In a meeting...

SHAPC, the NGO for which I work for here in Vietnam, is involved in all sorts of HIV/AIDS awareness building projects. I am currently working on a project which would bring some 300 trained Peer Educators to 3 different universities. Our target group is first year students, and we plan on implementing our project this coming November.

Right now I'm sitting in a meeting, and there is a lively discussion concerning the layout of our project proposal. This proposal is what will get us funding from PACT International, for the total of $100,000 USD. I have so many ideas to help this project move along. I even created an a schema of how I think the proposal should be laid out (based on the criticisms of their last proposal from PACT). I know what their problems are, how to get past this meeting, and to get some actual progress done in defining their strategies, goals, and necessary actions and activities in a comprehensible fashion.

I know all of this... but I can't say any of it, because I don't speak their language. The meeting is going on completely in Vietnamese, and I hardly know more than 'hello, my name is.' The PACT Proposal was written in English, and the meeting we had with PACT was held in both languages with good translators. Right now, however, sitting here in SHAPC's third floor office, I find myself feeling helpless and almost completely useless, despite the fact that I have many answers to their questions and frustrations.

I'm sure that they are discussing things which I might not have the answers to, but whenever I'm told what they are arguing, I get frustrated because it is usually the exact same solution which they were originally criticized by PACT for. It offers no improvements what so ever.

When I explained the amount of work necessary in creating a proper proposal to the one who can speak English, she sort of frowned and muttered 'that's a lot of work'. But that's what is necessary! I'm frustrated, because if I was the manager of this project, I would know exactly what needed to be done, and I would proceed by distributing the workload so that we could build a working proposal that had all of the requisite details to make a functional, logical document!

Okay, I know this is a rather boring blog entry, but damn it do I ever need to vent!