As promised

Another quick post to tell you what's been happening here lately.

Recently, I've been working on trying to increase the efficiency here at CREDIT. Sometimes the guys are a little lazy with the work, so part of my efforts are directed at trying to manage without micromanaging. It's tough to keep my Kiva Coordinator focused when his boss is out visiting sub-branches. He'd rather chat on Skype or read newspapers. I can't really blame him though. His job primarily consists of translating page after page of borrower profiles and updates from the field. Eventually the stories start to look the same, and it just becomes drone work.

I think that's one of the most difficult aspects of the whole Kiva-MFI relationship. Kiva needs talented bilinguals to work with them on getting information about borrowers on the website. By nature, those who are very good at other languages tend to be more curious and creative than those who don't make the extra effort needed to learn a very different language. However, the work that we want them to do is outright boring, and becomes nothing more than an endless grind of translating handwritten documents and inputting the information into the website. No wonder the turnover rate for Kiva coordinators can be so high.

Anyways, I've been focusing on figuring out ways to take the load off of the coordinator so he/she can focus on other work. I had a couple of ideas, but none seem to be perfect, and one was rejected by the crew at Kiva headquarters.

• let the kiva coordinator just translate forms word for word, and have native english speaking volunteers in America create well-written profiles out of them. In web 2.0 speak, crowdsource the creation of the profiles and journal updates from the basic info. This would prevent burnout because a lot of effort goes into trying to craft grammatically correct sentences.
  
• Use various programs to reduce the amount of useless, repetitive work that is required to upload a user profile or journal update
• For increasing the journaling rate of the field officers -- create a program that will automatically collect the comments generated in response to each post that was created from a field officer's journal update information, and send it as a printout (because of lack of internet) to the sub branches. This means that field officers see other field officer's posts and resulting comments, which would hopefully generate some competition and drive people to get more and better information. It's pretty fun to read comments that people write in response to your stuff...
• other random ideas that are still brewing

I also figured out a process where my coordinator and I can create about 8 journal updates per hour without getting completely burned out. It just involves being clever with keyboard shortcuts and making him do the minimum amount of translation work as possible. Using that method we've done about 55 journals in 3 days, with plenty of time for other work.

I've been trying to plan a visit to the field, but it's a bit difficult to coordinate, but I'm being very pushy, and have scheduled two visits to nearby areas next week. Hopefully we can go farther afield the week after that. Angkor Wat, anyone?

I think I had the most delicious meal I've eaten here for lunch today. I made a video, sorry for the shakiness. Just believe me when I say it was incredibly satisfying, and that the onions in the stew were heavenly.



And with that, it's time for a weekend! My plans? Get a bicycle, soak my clothes in insect repellent, buy some socks, and study study study.

(I forgot to mention that we were blessed with the presence of Alex, a member of the Kiva board and an absolute riot. He reminds me of some 70s rocker, but with a razor sharp wit. Hanging out with him means laughing every 30 seconds or so)