My work lately

The past two weeks at work have been exciting and frustrating. My survey project moved forward to the translation stage. For anyone who knows anything about research, you know that writing a survey means agonizing over every word choice so as to be as unbiased and understandable as humanly possible. So after writing and revising and revising again my 2 surveys for a month, I passed them off to be translated into a language with far less precise wording than English and that I can't read. Talk about a lesson in losing control. I absolutely trust my Khmer coworker doing the translation, but this still was a moment of me saying over and over again in my head "don't freak out Nicole, it will probably work out." And honestly, that's somewhat of the Cambodian way of doing work. Go with the flow. Don't stress. Definitely the opposite of an American work environment! In the end, we went through the larger survey with the entire staff, improving the translation and getting their input. I felt really good that there seemed to be some ownership of the project within the team. People were realizing what good things could come from the information we were gathering. Tomorrow, my coworker and I will go through the translation on the shorter survey. Then, both surveys will be back translated into English so I can verify no major changes were made. The hope is to be finished with translation by the end of next week.

The other major move forward on my work project has to do with data collection. In yet another meeting all of the staff discussed various ways we could administer the surveys. But, we knew that was going to be a lot of work and very time consuming. In the end, we went with an option I hadn't even considered, hiring people to collect the data. I never expected them to spend money on my project! Now Peace Bridges is investing almost $1500 is a project I'm leading- an inexperienced, just out of college volunteer. Craziness. I feel pretty empowered by their faith in me. Best of all, all the data should be collected by mid-March, leaving plenty of time for data entry and analysis.

So my main work project is moving along nicely, even though it doesn't really consume all of time. I've picked up another project- this time doing the analysis on a qualitative project. The data was gathered in focus groups last month. The purpose of this project is for me to work side by side my Khmer coworker as he does the analysis in Khmer and I do it in English. Its a good capacity building opportunity for both of us. Plus, then I can put on my resume that I did both quantitative and qualitative work in a cross cultural setting. This project probably won't get going till March though, because I have to wait on translation. (did I mention I'm already looking forward to being back in an English speaking country? I love Cambodia, but languages barriers suck)

I also am possibly starting another side volunteer thing- hanging out in the English language lab at a big university here. So perhaps one afternoon a week I will chill out and people will come talk to me to practice their English. I have a meeting about this this afternoon so we'll see where it goes.

Side note:

Today I took a motodupe (motorbike taxi per say) with the sweetest driver. He practices English every Sunday with an American. We chatted all the way to the office.His earnestness to learn English was endearing. He said he wanted to learn because English is the language of power. So true. Until I got here, I didn't imagine how much power I have because my first language is English. I love meeting kind strangers!