How do you deal with being a young professional in a country where the security situation is not the same as at home, where the food is different? With the pressure of ‘having to perform’: carrying out the activities as defined in your personal development plan. However, your new work environment requires things like conducting focus group discussions with tribal communities who do not talk English, or there are no resources for the department you are supposed to be running.
Published on: 18/07/2012
How do you deal with being a young professional in a country where the security situation is not the same as at home? where the food is different? With the pressure of ‘having to perform’: carry out the activities as defined in your personal development plan. But where your new work environment requires things like conducting focus group discussions with communities who do not talk your language, or there are no resources for the activitities you are supposed to implement.
During the second day of the feedback & evaluation workshop, the four young professionals, currently participating in the IRC Southern Youth Zone programme all shared the challenges they had faced over the past period.
Challenges
Basilia Nanbigne from Ghana struggled the first months at the host organisation in Uganda. She felt that her potential could not be exploited to a satisfactory level. However, with time, perseverance, and a positive attitude she did manage to achieve what she achieved, managing a ‘good governance project’ and being able to improve on her communication skills.
Mahidul Islam from Bangladesh spent three of the nine months in Nepal in the district of Surkhet, where he worked on an assessment of the existing monitoring systems for water and sanitation. His friendship with the owner of the hostel where he was staying turned out to be very helpful in finding his way around in the city, and adapt to Nepali culture.
When Andres Gil came to Honduras he was expecting that it was going to be the same as in Guatemala. He found out, however, that the culture of the Hondurans was quite different. ‘Hondurans are very straight forward.’ Throughout time, Andres started to appreciate the straightforward nature and adopted the attitude himself. He thinks he will continue being stratightforward when back in Guatemala. ‘It helps in getting things done’.
Simon Peter Sekuma faced several challenges. One of them was the lack of resources for carrying out the communication tasks that had been assigned to him. He decided to introduce low cost information products, he created a blog, he created a website and started sharing information among the network members of CONIWAS, the organisation he worked for, using social media. This sharing of information created a snowball effect. Network members increasingly started to share their information through the different platforms.
Another challenge for Simon Peter was the work in the communities. First of all there was the language barrier, but there are also many rules in how to approach the community leaders. ‘There are some rules, like ‘don’t cross your legs’, and then you end up that you don’t know how to sit anymore.’ What helped Simon Peter was the use of interpreters and recording of the focus group discussions for translation in the office.
Survival tips
So what can we learn from all of the above? How can a young professional abroad survive? Implicitly and explictly the four young professionals gave the following tips
The stories shared during this second day of the feedback and evaluation workshop, made the young professionals realise that there were many similarities in the challenges they faced. The period abroad has, however, all made them more and more confident to deal with these challenges.
For more updates and lessons from the feedback and evaluation workshop, please visit these pages over the coming days.
