Blog Post 3: Reflections of an 'outsider' at the end of a very long IDRP Journey

There was a point in time where I was really questioning if I would be making it to the end of my IDRP this year but here I am wrapping up my final blog and thoughts whilst finalising my conference presentation.  

This year has been extremely challenging for me personally and academically.  The onset of Covid-19 brought with it the closure of university for face-to-face classes and my standing down from my job.  I had planned on taking all my classes face-to-face this year as I've found that it is better way to stay accountable - both to myself, my peers and to my professors, however, life had other plans and classes continued on (albeit virtually) full steam ahead.  The demands and stresses of this period took a toll on my IDRP project as I struggled with stress, focus and time management and I ended up opting to defer my enrolment until semester 2 due to these factors and the fact that a key WaterAid in Timor -Leste (WATL) staff member had to be recalled home to New Zealand, meaning gaining access to important documents was proving near impossible for me and my IDRP project.  

However, reflecting on this experience now (whilst still under lock down in Melbourne) has led me to do some deeper thinking that perhaps would not have come about if Covid-19 had not occurred.  Firstly, I think I've come to some important understandings about myself personally regarding my limits and boundaries.  I have always been driven and tend to dive into as many opportunities and tasks as possible - even through last semester I continued to pile on mentoring, extra volunteering and research work all whilst completing demanding university courses and searching for another job.  I believe this led me as close as I've ever come to burn out and this has had implications for how I intend to move forward in my development career.  I'm now learning how to say no and have realised that open communication channels with both my peers and superiors is the best way to mitigate any challenges that I'm facing which is something that I have failed miserably with in my IDRP project this year.  I think this and the concept of self-care resonates strongly in a career path such as international development which can be so emotionally taxing since your work directly impacts on the lives of others.  It's made me think back to a video clip about the Haiti earthquake disaster response that we watched as part of our shelter and settlement course where the first responders switch out with a new team every two weeks due to the intensity of their jobs: this didn't seem like a key learning at the time but it certainly is now, especially since I would like to work in the disaster field in some capacity in the future.

Secondly, the combination of my own inability to travel to Timor-Leste for this project and the recall of WATL expat staff (effectively shutting down the MHM program for the time being) has made me reflect further upon the need for the localisation of international development.  Engineers without Borders is a proponent of capacity building - the idea that every community has the capacity to solve their own problems if their strengths are utilised and built upon and I think recent world events have brought the issue of localisation to a critical juncture.  It simply isn't sustainable for a project to shut down if expats have to leave and at the end of the day, we as development practitioners need to accept that locals hold the most knowledge about their own situations, needs and preferences and the development community should be doing all that it can to aid the transfer of power and decision-making into the hands of local people and organisations.  In this respect, I can now understand how my research project has been a positive step in this direction.  In the beginning, I doubted how much I would be able to contribute to this project if I were unable to travel to Timor-Leste to understand the context, but I now realise that there is no way I would be able to get a grasp of such a complex place in the short amount of time I would have allocated for this IDRP.  Instead, a much more useful capacity building tool has been to share the MHM research and tools that I have compiled with local community organisations so that they may then build on this to develop their own context-specific solutions.  This has also led me to consider the needs that exist in my own community and start the examine closer the myriad of development issues here in Australia.  One positive that has come out Covid-19 is that it has allowed me to gain employment with the Red Cross in their migration support team working on the Victorian Covid-19 emergency response.  Since there was such a quick turn around in the development and scaling up of this program, I have also been in the unique position to help shape a disaster response program in my own local community and I am now considering more carefully where my development skills are best utilised.