Week Nine: Bain de Paquis Regulars, Barcelona, and a Tunisia Progress Report
Last week I was brought onto a project involving IBJ’s recent project in Tunisia, which the United Nations Democracy Fund funded. Essentially, the UN requires a detailed report on all of the status of the project's key goals when the project is nearing completion. My week was spent getting in contact with our people on the ground in Tunisia to find documentation of the project to attach as part of the annexes to the report. This was an interesting task because the people on the ground in Tunisia are kind of hard to wring information out of. 
There were also significant changes in how the project was proposed versus implemented, so I also had to explain this in different parts of the report. IBJ’s goal was to use its JusticeHub app to connect accused people with lawyers in the vicinity. However, the legal profession in Tunisia is very competitive, and therefore very suspicious of an app that might give some lawyers more work than others. We had to pivot the app’s function to be more of a case management tool for the lawyers.
The entire document is around 17 pages long and required a lot of editing so this took up most of my week.
Outside of work this week:
- It was Kristen’s last week, and we spent every evening at the Bain de Paquis (once again avoiding our rooms). It has gotten very busy in August with the heat, and it’s kind of fun to see the whole city out at the beaches down by the lake.
- We ate dinner on Kristen’s balcony every night as well.
- I went to Barcelona over the weekend! I’ve never been to Spain, so this was really cool. I mostly did a lot of walking around the city’s Gothic Quarter, though I did see the Park Guell and the Sagrada Familia, both of which were incredible visually and architecturally. I also got to practice my Spanish a bit, which I’ve been trying to improve since I took it in high school.
