Week 7: Not just an intern
Click.
I stapled the last packet together and checked the time on my phone. Thirty minutes left until the meeting. I stacked the packets one on top one the other and looked up, hearing Lamar chuckle. “Don’t worry,” he said. Ghaida and I exchange a look, our eyebrows raised in unison at his comment and the fact that he never seems to be nervous before meetings. But how could I not be nervous? I am the intern—the twenty-three-year-old law student who is still learning in the presence of experts. Just a few weeks ago, I was only responsible for moving from slide to slide during our PowerPoint presentations to ministers. But after five weeks of data compilation, I was about to lead a meeting on my work product. I guess the truth is, I really have never been just the intern here.
After five weeks of research, it was time to stop looking for new decentralization laws, frameworks, and instructions manuals from Jordan’s neighboring countries. It was time to stop adding cells and sheets to my comparative table and begin to look at which laws or even combination of laws could act as the best models for each of the four functions of decentralized government: project planning, budgeting, implementing and monitoring. Moroccan laws are, without a doubt, the best models for project planning as their legal frameworks extensively cover the creation of municipal “action plans” or plans communales de développement (PCDs). But budgeting laws and manuals from Morocco, Tunisia, and Iraq all provided usable models that can be intertwined to form the ultimate budgeting model. Palestine and Lebanon, however, provided less useful models in all areas and for the most part, project implementation and monitoring laws were few and far between.
Lamar had pitched the idea to me weeks ago: the way in which my comparative analysis could be used beyond providing a country model of each of the four functions is through the creation of a desk reference on budget preparation and budget execution, where the next generation of newly elected and appointed officials in each of the four councils could open the code and follow step-by-step procedures on their many tasks and responsibilities--participatory budget voting or capital and operational expenditure balances or project prioritization, for example.
So I drafted a Table of Contents for such a Budget Execution Manual and called a meeting between myself, Lamar, Ghaida and the heads of Component 1 (Service Delivery) and Component 2 (Organizational Development and Municipal Finance): George Hartman, Mohammad Hamed, and Ahmad Musa for guidance on how such a manual based on laws from other Arab countries can be adapted to the Jordanian context.
One by one they trickled into the meeting room, a large table in the center and a white board on the left wall. I handed them their packet as they sat down. Waiting for the little hand to hit the ten on the clock, we joked about this being a very serious meeting and the fact that my table of contents resembled a thesis at nearly twelve pages. And then as it turned 10 AM, George, Mohammad, and Ahmad began flipping through my packet, scribbling notes in the margins, and the discussion began: Jordanian laws and manuals I needed to read, a proposed new structure to my table of contents, and an overall discussion of how decentralization in Jordan is going two years into the project.
Time had moved so slow that morning as I was nervously awaiting the start of the meeting, but 11 AM came so quickly and as everyone left the room, I stared down at my chaotically written notes.
“You’re going to run out of time,” Lamar said.
He was right. I had roughly three and a half weeks left here and more than three and a half weeks of work to complete.
“What if I keep working remotely from Virginia?” I suggested.
It seemed like the obvious fix to the problem. I did not even hesitate at proposing the idea at all because in the nearly seven weeks I have been a part of this team, I feel as though I have become a part of the change taking place in Jordan—too far invested to have a clean break come the end of my ten week internship. There is no time limit after all--ten weeks, ten months, ten years--when it comes to the depth of which I care about development and progress in Jordan, specifically, and across the Middle East, more generally. So I am implored by this passion and my belief in the importance of not only my own work but that of my team to continue past these ten weeks and see this work through.
DISCLAIMER: This blog represents my own thoughts and not those of USAID or USAID CITIES.