Development as Distraction: You keep using these phrases but does everyone else know what they mean?

At the blog wronging rights, the most recent post has a list of terms that are drawn from science by the general public and usually mis-applied. At the end of the post, the questions was asked: Are there words that you use in your professional lives that laypeople frequently misunderstand? 

Simple answer: Yes 

My mum (who is a translator) sent me the below table earlier this year and which is very amusing. However it worries me that as a native English speaker I use phrases which have a meaning that is acknowledged to be different back in the UK (noone wants to get "interesting" written on their homework by the teacher). How much of what I write (which genuinely does draw from the phrases below) is misunderstood by the 12 Asian countries and 5 European countries that I communicate with every week?

My personal favourite, as an English man, is to assume the blame: I'm sure it's my fault... However, I find myself probably using: I would suggest most commonly in my day-to-day work. Perhaps I should be more direct?

Scanning the internet shows that this table was circulated online at the same time that I received it in my inbox and shared it jokingly with my team in the UK. However, there is no mentioned author or original source.

Planning a Wedding: Closing Statement

I live and work in the world of Expat Aid Workers, a well-documented group of people who believe they possess a greater sense of world-awareness and understanding. And over the past twelve months that have been dominated by wedding planning, I have had to repeatedly face friends/colleagues/people who superiorly declared: I will never get married, I’m not that kind of person etc.

There is a statement that I wish to openly make, which in my conflict-averse nature I always avoided replying with before:

Getting married is not a lifestyle choice.

For those who haven’t done it, don’t write it off until you have tried it.  A person chooses to make a commitment with another person for whatever reasons are specific to their relationship. Indeed in my work I have to try and address the negative examples (note my world-awareness!), but it is never, or very rarely, a simple, binary decision.

Yes, society has created an institution (legally and/or religiously) so that people can make that commitment and for me, to be members of a society, shared and common experiences are essential. Living and working abroad, I believe that is something very important. But because we married people share the same institution, it does not mean we share the same marriage. To make a clumsy analogy: we all wear socks, but we all have very different feet.

So lets not over complicate the story. It is not that you aren’t the marrying type; it is that you have not met someone who has made you reflect on the possibility of going through with it. Or you don’t have the imagination to conceive of a marriage in which you are able to do your own thing. Or simply, you are not the type to meet someone and make a commitment that involves you compromising on whatever you think your life is about. 

Like putting on a pair of socks

Yangon Days: Lucky Numbers

In Myanmar, nat (spirits) are apparently keenly believed in and followed. Astrologers play a key role in life-planning (and politics too apparently, as one of the rumors as to the placing of the new capital Nay Pyi Taw is attributed to them) and numbers have great significance. The other day my colleague received a very long phone call in which apparently her father explained to her that the 15^th was going to be a full moon, and that the combination of number plus moon meant that it would rain a lot. I felt that this was cheating somewhat as during the monsoon in Yangon, claiming that it is going to rain significantly is a fix.

Apparently, the number 9 is ‘auspicious’ which has a mystic significance and literally means “to seek protection from the Gods”.

It seems my birthday is not an auspicious one, as I am not able to manipulate any of the figures in to the value of 9: 1 + 9 + 1 + 9 + 8 + 2 = 30

I hope this doesn’t mean that I will suffer bad luck in my time here. My wife is much better off though: 2 + 3 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 9 + 8 + 2 = 27

She has a multiple of 9, so she just needs to find an event that corresponds to the number 3 (e.g. she likes to eat chocolate bars in multiples of 3, or she brushes her hair 3 times a day) and she is sorted.

In the Burmese New Year, I read the astrologer’s predictions for the coming Burmese Year 2054. I got “things have been a little slow for a while and you must work harder in the coming year to inject a bit of joy and vitality into your social life”. That was very good, considering that I had just arrived in a new country and didn’t know anybody, and spent most of time at home designing curtains, filling photo albums, and putting up picture frames. My wife’s was a lot more worrying though: “You personal relationship will be rosy up until July but decidedly hazy afterwards. Things rarely work out as we expect and romances, like milk, can turn sour overnight.” Our wedding day was on July 28^th.

Give me a 9

Pause and Rewind: I'm Back

In August, I had another guest-blog put on “Stuff Expat Aidworkers Like”. It was completely unexpected, though I did know that I was in the queue (the editors of the blog seem to have no problem in posting a majority of their own work). I only found out thanks to one of the Australians that I semi-knew in Dhaka. The initial sense of achievement (I think that I’m the few guest bloggers to have more than one post on the site) was quickly outweighed by the disappointment that blogging is something that I had stopped doing.

For a long time I could not access maximobo.com in Myanmar. I assumed there were always methods by which to get around this, though the largest was non-technical: the sense of paranoia that can very easily develop in the country.

Did this used to be the most commonly viewed webpage in Myanmar?

In order to start posting what I needed was:

1. a visa for the country
2. a reduced sense of paranoia living in Yangon
3. to have got some time back after having finished my wedding planning
4. an ability to connect with blogger.com

The first three finally happened over the summer, and then in the past fortnight access to yahoo.com, blogger.com, and a whole range of other websites is permitted. So I'm back, and with that will start a new series on life in Myanmar: Yangon Days

I've not worked out of the full scope: chiefly it will be an exercise in trying to get past the polarised and repetitive debates, as Myanmar is a country in which 60 million people live and they have their own lives which seem to go largely ignored. So for now I will write about living and working in Yangon and travelling around the rest of the country. My theory after being here for six months is that the government there is sufficiently tolerant and disorganized that no one will really notice.

Welcome to Myanmar

Development as Distraction: Children’s needs must remain a priority

Again, I got my advocacy hat on and wrote another blog for my organisation based on my deployment to the 2011 flooding in Pakistan.

I have just got back from the opening ceremony of the child friendly spaces thatPlan has set-up in Thatta District in the flood-affected Sindh province in Pakistan. Families who had to leave their homes in the neighbouring district of Badin were evacuated here by the local government.

Around 250 children were playing games outside in different groups according to their age. The noise was what you would expect in a playground: shouting and laughing followed by a loud applause when someone won. Except that we were in an Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDP) camp, not a normal playground. I started to get carried away when an impromptu cricket match was set up by some teenage boys and joined in. It was all going fine, and I was even using my basic cricketing Urdu language skills, learnt from spending too much time watching the sport on television, until I dropped a catch.

The day job is tough right now, developing projects with the response team and trying to raise funds so that we can provide an integrated response to all the IDPs we've registered. Badin district alone has one million people affected. It is no secret that funding for this emergency has been low so far. News reports have cited various reasons from donor fatigue to the attention on the Horn of Africa famine and 'bad brand’ issue faced by Pakistan. Out of USD 357 million funding target set by the UN for flood response, only about USD 9 million had been raised until last week.

When funding is as low as 3% of what is required, it is the activities that target vulnerable groups that usually suffer. For instance, the activities centred around children often become the first ones to be excluded and it is sometimes hard to get funding for projects dedicated to issues such as child protection. Don't get me wrong; shelter, health and hygiene, fresh water and basic living essentials are all essential life saving responses and Plan have prioritised them too. But children are the heart of everything we do and remain our main priority. A normal child-focused response in Pakistan will require substantial external support as children make up over 30% of the 5 million plus flood-affected population.

Children are commonly one of the most vulnerable groups in an emergency and the kind of children-oriented support we provide makes perfect sense. The child friendly spaces that were officially opened by Plan in Thatta are not costly: 60 kids, inside a very large tent, with a toy box, and two trained staff who will take the time to listen to them. It is a chance for the children to be themselves, in a safe environment away from the situation outside the tent.

Funding is scarce for Pakistan floods, but what we have is coordinated response to make the best use of limited resources. Let us ensure that the needs of children and vulnerable groups remain in focus.

Plan / Shahnawaz Khan