Peace Corps Follows Me Wherever I Go...

I am not sure whether this is some kind of a random coincidence or it should have been expected, but I just found out that two of my teammates of the aforementioned fellowship in Armenia are former Peace Corps volunteers who I have apparently met (but can't recall, or rather can't put faces to the names) during my PC groupie days. My reaction, a mixture of surprise and amusement, is similar to that when upon meeting my current MA classmates during graduate orientation:

Where do Peace Corps Volunteers end up after they’re done with their two year service? Apparently, the SID program at Heller is the place to be – it seems like ninety percent of the Americans who are in the program (and believe it or not, they are a minority in an extremely diverse and colorful incoming MA student crowd) are returning Peacies. To take this further – what are the chances that you’ll meet one, let alone two of these amazing well-wishing, tree-hugging do-gooders that have just come back from your own country? Even more so, what if you even happen to have personally seen them on site? From the day one, when after being freshly inaugurated and sworn in, they crowded my favorite bar, making complete fools of themselves, I’'d stumble upon them throughout the year here and there in ever corner of downtown Yerevan… A former PC groupie that I was back in the day, while conducting series of interviews with them for my still unfinished project, I actually ended up befriend a few (they are, after all, charming, and adorable, and totally harmless). And yet, Brandeis was the last place I’d expect to run into a former Armenia stationed Peace Corps Volunteer – but then, it’s a small world that makes room for even the most improbable encounters to happen.

Apparently, the fat bastard was right: PC volunteers turn up in the darnedest of places when you look for them... even more when you don't... kinda like Armenians.

Question of the day

Should the efforts of the international community towards poverty reduction be codified as “hard law” in international instruments (such as treaties) or should they be more on the side of “soft law” similar to Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals?

Now if you will excuse me, I have a few hundred pages of readings to do on sources of international law in order to build a valid argument in favor of either one of the options. Any suggestions are more then welcome, so comment away…

This Week in Development - The Impact of Economic Growth on Poverty and Inequality

Starring Dave Nicholson, an SID MA Candidate – in other words, a classmate of mine, who I think is absolutely brilliant (pronounced in British accent). The text below is one of the topics of our “discussion boards” based on a couple of recent studies on the above referenced subject:

Bob Sutcliffe. (2004).World inequality and globalization. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol 20, No 1.

Dollar, David and Aart Kraay (2002) Growth is Good for the Poor, Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 4.

As what seems to be the typical outcome in economics, the answer to the question of the growths impact on inequality seems to be....all together now....it depends. Bob Sutcliffe studied various methods of measuring inequality and found that different indicators could be used to generate different results. Without a reliable measure of inequality, the impact of growth is really tough to judge with any certainty, and therefore the impact of globalization is equally tough to measure. The only thing Sutcliffe can conclude is that inequality is very high right now, using the word “futile” to describe attempts to quantify it properly. If nothing else I admire his honesty.

In another study, Dollar and Kray seem to try really hard to obtain some correlation between current popular pro-poor policies and reduction in inequality (This observation is based on the fact that I understand little to nothing of what they actually did, but it sounds both impressive and time consuming). The conclusion they draw is that pure economic growth is the only thing that can be reliably attributed to increasing the income of the poorest 20% (don't tell Amartya Sen anyone!) They admit that this doesn't imply that nothing else has an impact, but merely that the contributions made by various policy and institutional factors may be too complicated to recognize in their “simple” study.

Trying to read their study led to the feeling that we were going round in circles; such a broad study was unlikely to identify singular important factors. I thought the Washington Consensus experience had taught us that the search for a blue print answer for all countries was “futile”, and that localized factors were always relevant in policy creation. Overall, we can conclude that we don't really know. Dejarvous anyone? Equiproportionately so.

The bottom line is – we don’t know, or at least, the attempts of such broad-based, cross-country studies to measure even a more complex correlation between growth, poverty and inequality leaves us with inconclusive results. Fried-pork, anyone?

For clarifications – Amartya Sen, a philosopher and economist who teaches, as said in Heller parlance, right down the road at Harvard. A Nobel Prize winner for economics in 1998, he’s famous, among many other works, for his book Development As Freedom – a self-explaining title that sees the true means towards development in enhancing freedoms and capabilities of people, whereas growth in itself does not necessarily contribute towards the end goal.

Washington Consensus – a set of ten market-oriented, neo-liberal policies that came out from Washington based institutions (World Bank and IMF) in 1989-1990, that were aimed at reducing the role of government and placed the emphasis on the markets to promote development. It was broadly implemented in a number of developing countries and yielded pretty miserable results. One of the lessons among the many from this particular experience was that there are, after all, no blueprint solutions to development that can be transferred from one country to another.

To Whom It May Concern: It’s a Thursday of no particular importance

And this blog is screaming for an update. But since there has been a lot on my mind lately, I am not quite sure where and how to begin. Except that maybe I should first spill out the unexciting news before I could move on to somewhat exciting ones?

So the non-so exciting part – it’s been veeery quiet on the job-hunt front, despite the fact that I keep applying away to anything that comes on my radar. Besides my recent rant and apprehensions on the said topic, the process leaves me with a feeling that I am compromising my own integrity. Not fun at all.

I had a mild freak out earlier this week due to what turned out (hopefully that’s the case) a minor gum infection that I thought was spreading at alarming rate to bring many serious consequences that would require surgical intervention. And since I am not covered by dental insurance, I was even more scared as to what to do about the situation. A trip to a physician calmed me down a bit, as I found out that surgery may not be necessary at this point and a good dose of antibiotics might do the trick. Also I cleared it with the said physician and my health insurance company that in case I do need a surgery, it would be billed as “medical” and not “dental,” which, in its turn was a pretty big relief. For once I should not bitch about the American health care system (yet).

On slightly more exciting news – I have been offered a ten week fellowship with a microfinance organization (that I have worked with for a couple of years in the past) to conduct a client assessment research in Georgia (country) and Armenia. Besides having a darn good reason to go back home this summer (and a trip is long overdue), I would gain a much needed research experience, get to compare data on two neighboring countries that share many political, social, cultural and geographic similarities and get to hang out in Tbilisi. Also, one of my classmates from Ukraine who I really like will be accompanying me in my Georgia trip. The downside of it is that the fellowship does not pay shit. Even more so, despite the fact that the said organization covers the living expenses in both countries, the cost of the trip is completely my responsibility. With continuously depreciating dollar airline tickets have gotten very, extremely expensive, so my ability to actually do the research will be contingent upon my being able to find funding for the said trip, along with several other factors that I won’t go into now.

Needless to say, I am excited about this fellowship. However, there are a couple of concerns that rise off the top of my head in case I do end up accepting the fellowship. For one, there’s the whole situation of depreciating dollar and appreciating Georgian/Armenian currencies that makes my already limited resources stretch rather thinly. Then, in case I do end up going to Georgia, I do not have the vaguest idea as to how in the world I will be able to communicate. I do not speak Georgian. Neither does my Ukrainian friend. We both speak Russian. You’d think that Georgians would too, given our shared seventy years of Soviet history, but due to current and not-so current political relations between the said two countries, Georgians are not very friendly towards the Russian speaking folk. And they refuse pointblank to speak Russian (or so I hear). There are quite a few people who speak English in Tbilisi but I doubt that a middle-age rural microfinance client would be fluent enough for us to be able to communicate. Although the flip side of it is that this might create some pretty hilariously nonsensical situations worth getting into. Or maybe not. All I know is that at this point I should hold off the excitement, since there is a whole lot more stuff that needs to be worked and figured out before I can wholeheartedly accept this offer. For now all I can say is that I really really want to go home…

On a brighter note: things that have been my source of amusement lately

• Watching grown men “unleash" their inner teenage rock star as they play Rock Band (an equivalent of Guitar Hero) for hours at a time. Makes me remember the days of my “youth” when [insert the rock band of your choice – in my case – Nirvana, post mortem] held the status of a deity, wearing torn blue jeans and multiple piercings was a statement equal to blasphemy (we’re talking Yerevan in early 90s) and obtaining the said pair of blue jeans that cost twice as much as my mother’s monthly salary was the biggest source of obsession.

• Mother Sugar watching democratic debates or the results of the primaries and changing her mind by the minute as to who to vote for. The current verdict – Hilary is a bitch, Obama is the man, look out for McCain and the world is coming to an end, fast, so it doesn’t matter anyway. As surprising as this may sound, I have been relatively cool about this whole election circus (I shouldn’t be, even if I don’t get to vote), especially since my beloved cute Southern boy (Edwards) dropped out of the race early on.

• Statements made by certain crazy professor(s) saying that “some of us haven’t read a book in twenty years,“ and that “if you are reading, you’re not thinking; if you’re thinking, you’re not reading.” Thus, if you want to keep thinking, put down the damn book.

• Remarks made by my classmate on my pessimistic attitude that go like:

Him: “Why are you so pissed all the time?”

Me: “I’m practicing on being a bitch.”

Him: “Trust me, sweetheart, you don’t need to practice.” Ouch.

• My African fan club at Heller and a certain skinny dude who keeps proposing to me to be his African queen, go with him to Nigeria and be his number one wife… When I tell him that he looks too much like my brother (both are skinny, tall, with big round heads and even bigger smiles), the guy standing next to him says:

“My condolences, brother. I am so happy that she doesn’t think that I look like her bother.”

Good to know that in case I don’t find anything useful to do with myself, I always have an option of being an African queen. I guess I should find out who the rest of the wives are going to be?

An ongoing rant on my utter ineptitude... or I went to Brandies and all I learned was that I don't know a thing when it comes to development

Despite a very strenuous week, the last few days of the week I was actually in a pretty good mood. Maybe it was because the weather finally warmed up a bit, maybe because I was done with my third module of the academic program, having only one more module to go. I finally figured out how to resolve the tangled issue of previously mentioned universality and cultural relativity when it came to human rights, wrote a pretty darn good legal argument about international law and humanitarian intervention, did a kick ass job on a presentation… Walking out of Heller early Friday morning, after having handed in yet another assignment I felt relieved, happy. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the air smelled of spring… “Maybe I should give myself a reward, buy a sweater, maybe a new pair of shoes,” I thought to myself, as I walked home, looking forward to indulging myself in doing absolutely nothing for the rest of the day, possibly taking a trip to Boston on Sunday, to buy the said reward…

However, despite the good mood that finished off my week, I’ve been having a pretty lousy weekend, and that’s not simply due to uncooperative weather that made me cancel my tentative trip to the city and has kept me locked up indoors for the last forty eight hours. When one doesn’t have a whole lot on her daily agenda, one inevitably keeps going back to the reoccurring thoughts that might have been circling around one’s mind. And since close friends and family have gotten sick of hearing about my woes of late, I thought I would turn to my last resort and vent on this blog.

So, yeah, things that bother me right now – the same things that have been bothering two months ago, three months ago, maybe even longer… I am clueless as to what I want to do with myself after this May, when I am done with this semester. I am not sure what I actually can do come this May. All I know is that I am supposed to be at a practicum of some sorts. That can be an internship or an actual job, as long as it’s related to the field of interest, does not involve doing my own research and can serve as basis for writing my Master’s paper.

Here’s the thing though – on one hand I don’t have a quite clear picture of what I want to do. Or to correct myself – things that I want to do I am not quite qualified for (blame my weak background in econ and statistics). On the other hand, pretty much all more or less decent internships are unpaid. And the truth is, I cannot afford an unpaid internship. So I am looking for jobs. Entry level jobs in the field of sustainable international development that do not involve the aforementioned advanced stats and econ skills. And boy, is the process frustrating. I don’t think I ever mastered the whole art of self-promotion and selling myself thing. What am I supposed to say here? I’m smart, I’m smart, I go to a tough preppy school and get good grades, I’m smart, I speak three languages, I really care for the poor, I’m smart, I’M SMART, god damnit, now WILL YOU HIRE ME ALREADY?

So I am coming to realize that as respectable as Brandeis degree is, it is a pretty generic one to make you a specialist of anything in particular. International development is a pretty broad field that encompasses a wide range of disciplines from environmental conservation and sustainability to poverty alleviation, economic development, human rights, gender issues and everything else in between. But really, you’re not graduating as an ecologist or an environmental engineer to be able to really tackle the issues of the environment. Nor are you coming out being a human rights specialist – for that there are programs in law schools. If you want to work on economic development, then you’re gotta be – come on, take a wild guess – an economist maybe? Did I really need another reason to tell me that I didn’t make the smartest choice when I came to Brandeis?

Also, even the lowly bottom of the barrel entry level position of a program associate in any lousy DC NGO requires (and I’m not kidding here) FIVE years of relevant experience, on top of an advanced degree. No more or no less. Now, do you think that if I had five year’s of relevant experience with an advanced degree I would be applying for a job of a program associate? Give me a break already. I don’t think I have ever, EVER in my life felt more unqualified and … I guess, worthless and limited in what I can do. I do keep applying to anything from human rights advocacy to gender issues to small project management to micro-finance … everything that comes on my radar that I can be even remotely considered suitable. Perhaps part of the reason I feel so limited is because I do limit my search to one and only location of Washington DC (or Richmond, but no big market there), since I decided that I really do not feel like working overseas or any other spot in the States in the near future. Even if devil tells me to try to find a job back at home, the only thing that I’ve been able to find is a ten week microfinance fellowship (not long enough) and internships (paid) with USAID (require US citizenship that I do not have).

So back to the job hunt. A part of me has been entertaining the thought that in case I don’t manage to find something that is at least remotely suitable for my field and doesn’t require me taking out another huge student loan to cover my living expenses, my only other choice is to defer my second year – something that neither the boy nor my mother will hear about. And that, frankly, pisses me off. It’s one thing to be able to do what you want to do, it’s another thing to be able to afford what you want to do. Nor could I really afford this fancy education in the first place, especially since the more I think about, the more worthless it appears to be. And the whole chain of thoughts repeats again. Also, makes my kick-ass legal arguments and carefully composed papers seem completely pointless. Or maybe I’m worthless. And I have this lousy feeling as a proof for the latter. So much for buying a new sweater as a reward.

To Whom It May Consern: It's Twenty Degrees and Sunny. Sunday Afternoon

And I'm suffering through a paper.

Although most of the times my writing assignments are nothing more but a means of perfecting the art of pulling a paper out of thin air, there are those few occasions that seem to open a can of warms that I really don't feel like dealing with. Like universality of human rights and cultural relativism... Especially cultural relativism. Perhaps a good indicator I should not pursue a career in anthropology.