March-April 2019

Morning sunrises as I leave for work.

Almost four years ago, I discovered On Being – a podcast that asks timeless questions about how we live and what it means to be human. Throughout my transitions over the last few years  – as I have moved to new geographies and explored unexpected terrains of my own emotional landscape – On Being’s collection of conversations have sewed hope, humility, and a hunger to learn more about what it means to live in this deeply complex world.

In one of my favorite podcasts, Krista Tippett interviews Irish poet John O’Donohue. He says:

Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. …about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.

As I approach the end of my fellowship year in Monrovia, Liberia, I continue to return to O’Donohue’s definition of beauty. What are the beautiful moments that will remain etched in my memory well beyond my fellowship year? My fellowship has been shaped by the repeated micro-moments — the morning greetings to our security guard, the unyielding rhythm of the rain in July, hilarious group WhatsApp messages, lunchtime walks to buy ground nuts, and incessant car horns that make me feel energized and alert. There is no single moment that will capture the complexity of my fellowship, and so, I have written a mosaic of memories that represent the beauty I have experienced:

What’s more exciting than spending time with co-fellows?

~Morning hellos and “Happy Mondays!” as we walk up the steps to sign in for work,

~Salmon colored walls that will slowly fade as rainy season advances,

~The welcoming shouts of “Team Curriculum” as I step into the print shop to carry back the hundreds of Teacher Guides and thousands Student Workbooks that will be eventually be distributed to schools,

~Whitney Houston’s lyrics belted out at Thanksgiving dinner with PiAf Fellows and Church friends,

~Choir voices practicing on Saturday evenings,

~Stories, laughter, and cucumbers shared with colleagues on day-long car rides to and from school visits and closing ceremonies,

~A deep appreciation for Google Sheets, Pivot Tables, Way Bills, and fluorescent Obama pens,

~Monday morning meetings, standing on the rooftop of our office, listening to staff updates, announcements, and SHOUT OUTS,

~Conversations on life, love, and next steps on hot Saturday afternoons,

~Beach yoga sessions on Saturday that roll into all day meditations in the sun,

~Potlucks with friends once strangers that make Monrovia feel like home.

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Standing at Imani Development’s office entrance.

The first part of my fellowship with Imani Development, based in Blantyre, Malawi, has provided some great learning experiences. I have had the opportunities to work on several projects ranging from conducting an aquaculture baseline analysis to managing and providing technical support to a team of enumerators conducting baseline surveys in rural Malawi. Some highlights at the workplace include taking the lead on the coding of survey questions using CommCare, conducting site visits and setting up a location tracking system, receiving training on QGIS, as well as working on various data analysis projects using R.

Project-based consulting can mean very inconsistent workloads — a feast or famine work cycle, where one is very busy at some times and in a lull during other times. Nevertheless, the downtime has given me the opportunity to work on improving my professional knowledge and skills relevant to the development sector. I have managed to complete a MicroMasters in Data, Economics, and Development Policy offered by MITx over a period of four months. Though it was certainly challenging to be taking four online courses while working full-time, the experience has proved to be extremely rewarding. The classes were very relevant to my work at Imani Development, and I was able to apply what I have learned to some of the projects I was working on.

En route to Sapitwa, Malawi’s highest peak

For instance, the lessons on designing questionnaires and coding in SurveyCTO were proven highly valuable when I was tasked with coding surveys — having never previously done any work on CommCare, the practices on SurveyCTO helped reduce the learning curve and allowed me to complete the task in a timely fashion.

In the coming months, I will have the opportunity to lead and manage several baseline surveys for the Malawi Innovation Challenge Fund (MICF), a UNDP-supported project. From planning the logistics and designing the questionnaires, to managing the fieldwork and data cleaning, I look forward to managing the projects from start to finish.

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PiAf alumn Renee Hsia during her fellowship with the IRC in Rwanda. Renee was one of PiAf’s first two fellows in 1999.

My wife and I often joke about who had the idea for a Princeton in Africa program. I remember that we were at the 100th Anniversary dinner for Princeton in Asia. One of us said to the other “why isn’t there a Princeton in Africa?” As it turns out, Jim Floyd ‘69 and others had been thinking the same thing. 

Years before, Ralph Nader and his class (‘55) offered to mentor us in creating an alumni vehicle to help attract undergraduates to public service.15-20 of us began to mentor undergraduates to work in organizations that were important to us. I chose the International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief organization on whose board I was serving.

After five years of experience with Princeton summer interns, the IRC’s head of international programs agreed that if he could get full-time recent grads, the IRC would put them on the IRC payroll. I brought the idea to the ‘69 Board, and it was initially rejected as too risky. We again tried to launch the program with class members, as an unofficial Class of ’69 activity. Nearly immediately, 10 people, including 1 or 2 who were not members of our class, each chipped in $1,000. But, our plan was leaked to a member of the administration, and we were shut down.

However, years earlier, as the last all-male class, we had been allies in the movement for co-education at Princeton by using extra-legal conduct. We were not going to take no for an answer. The rest is history. It was like pushing a snowball downhill. By the summer of 1999, we managed to send to Rwanda (5 years after the genocide) a Pyne Prize winner, Renee Hsia ‘99, before she began at Harvard Medical School, and Emily Holland ‘01, who returned to tell the campus about PiAf.

20 years later, we still place recent grads with the IRC, but we have also placed PiAf Fellows in over 100 other organizations in 36 countries. We have Fellows from around the world and this incredible diversity has shaped and strengthened our program as we move forward.

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