What am I doing?

Sometimes I have a sense of conviction and direction regarding work. This is not one of those times! Instead I feel uneasy that I don’t have everything mapped out. I’ve been telling myself that it’s natural; it’s the start of the programme. I’ve been telling myself I’m new to the context; it’ll take time before I have a sound understanding and I shouldn’t expect to know with certainty where the gaps are yet. I even sit in meetings and reflect that I seem to be holding my own and making contributions that others regard as valuable.

But still I’m uneasy. The way ahead just seems so less clear cut than elsewhere I’ve worked.

For instance, in Rwanda there were no organisations working with street children in the east. We went into the community and found a large group of children who’d been living on the street, overlooked by everyone, some for as long as 10 years. Sleeping on verandas, under market stalls, in the gaps between buildings. Surviving largely by stealing and inhaling substances to ease the hardship. No one had acted. No one was proposing to. The decision for us to set up a programme was clear cut. Similarly, in Iraq there was a dearth of child protection organisations responding to the humanitarian crisis. There was no risk of duplication because there weren’t enough actors. It was clear where the gaps were – it was the entirety of Southern Iraq. The only constraints were funding and security.

12-18 months ago the same could have been said of Pader. Barely anyone was operating here. It was off limits, inaccessible due to the acute insecurity and lack of infrastructure to support the humanitarian community. And yet it had been the worst affected by the LRA conflict.

But over the course of the last 9 months organisations have started flooding in. All far larger than us and with more resources at their disposal so able to hit the ground running. There remain gaps but there are a lot of organisations doing a little in a lot of places so these gaps are less clear cut and discrete. And numerous agencies say they are working in this camp and that camp, but it’s unclear what they actually do there.

So I’m confronted by two challenges. I’m finding it hard to identify these gaps, and I’m worrying that the gaps will disappear before I have completed the protracted registration process and secured institutional funding.