Changes and Challenges

 International development is a very volatile field. New organizations are constantly being started while others are unable to find the necessary funding to continue running and are closing. Even within an organization, people are always moving in and out, along with funding which can never really be predicted. Communication can be slow and misunderstandings are common. And these are only some of the challenges for people in the international development field. Overall, this is a very uncertain business.

This week Jeannette and I got a bit of a taste of what that is like. Yesterday morning we got our tickets to Ouagadougou. We will be flying out on September 9, having a layover in Paris, and landing in Burkina Faso on September 10 at 16:15 local time. This was pretty exciting news for us, as well as many of the other students in our class who also received their tickets yesterday.

Later in the day, we then received an email about the organization with which we were supposed to be working: AEAD. It turns out that they do not have the funding to get us out to visit the villages where we would be working with the farmers. For this reason, we are going to be working instead with l'Association Solidarite et Entraide Mutuelle au Sahel (SEMUS) which is also where Kevin will be working.

Jeannette and I will now be living in Yako instead of in Gourcy. These two towns are fairly similar in size and only about 30km apart so we will still be in the same region and dealing with similar environmental conditions. We will also have a different mandate. Because this is such a recent change, we are not yet sure what our mandate will be, but hopefully in the next couple of months we will be able to communicate with SEMUS about our work.

When you are getting excited about an opportunity and something changes, it's easy to be disappointed. I think both Jeannette and I are a bit uncertain and maybe a bit disappointed about our new placements. Nevertheless, I believe that any experience is only as good as you make it. Yes, it may take a week or two to become excited about my new placement organization, but I'll get there. Circumstances change and the way to make the best of these changes is to stay positive.