What about that work thing?

**This post has a lot of words and no pictures. For those visually inclined people, check out my new Videos page!**
I've realized recently that as much as I talk about friends, kava, mosquitoes, spitting... that the last time I actually talked about my job, about what I actually do most days, was, well...a long time ago. At the beginning of my service long time ago.
So what have I actually been doing for the past year and a half, you may be wondering! I'll do my best in this post to give you a better idea of my role here in the PENAMA Provincial Office and surrounding government offices.
First, a refresher on my job in general:
I'm working as Provincial ICT Support for PENAMA Province, which means that I am the primary support person for computer/phone/network/printer/etc problems for the roughly 17 government offices in Saratamata. Let me stop you before you get more impressed than you should, and tell you that many of those offices have less than 4 employees, and quite a few have 1. All in all, there are roughly 150 people under my purview. This means that days vary a lot; sometimes I have very little to do, sometimes, I'm constantly running from place to place with 5 people on my list to help, and more being added all the time.
Initially, I was hired with the understanding that after a year of working by myself and getting a handle on the job, the Vanuatu Government would provide me a counterpart whom I would train in my second year and who would take over when I left. Unfortunately however, after a change in Prime Minister and the position of Acing Secretary General for my province changing hands 5 or so times, that promise has fallen though.

The IT support part of my job is the most important, the most time-consuming, and the least interesting part of my job, so I'll keep my description of it short with a list of some of the most frequent issues I face (this is by no means a complete list):
    - Computers needing to be configured to work with the government network (setting the proxy, changing mtu (maximum transmission unit), updating security certificates and programs, adding it to the government domain...)
    - General computer questions, ex: "How do I insert a photo into Word?" (although I'm working on improving general knowledge, I still get a lot of these questions)
    - Hardware issues, most of which, unfortunately I either don't have the tools or knowledge to fix. These I refer to the capital
    - Issues with connecting with the government internet network
    - Lots of questions about smart phones, and ever since they blocked Facebook on the government network, lots of people asking how to connect their smart phone to mobile data

The next thing I decided to focus on, in an attempt to attain some sort of more lasting impact (sustainability is a very important part of the Peace Corps model, and with no counterpart...), was to start teaching classes, to help my fellow government employees build up confidence and knowledge in regards to computers. Computers are fairly new to Vanuatu, and many people have limited knowledge of how to use them. Whether that manifests by asking me not to switch monitors because they're worried their documents will be lost (I set this guy right before switching them), typing with only pointer fingers, seeing an error message (about anything) and being worried they broke their computer (without reading the message, I might add), or not knowing what the internet is (I like to think I've gotten pretty good at explaining it: "think of it like a library..."), it amounts to the same thing; lack of comfort and knowledge, and over the course of my classes I've definitely seen a lot of improvement.
I won't go into depth about these classes (all centering around basic subjects, ie typing, Word, Excel...), but look, numbers!
          Classes taught: 27
          Students taught: ~45 (I keep track of students per lesson, not individuals. This number is an estimated guess of the individuals that have come to classes, including both those who came to one lesson, and those that came to many)
          Biggest class: 12
          Smallest class: 1
          Departments worked with: 13

Classes and my IT work have been my main focus and where I've been spending much of my time. I would like, however, to talk as well about a few one-off projects I've been able to work on (in no particular order):
     1. A while ago I began working on a pet project in my spare time to help new volunteers learn the local language on Ambae (or really any language, as long as they have an Excel spreadsheet of it). It's been a little slow going, as I've been busy with other things, but I'm hoping to finish it up soon! Potential cool applications I'm looking into are putting it on the computers at Thomas' school to see if it'd help students improve English vocabulary, creating a mobile app version, and expanding it so that it can also be used as a language acquisition and preservation tool (although this one's a bit of a stretch; most likely it won't happen unless I end up in Vanuatu for another year)
     2. SMART Sistas Girls ICT Camp: I already wrote a blog post about this, which you can check out here
     3. Way back  in the middle of last year, I was asked to help run a workshop at the Hospital about a new system they're asking health workers to use to submit data from their Health Center, and have since provided limited followup with those Health Workers that came, being the only one who helped with the workshop that lives in the province
     4. I was asked by the Australian High Commision, working with various government ministries based in Vila (the capital) to help conduct interviews with people who have mental and physical disabilities about how they interact with technology, in order to help draft ongoing policy about IT access in Vanuatu. I was able to conduct 8 interviews over the course of a few weeks, and out of this, I gained a couple more students! Two of the people I interviewed came back to me a couple of times to ask help with setting up email and general computer questions.
     5. Helping the medical ship Marine Reach on their mission in Ambae, which you can read about here
     6. One of the goals of Peace Corps is "To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans". Thus, this blog, and my Photo a Day Project! It's been hard work keeping up with the photos and weekly updates, but hopefully you, my readers, feel as though you've learned something. If all else fails, I'll have a great record for myself to look back on in the years to come!

Potential upcoming projects:
     1. It's been a while since I've been able to teach a class unfortunately, with renovations at my office, another new SG, trainings in Vila and my family coming to visit...but they should be starting up again soon!
     2. PENAMA Tourism website: Way back in November last year, I got tapped to work on a tourism website for my province. I was all for the idea, but it fizzled after talking to the Tourism Officer and realizing there were few photos and fewer content available for it. I told him I wouldn't build a website without content to put on it, and let him get to work. 9 months later, still not much progress has been made, but we've recently had a couple of meetings, and I remain mildly optimistic about this project.
     3. With only 6 months left on Ambae, I'm focusing a lot more on what will happen when I leave. I don't want to leave my friends and co-workers totally without support, but with no replacement it's tricky figuring out the best way to do it. Right now, I'm working with some of my more computer-savvy co-workers to teach small parts of my job to, and have started pointing people in their direction when they run into those specific common issues. I'm going to be focusing a lot more on this as time goes on as well, and hopefully, by the time I leave, I'll have very little IT work to do at my office!
     4. All computers on the government network are supposed to be setup a certain way and many of them definitely aren't. Not even close. One of my goals is to have all computers setup totally correctly before I leave! (Takes about 45 minutes per computer...it'll be a big job)

There have been a lot of frustrations and setbacks in this job of mine, such as the lack of counterpart and constantly changing leadership in my office, but there have been a lot of triumphs too: hearing from fellow volunteers that one of the people I taught to use Powerpoint made a great presentation, seeing people's looks of comprehension when I explain something in a way that makes sense, the gratitude when I solve any computer issue (no matter how small). It's gratifying to know too that the number of inane questions I get has gone down; if I get a question that is too simple, I tell them to Google it first and come back. People have no confidence in using Google, so I've really been pushing people to learn it before I leave, and I take the reduction of simple questions is indicative of improvement! I've seen success in slowly figuring out how to delegate different roles of my job to people who can handle them, which has both lightened my task, and made me more confident in what'll happen when I leave.

Working as Provincial ICT Support been a difficult and at times (more often than I'd like to admit) frustrating job, and while I've learned that I don't ever want to work as a Helpdesk or IT person in the States, it's taught me how much I enjoy teaching, and reminded me (through my language helper program) how much I enjoy and miss coding. It's refreshing knowing with more certainty that I made the right choice in school in regards to my degree, and knowing what I want to do when I go back. I also feel as though this job has prepared me in many ways for entering the workforce when I get back, and I'm looking forward to whatever challenges come after I finish my last 6 months here and apply some of these new-found or improved soft skills.