Doing things differently, Dec 12th

Doing things differently

I would have done things differently. The only things that I would do differently are those I have thought of. For anything else that does not come to mind, I would not do differently, because if it was unsatisfactory then why would I do it differently?

I would have not refused to take the garbage out. I was busy scribbling, those brouillons, which were to be posted and I just said “No I will take it out later”. My mother implored me “please take it out, or they will steal the bin [ it has been stolen before outside]” but I kept saying “I will do it later”. This was my time to write and I just did not want to deal with rubbish. She stormed out of my room cursing my genes, I wish I could translate this well “The cursed genes of Ben [my father], you are infected, cursed genes”. I would have been calmer and just said “yes I will” and just taken it out. After all, I needed a break from sitting there, on this not so comfortable plastic chair.

I need to be calm, that is key and not let what I call emotions rule me. What is the difference between the off hand and the reasoned approach? Is it what Plato spoke about in Republic IV, using the appetitive part of the soul instead of the part of reason? I need to use the reasoned one. I think the avoidance of conflict or misunderstanding is the main advantage to using the reasoned part, otherwise we feel so self righteous using the emotional part.

I am guilty of a wrong approach when it came to addressing an issue I care about at work. At work it is, but this issue matters to me a lot. The matter of prisons – which have clinics, according to the people I called at these prisons, but were excluded from the health facility census. I found this out at the very end of the census, I noticed, by chance. Noticing this after the census fieldwork was already over was unfortunate, but not something to beat myself over about. I could have just emailed the two people that I answer to most of the time, Anna and Mr Dumeni, and told them about it. Instead, I wrote an advocacy style email that began with the words “Take a look at these prisons, all of which have clinics” to everyone involved everyone involved in the census, about 9 people – some here and some overseas in the US. I listed the omitted prisons, all 9 of them and even highlighted the word “juvenile” in the prison that was a juvenile detention center. In my three paragraph letter, I spoke “prisons being unaccounted for” and how “saddening it was that the prisons are excluded from the census” given that the next day was human rights day. I spoke about human rights in implicit terms that prisoners have a right to adequate health and I underlined the importance of knowing about HIV services : counseling and testing and anti-retroviral therapy. This email was sent to everyone supervising the census, including the donor partner (the USAID representative, who is an American). I hope that they would do something about this and I did end the letter by saying “something needs to be done, at the very least the report must mention this caveat of the NSPA (Namibia Service Provision Assessment). I even undermined the concept of calling this a census, given that only a sample of the prison clinics was on the original sample list of health facilities. 3 out of 13 prisons were there, leaving 10 out and 1 was done on the fly by interviewers who found it.


When I spoke to Anna about it, she was very stern throughout our talk. “What was the whole issue about human rights?” she asked with a confused expression on her face. All I could reply was the pathetic “Well it was human rights day the next day, so I put it in there.” Indeed, how pathetic, I could not even muster the courage to say that prisoners have the right to adequate health care and by leaving them out we cannot know if their rights are met. Anna explained how the facilities I mentioned were not on the list because the ministry of defense – the one responsible for these prison sick bays – submitted only three prisons to be surveyed for their health facilities. The reason for this was “because these are the largest sick bays and they may soon become clinics”. Since Anna was rather dispassionate in providing these answers, there was not point in asking her to consider that if we the health facility census decides to include sick bays in the census, then it is important to do them all. She told me that “I did not ask them why they gave only these or why the were the largest, if you want to find out, contact the ministry of defense, but don’t send us anymore emails [about your finding], we don’t care.”

My advocacy email just did not work. When I spoke to Mr Dumeni he told me that “when a problem arises, just contact us first”. But I did contact him and all the rest. Of course, what he meant was to just contact him and Anna personally, before sending it to the whole crowd. This is what Anna meant about me making “unfounded claims” in an email. I should have understood this to mean “first find out why this is the case from us, the Namibian people you worked closely with before blowing it of proportion.”
Anna also felt that it was not part of my job to write this email. I jumped to defend my stance and said it was, since I had been calling the ministry of defense health facilities for about two days in order to clarify information collected about them, when it dawned on me that there were only three prison clinics for the whole of Namibia in the data. Here, I have no regret, I needed to impress upon her that I cannot ignore major gaps in the data, even though it is not my job to rectify it.

The exchange I had with Mr Dumeni was cordial. He clicked away on his computer, but at least he made more eye contact than Anna did. In speaking with him, I realized how the limitations of a census can be used a pretext for excluding sites from the data. “What is the methodology of a census” he asked me.
I replied that “it is an attempt to get every site into the data, but you may not get them all, so try and get as much as you can.” Here he came in for the kill : “So if you don’t get all the sites, does it mean that it is no longer a census [ as I claimed because prisons were excluded] or is this just a limitation of the whole thing.”
“It is a limitation,” I conceded, but then came back saying “But if a facility is not even on the list for facilities in the census, you cannot even attempt to get it. The census is an attempt to get it all.”
“Yes that is true” he admitted while his gaze took refuge at the computer monitor. He did not want to admit the implications of this, I assume. Nonetheless, he was friendly, as he always is and he understood. I ended our mini meeting by thanking him for all he had done for me and choosing me. He was grateful and said “We don’t know what we would have done without you.” I wonder too how this census would have been had I been somewhere else, someone else.