A new job

 

It has been a while since I've found the time to write in the blog. This is because I have started a full-time job with the American Red Cross. The photo above is looking down across the site of a reservoir we are about to build to feed down to the Krueng Raya area in the background.

I've been busy sorting out my personal situation here in terms of administration, trying to meet the staff and trying to understand my projects here.

I am the project manager for our water and sanitation work in about 40 villages. There are around 100 houses in each village so we are somewhere in the order of 4,000 houses which have been built by other Red Cross organizations. My team has responsibility for supplying septic tanks and water supplies for these houses. We are also providing health and hygiene training and very importantly we are providing capacity building and training for village communities to operate and maintain the facilities. We also are providing funding to IOM for a lot of houses so in addition to the houses above we oversee IOM's work with our money.

It is going to be fun. We have about 20 contractors working for us right now in villages spread over a drive of about 8 hours. We also have to work with the community, other aid organizations and the local government structures that exist.

My team is about 20 people at the moment and they all seem to be very nice and capable people. I am really looking forward to working with them more. I am also really looking forward to working with the communities and the operators of the systems we are building. Great fun.

It has been a case of long days at the office trying to get my head around all of this but I've been enjoying it. It is quite different from being the consultant. I actually have one of my old major competitors working for me so it is nice to become the client not the consultant.

Of course there are going to be challenges. Mostly issues that took place before the team that exists now had a lot to do with this. Also after the construction we have the even harder task of working to educated/encourage the communities on how to use the new infrastructure. Wouldn't be fun if it was all easy.