Graduation

If we’re calling the summer internship we did for FSD “FSD University”, then our intense past Wednesday must have been a sort of commencement ceremony.

Who we are: Seven future program coordinators, soon to be dispersed throughout the world, and three marketing interns coming in at least two days a week to haunt the fulltime wisdom behind FSD(Eric, Hailey and Alex).

What we’ve done this summer: The prospective program coordinators took on a variety of tasks designed to be useful to the organization and help us learn about our position. This included working on whatever projects turned up in the daily operation of FSD, plus country-specific research to learn more about where we were going – such as revamping local partner organization profiles and drafting a paper on local development issues to put on the website. Of course, a slight flaw in the system is that three of us are no longer going to the countries we’ve been researching -- but it's been a nice excuse to learn a lot about Ecuador and Peru. A final element of the summer was the periodic workshops our executive director Eric facilitated, each one with goodies and lots of program coordinator info and training.


This photo should evoke tight office space, malfunctioning computers, the smell of everyone's lunches and Alex's ipod, spinning Bright Eyes and Damien Rice anthems

This past Wednesday was the final workshop and about four hours straight of last minute information and final motivational talks. An old Program Coordinator came in to tell us everything is going to be okay, Alex gave us a passionate speech on group dynamics. Additional hours were spent in smaller groups revising and analyzing projects we’ve done -- and coming up with new ones. By the end of the day, it had felt like the longest nine hours ever while most of us also concluded that we hadn’t accomplished much at all.

The finality of the day was provoked by the imminent departure of Nicole (Ms. Mombasa, Kenya) and Anna (Ms. Udaipur, India), so we freed ourselves from a particularly oppressive office environment and hit the town. First, drinks on a street corner outside a little bar in North Beach, and later a family Italian dinner at the illustrious Tomaso's.


Robin (La Plata, Argentina), Anna. Ashley (Cochabamba, Bolivia)


Hailey (Program Director), Eric (Executive Director), Alex (Outreach Director)


In Tomaso's: Yvonne (Nicaragua), Alex, Nicole

This has turned out to be a pretty amazing internship, and I think meeting the other program coordinators has been a big part of it -- it’s hard to believe that it’s the first year they’re doing it this way, with a summer of communal training before we’re sent off into the field. It’s always bittersweet meeting pretty inspirational people just to say goodbye to them right away, but the little network we’ve established will could be really valuable in the coming year.

Introduction

I think it’s been official for three weeks now, or at least I’ve felt varying degrees of official-ness -- as a country change was proposed, accepted, finalized with the purchase of a flight, and then mentally committed to as much as possible by referring to it in casual conversation.

Someone called me on it at the beginning of the summer -- I had gotten so into the routine explanation of FSD (why does it require such patience to get beyond the acronym?), that it had started to sound rehearsed:

The Foundation for Sustainable Development is an organization in San Francisco that facilitates internships for college students and grads with local NGOs in Latin America, India and Africa, where they design their own work plan and projects in support of community initiatives for sustainable development. I will be the Program Coordinator, serving as the liaison between the interns, their host organizations and FSD in San Francisco.

Originally it was Puno, Peru, later, most likely Ambato, Ecuador. And finally, in a twist that rocked the office, I got moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia and the former Ms. Argentina was dispatched to come with me as a co-program coordinator (the Cochabamba program is the biggest in South America). I had been doing research on Peru and Ecuador, but most everything but the drastically reduced time before departure has excited me about the change. Now I’m just trying to finish up my Peru/Ecuador projects so that I can move on to learning more about Bolivia. Unfortunately, right now I’m limited to keywords like “Evo Morales” and “coca” and “Aymara”, but I have a seductive pile of books awaiting me. Just to add a few more keywords before I’m thrown in relatively ignorant anyway.

The Bolivian Program Director I’ll be working with, Mauricio, seems just right. He has a reputation in the office for being one of the most innovative and proactive of the in-country directors. And he chided me for not getting in contact with him sooner and asking all the questions that were piling up in my mind. That’s what I like to hear.