Working 9 to 5...
- Julien
- 12 jun 2015
- 4 minuten om te lezen
More interesting than traffic is perhaps hearing something about the office / our job. As said, the CDRN office is virtually next to the guesthouse and it consists of three big buildings. One is the building CDRN uses and where all the office spaces are, another is rented to some smaller organizations as a means of income generating and a third (a large circular room) is used as meeting room / lunch room / extra desk space for interns room / church on Sunday / whoever rents this place can use it room. As with most properties here, a high wall and gate mark the boundaries.

Letās pretend you were to join us to the office. Upon arrival you ring the bell and someone comes and open the door. This will be Julius or Anatori, both friendly guys who we have a little chat with every morning and afternoon. They guard the place, keep the garden neat etc. In their little āguard roomā thereās a book where everyone arriving has to sign in and out. We walk to the office building and pass Loy () at the reception. To our right is the door to the office of the big boss, Mr. Joseph Ssuuna, the āEDā (executive director). We turn left and first pass the ICT/printing room, where Cox (the driver), Brian (the IT guy) and Rebecca (Programme Assistant) work. If we go straight a little further we enter the Resource Center, a small library with literature on a wide range of literature on civil society, Uganda, various organizations and much more. Coney (Programme Assistant) works in here and our desks are in this little library as well. We turn around, leave āourā room and go left, passing first the office of our supervisor in Uganda, Rashid (Senior Programme Officer), and then the office of Dennis (Finance) and Margaret (Financial Assistant). The corridor ends in the biggest room, where another team of Programme Assistants work away (Fred, Joseph, Maurine, Deborah, Dorcas). Each of these people works on their own project, as well as doing some of the general work. Theyāre all very friendly and welcoming and I begin to feel more and more part of the team. Especially Rebecca has proved to be a friend also outside of office, she has taken us on a tour through Makerere University (she studied there) and on some other sightseeing trips during free days. Her and Coney went to the Kasubi Tombs and Uganda Museum with us as well.

Although our working times are a little bit flexible, weāre generally expected to be in the office between 8.30 and 9.00. Work in the morning takes from start to about 13.00 when lunch is ready. CDRN, by means of a lovely cook whose name I have forgotten, provides daily lunch for all staff members. I quote the CDRN policy book: āThis is in a bid to enhance productivity by ensuring that everyone conveniently gets a meal during the lunch breakā. Needless to say, lunch is something we look forward to! The food is always a simple, traditional meal, but still a little different every day. After lunch break, which takes an hour, work continues till people go home. For us that is around 17.00 every day, but sometimes people stay longer.
Lunch yesterday (the 11th): rice, matoke, sweet potato, beans and some cooked green leaf veggie.

Lunch is also the time when most interesting conversations happen. Weāve had discussions about corruption in Uganda, leadership and the role of women/men and marriage (āI would never vote for an unmarried leaderā āIf you canāt convince one woman, how can you convince a nation?!ā āthey were shocked when I said we have an unmarried prime minister, surely there was a reason for why he hasnāt marriedā¦, funny, because in the Netherlands youāre probably better off not having a family when you get into politics), condom usage, particularly among Catholics (ātest me! Put a condom in front of me, give me 500.000 shilling and youāll find out!ā), Indians in Uganda and their apparent misbehavior (āwe have no problems with anyone, but the Indians⦠blegh!ā), corruption in FIFA, European politics, traditional foods and how to prepare them, bullying in school (Iāve never heard people laugh so much about how they were hanged upside down and got their food stolen!), marriage and divorce and many other topics. Often Anna and I simply try and follow the arguments as people talk over each other, once in a while throwing in some Sweden, the Netherlands or Europe.

The work weāve done so far has mainly been done in our brain. We arrived with⦠letās say limited preparation in terms of our research. Of course, we had handed in a proposal late March, but a lot happened since March and not so much happened with our research. We spent the first week (we started Tuesday the 26th, we were off getting lost into Kampala on Monday trying to buy a phone/SIM/internet) getting to know the people at CDRN, the projects they are working on and reading bits and pieces about the civil society context in Uganda, as well as beginning to rework our proposals. We challenged each other to explain what we were doing, why our research mattered, what we expected to find, how we were going to collect data etc. Many conversations, brainstorms and days later we finished our research proposals last week and weāve begun to select organizations to work with / interview. If all goes well we will try and schedule some interviews over the next week(s) and have all our data collected well within the ten weeks weāre here. Hopefully also a large part of our data analysis can happen before we return home in August.

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