Building Work from Scratch

For many Americans, one of the absolute most challenging things about living abroad is the loss of easy access to our favorite foods. I cannot count the times that I sat at my apartment window in Shabran, Azerbaijan as a Peace Corps Volunteer and dreamed as hard as I could about what I would eat as soon as I got home. 

Out of this great need to substitute bacon-avocado-cheeseburgers and seared ahi tataki rolls for dishes borne of more local ingredients came the Peace Corps Volunteer recipe book. The lessons learned of adventurous bakers and chefs of years past had been carefully collected and bound into what was more of an instruction manual for maintaining the soul than anything else. I remember the moment when I realized that brown sugar, an ingredient found only in one store on this one corner of a street in the capital, could be made from combining sugar and honey, two ingredients that could be found in almost any village bazaar. It was like being hit in the face with the very real possibility of baking chocolate chip cookies, in my own home and without having to spend ¼ of my monthly stipend on transportation and over-inflated expat prices. It was a day filled with the joy of knowing that the impossible reality of eating batches of cookies by myself had been dissipated with the help of a little know-how and innovation.

Why am I talking about ad hoc baking in a blog focused on detailing the experiences of working on conflict resolution? For those of you who have read John Paul Lederach’s The Moral Imagination, the answer might be obvious. For those of you who have not, it may help to know that Lederach uses the concept of wetting and sweetening yeast to grow bread dough to explain the effect he thinks a small, socially and peacefully conscious group of individuals can have on building and growing a movement.

Maybe you are still asking why I care about sugar and honey, then. My answer involves the following explanation: I have spent the last two weeks trying to flesh out what my role at the Red Crescent should be. I do not have clear tasks or objectives to meet on a daily basis, and staff oversight of my work is very limited. Much of this relates to the sheer volume of responsibility that weighs on staff here and some of it relates to my colleague and I being the first foreign interns at the organization in its history. These factors, combined with only having worked a total of 8 business days thus far, have led me to an impasse of sorts. I find myself wondering what it is that I am going to do every day from morning until it’s time to pack up our bags and board the shuttle home.

What am I going to do for work when there is no history of hosting summer interns, access to information is limited, and there was no predetermined scope of work to lay the foundations for the summer? How can I possibly bake chocolate cookies without brown sugar (are you starting to see the connection)? Intrinsically, I know the answer is rooted in how willing I am to innovate and locate the connections between how I perceive I can be useful and what the organization needs but may not explicitly ask for. If what I want is work, then what I need to find are disparate components that on their own appear unrelated, but together can create the basis for a meaningful project. I think the degree to which I feel accomplished at the end of these 10 weeks will be entirely dependent on the creativity I employ to carve out a niche for myself.

So, here is to mixing and matching strange ingredients! And cheers to the idea of building purpose out of creative experiments!

The Summer Field Program is supported and organized by the Georgetown Conflict Resolution Program. Please visit our website at http://conflictresolution.georgetown.edu.