Kerri Carleton
Week 5 Reflection
1.
Week of July 3. Week 5 of 6
2.
I would describe this week as the climax of my
internship, as it was definitely a week full of ups and downs and turning
points. This was the second to last week of the trip, so on Monday, we all
expected it to stay within the routine of a typical teaching and surveying day.
In the morning, all of the interns hop into the same van with the same driver
and make the same first stop, a building called Naluwoli Hall to pick up our
translators and drop off the interns who aren’t teaching in the morning. On
Monday, however, my roommate Sydney’s and my translator (husband and wife) did
not show up to Naluwoli Hall. My initial reaction was frustration, because my
translator, Ronald, has lied to me before to get out of work. Dorothy had been
extremely suspicious of him for having other jobs, and a requirement for this
position through ISU-UP was to be completely free and available from 8 AM to 7
PM and weekends for the interns, because we have to get a lot done in just a
short 6 weeks. I set my goal to get 100 interviews done before I depart, and on
Monday was feeling very behind at 50 surveys with only 2 weeks to go. Panic
started to set in when I noticed a few of the interns, my supervisor, and
Dorothy standing in a circle discussing something serious outside of the school
before my class. I asked Sydney what was going on, and she informed me that
Ronald would not let his wife go to work today because at the end of the
previous week, Dorothy had warned Ronald to shape up and that he could learn
from his wife. In this culture, it can be very dangerous for a husband to feel
inferior to his wife. While there is a lot more to this story that I am not comfortable
sharing publicly, I can share that Ronald was fired and Ruth will keep her job
with ISU-UP. This left me without a translator and feeling very uncomfortable
and sad about everything that had happened. On Monday after teaching, Mike, my
supervisor, took me to survey and translated for me, and I got about 5 done. I
was really worried because I needed to get at least 50 more surveys done before
the next Tuesday. On Tuesday, I worked with my bi-national team project to
attempt setting up a sprinkler irrigation system in the Namasagali school
gardens. When we got there, our equipment wasn’t, and so the first hour was
spent manually irrigating crops until our hose, sprinkler head, and pump
arrived. When the equipment arrived, we looked at the system as a whole and
tried to figure out what crops would be the most efficient to set up with it.
We considered plant spacing and how much water each crop needed for this. Just
when we had decided on the sweet potato beds for our sprinkler system, my ride
approached and I had to go survey with my new translator, Shafi. Shafi is a
student leader and former service learner for the Makerere students.
Unfortunately, Shafi and I only two interviews done because transportation took
up most of our half day and we had to get acquainted with my questions and the
type of answers I was looking for. It ended on a good note, though, with a
soccer game against one of the primary schools we taught at! Wednesday was
better, because we started the day with building a fence with the college (high
school) students around the borehole. It was a lot of fun to interact with students
in the adolescent age, and even more so to work with them as equals. The rest
of the week went very well, with Shafi and I cruising through surveys and
spending time with my primary school students at Naluwoli. Shafi and I ended
the week with 91 surveys, and our minimum goal is 100!
3.
a.
My transition with my new translator went very
smoothly, and we really picked up the pace on our interviews and I was able to
up my average survey per day significantly.
b.
I think at this point in my internship, I needed
to be less emotionally involved in the people I worked with. The Ronald
situation really placed a dark mark on the experience as a whole and I feel as
though that could have been prevented.
c.
While caring too much can be a problem
professionally when it comes to colleagues, I definitely think that my passion
for the work and data collecting really was what got me through the week and
was the reason I did not fall behind when it would have been really easy to,
considering the circumstances.
d.
I really focused on the present moment this
week, when it really would have helped to keep big picture perspectives in
mind. So I think considering all perspectives is something that would make the
internship more successful than it already is.
e.
To affect change in myself in terms of the
internship, I really needed to take a step outside myself and separate my
emotional self from my professional self and realize that some things I can’t
change no matter how much I would like them to.
