Sleeping queen of Benin
It's me.
I am totally jet-lagged. It is terrible per se…but it is even more terrible when you try to read documents full of tables with suspicious numbers and funky names such as Beroubouay, Djassin-Zoume, Mounon Koussou…
So, here I am, sitting in the office, checking the clock every 10 minutes and thinking, ‘pls, pls, tell me that it is already 5.45pm’..The timetable of this office is worse than the jet lag. I have to wake up at 7.20am. Let me write this again to build self-esteem…7.20AM. After a Harvard-year waking up at 9.30am I am in shock. I hate working. ‘Why not doing a PhD?’ I fantasize. And don’t miss that…I have a 1-hour lunch break. This is slavery.
I am overwhelmed with documentation. Debordee, qu’on dit in French. I don’t trust a single line I am reading. The French language in those documents is so rococo that I bet nobody but me has ever read these evaluation reports.
“La recherche de solution au probleme de la scolarisation des filles ou au probleme de l’ecole tout court passe obligatoirement par la realisation de conditions favorables a cet epanouissement socio-economique qui constitue la terre nourriciere dans laquelle l’education pourra enfoncer profondement ses racines”. Amen
I believe my Empirical Methods classes have turned me into the biggest critic of any observational, full of bar-graphs kind of document. I am going to send these lines to my prof Levy, el Sr. Empirical Methods, he will be proud of me. I have a meeting with the Education Program Officer in some days and sincerely I feel like telling him “ Mr. G., I believe you are wasting money. I have no idea how to proceed better, but these interventions are not cost-effective’. The thing is what to do when you have so many factors, variables, actors, problems, weaknesses, cultural barriers, economic ones, misery, illiteracy!?! WHAT to do?! At this point Haussman’s ‘binding constraints’* approach does not help. The mess is so large that it feels like the only option is to proceed with a tavula rasa approach. This sounds like Iraqi-styled development.
*Find the most binding constraint to economic growth, remove it, and proceed orderly removing other constraints.
I am totally jet-lagged. It is terrible per se…but it is even more terrible when you try to read documents full of tables with suspicious numbers and funky names such as Beroubouay, Djassin-Zoume, Mounon Koussou…
So, here I am, sitting in the office, checking the clock every 10 minutes and thinking, ‘pls, pls, tell me that it is already 5.45pm’..The timetable of this office is worse than the jet lag. I have to wake up at 7.20am. Let me write this again to build self-esteem…7.20AM. After a Harvard-year waking up at 9.30am I am in shock. I hate working. ‘Why not doing a PhD?’ I fantasize. And don’t miss that…I have a 1-hour lunch break. This is slavery.
I am overwhelmed with documentation. Debordee, qu’on dit in French. I don’t trust a single line I am reading. The French language in those documents is so rococo that I bet nobody but me has ever read these evaluation reports.
“La recherche de solution au probleme de la scolarisation des filles ou au probleme de l’ecole tout court passe obligatoirement par la realisation de conditions favorables a cet epanouissement socio-economique qui constitue la terre nourriciere dans laquelle l’education pourra enfoncer profondement ses racines”. Amen
I believe my Empirical Methods classes have turned me into the biggest critic of any observational, full of bar-graphs kind of document. I am going to send these lines to my prof Levy, el Sr. Empirical Methods, he will be proud of me. I have a meeting with the Education Program Officer in some days and sincerely I feel like telling him “ Mr. G., I believe you are wasting money. I have no idea how to proceed better, but these interventions are not cost-effective’. The thing is what to do when you have so many factors, variables, actors, problems, weaknesses, cultural barriers, economic ones, misery, illiteracy!?! WHAT to do?! At this point Haussman’s ‘binding constraints’* approach does not help. The mess is so large that it feels like the only option is to proceed with a tavula rasa approach. This sounds like Iraqi-styled development.
*Find the most binding constraint to economic growth, remove it, and proceed orderly removing other constraints.
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