Bureaucracy 3

Peace Corps requires us to complete a form (called the Volunteer Reporting Tool or VRT) three times a year to show what we have accomplished. All the data is entered into a spreadsheet and presumably makes up the bulk of what is presented to congress to determine Peace Corps funding. In spite of the wide differences across the program, Peace Corps volunteers in Kenya will complete the same form as volunteers in Guatemala or in Bulgaria. That means that the form is pretty generic and often ambiguous. There is no paper copy, and the form must be filled out in Excel (which is actually a bit of a challenge since most Windows machines here are crawling with viruses). I discovered that my form had some entries locked in by my Peace Corps supervisor. I was pretty surprised to learn that my village is in Voi, seeing as that is actually an hour and a half from where I live.

When all is said and done, they will be able to come up with statistics like "Volunteers in Kenya have developed critical thinking skills in 1328 students (ages 15-24) in 2009" or "Volunteers in Kenya have increased awareness about AIDS in 28746 people during 2009" (these numbers entirely made up and do not reflect the actual results of the survey). What does that even mean to increase awareness? I told my students what T-cells are. Did that raise awareness? Several of my students with critical thinking skills are at risk for being expelled because they are using this knowledge to question certain bits of authority. Is that what Peace Corps had in mind when they formulated that goal? Not all volunteers complete this survey, do they extrapolate in that case? How big is the margin of error on those numbers? I worked with a lot of people on agriculture and environment projects, but since those sectors don't exist here, Peace Corps is not interested in quantifying that data. Does that mean that I should stop working on those kinds of projects? They asked how many of my students scored C or above. That seems pretty irrelevant, since some schools have lots of students who already average Bs, while at other schools, students are used to an average score of 10%. Why don't they ask about improvement in scores or some other less arbitrary metric?

There was also a section where we wrote a few paragraphs talking about our challenges, lessons learned, accomplishments and anything else that we thought Peace Corps should know. I tried to paint a pretty clear picture, but I imagine the quantitative information will be reviewed much more intensively than the qualitative information. After filling out the report, I felt like I have been a big disappointment in terms of what Peace Corps wants us to do. I think that I've done some good work, no matter what any VRT wants to say.

In unrelated news, Jackie wrote a cool post on development which includes pictures from my school.