This week I had my 6 month placement review. OK so technically I've been working here for 9 months but it's still my 6 month review. In fairness both my VSO Program Manager (PM) and I wanted to hold it before I went on holiday in June but she couldn't make it up here. Actually, I'm quite glad that things worked out the way they did as those extra months of holiday and work have made a big difference and so made the review we did more meaningful.

It all started when Moni, my PM (see photo), called me into her office one day when I was in the VSO office in Dhaka asking to set a date. I said "callHabib as he's the hardest to pin down" and surprisingly she did, there and then. She then sent us both a letter to confirm things and give an outline of what the review would consist of i.e. a half day workshop. What this correspondance failed to detail was who exactly was supposed to attend and what preparation was required of us. It took a few e-mails to define all that exactly but afterwards Habib was able to get the word out and invite the appropriate people.

To put in simply, the basic purpose of the 6 month review is to check how the volunteer is settling in. There are no real expectations on VSO's side of serious work being done yet as they know from experience that it takes time for a volunteer to settle, find his or her feet and learn the language etc. In my view those are realistic objectives for the first 6 months, though arguably not terribly challenging. All in all though I see a review at that point in the placement as a useful thing as it comes at the right time to remind the organisation why the volunteer is there and relaunch things so to speak.

So, to the review itself. As I mentioned earlier, it's basically a small workshop with 6-12 staff from the NGO and the volunteer, all facilitated by the VSO PM. We're not a very big organisation, and our projects are quite spread out, so we only had 6-7 people in the room from BRIF. Anyway, the review starts by asking what the NGO knows about the placement objectives. Now, while I'm sure I mentioned these things during the odd meeting when I first arrived, that was back in January so I wasn't overly confident about the outcome. To my total surprise they by and large came up trumps, though most forgot about strategic planning which is nice.

Secondly the participants (I'm just a bystander during all this) write down what I've been doing i.e. my activities, in what I can only assume is an attempt to link objectives with work. Once again I was a tad pessimistic as I don't really advertise what I do to all and sundry, and once again they were pretty much spot on. They were even a tad generous as they gave me credit for things which I may well have suggested or facilitated but didn't actually do. An example would be recruiting Shahid to coordinate monitoring and evaluation, as while I ran the workshop that identified the need, I had nothing to do with finding and hiring the right person.

So far so good then. Next came a discussion about the benefits people percieved from my presence and their concerns about how things are going / the future. To make it all totally open we wrote down our points on little anonymous cards which Moni then summarised on a flip-chart. In all honesty this is a little bit of a joke as with so few people I could easily tell who had written what but the important thing is that they wrote something! The benefits were rather positive (which is rather the point), mostly about developing management skills and improving systems. For the concerns I expressed one about having a counterpart until the end, and having enough time from others to finish everything. Others also shared this latter concern. Ironically, in a pre-review meeting with Habib and Moni we had hatched a plan to achieve the various objectives by year-end and then spend most of the last 3 months until March 2005 supporting the changes implemented as well as the staff working with them. I say ironically as the other participants knew nothing of this. There were also a few concerns expressed about communication and really understanding the local context, which I think is fair enough. I have now though started Bangla lessons at a Christian missionary hospital about 2 hours away on rickshaw-bus-bus-rickshaw which I hope will help improve matters. If nothing else, I hope I get some credit for travelling 4 hours just to learn some bangla which is, let's face it, not the most marketable of foreign languages.

Finally, to end the workshop, we (or rather I) did an action plan for next 6 months. In my case this will actually be until virtually the end so it must include some sort of exit strategy which I've yet to give too much thought to!! Soooo, all in all we have now changed a 2 year placement into a 13 month one without changing the objectives or scope of change. This should then be a busy end of year, though hopefully I'll have more free time next year to look at career options...