Rs 3000, he gets hassle/resistance, and it'll take one or more weeks. If I ask for it, it happens ASAP. If it does not happen ASAP, the person concerned is reminded that I have the source of his salary on speed-dial, which generally produces rapid compliance. Furthermore, the Indian culture of semi-slavish respect for "superiors" in class (more on that in a future entry) means that my simple presence in any gathering causes more attention. Basically, I am the local agent of PS Reddy and Ashok Agarwal and have defined my role as doing the same shouting-at-people that they would do.
Net result? Project probably gets up and running a bit faster than otherwise, maybe a month or two earlier. Data will have slightly better quality, although I don't know how well I can put in place measures to prevent them from degrading once I'm gone. How many lives is that really going to change? One? Ten? A hundred? I have no clue, and have to take it on faith that I'm doing something other than low-budget tourism.
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Problems like this are too big to be severely impacted in a day, a month, a year. Is that a reason to not try ? I do not think so. All of us should try to make a difference and that is what you are doing. There is a saying that mighty oaks grow from little acorns. So do what you can to make a difference and wait for the trees to grow years from now. Keep plugging away. Real progress is always hard and takes time.
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