A Small Venting Session

Our team is getting very upset and antsy. We have been at the GV campus for over a week now. While we believe we were told that we'd be able to go onto the field to get our quality as soon as possible, we have been stuck in an office looking at data and papers that we should only look at upon returning to the states, where we will not be so close to our field.

It is one thing for an NGO to invite a group of graduate students from far away to work on evaluating their program's progress through annual reports, but it's another thing to have them ship themselves 8000 miles away to the actual work sites so they can look at the actual WORK and make recommendations on the actual field PROGRESS. We are the latter, but they treat us as the former, and it is clearly going to negatively affect our report at the end.

Other summer Capstone teams have been writing about the great amount of time they have been visiting their fields upon arrival, making them very very busy and probably inundated with information. Our group simply sits and waits. For them to finally REMEMBER us and say that it's okay for us to actually do our work now seems to be too cumbersome for them. It's not that we haven't tried; we have written notes and come to supervisors and asked everyone when we would be able to go out. With monsoon rains making our traveling time precious and fleeting, we should have been able to start as soon as the first rains let up.

They have told us to expect that each of us will get approximately 2 days in the field. 3 weeks on our project, 2 days in the field. I have no clue how they have been able to rationalize that such a small amount of time will give them a legitimate scaling report from us in the end. Perhaps it is enough time to get our findings, but according to my feelings on this whole matter, it's not.

We are, simply put, at the mercy of their whims and convenience.

And I am, simply put, put off by all of this stalling.