Today was the first time the Dominican Republic felt anything like Sudan – encouraging me further to re-enter the blogosphere - I was rather desperately walking in circles looking for vegetables, longing for leaves full of more than beta-carotene (mangos are everywhere here…) and something more nutrient-rich than rice and beans. The main difference between this experience and that which it reminded me of, was that today I was standing in a four-storied, air-conditioned, Walmart-esque super-center called La Sirena in which I could buy just about anything I could conceivably need, except for spinach. In a way, this is somewhat representative of how I’m feeling about, and what living and working as a gringa within, the DR is all about: everything is so close, but just seems to miss the mark.
For all the hours studying theories of intervention-mapping, or processes for planning service delivery, it’s rather ironic that I’ve been tasked with creating deliverables that move against the spectrum preferred by “the public health agenda” by a program actually run by my school. I tried explaining this in Spanish and it made even less sense. Cual yo quiero decir es [my new favorite expression: “what I mean to say is…”] that I’ve been told to produce things that are unsubstantiated theoretically which basically goes against everything I’ve studied for the past year. More specifically, the organization I’m working for has asked me to design a health brochure without doing any of the background processes or development of logic models I’ve been trained to do. More on that later.
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