I think I am allergic to TLAs!

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At the beginning of April I took over from Richard Schmid as project officer for Laos and Vietnam at LD’s head office. I had anticipated a few “teething difficulties” taking up my new position – but not a language problem in a job requiring English, my mother tongue. However, the TLAs (three letter acronyms) were the first real problem I encountered. MTH, PTC, WTP, IPC, TET, – just a few examples from the reports and emails that cross my desk.

As I do to not want to give up my afternoon job as taxi driver, cook and storyteller to my three children, I am trying to be project officer on a part time basis. This is a challenge which would not be possible without the constant support of Catherine Mertz, my assistant, and the boundless energy of GDB (another TLA) our ROM for Asia.

For the first few weeks I felt as if I was completely swimming – with little idea of which project was which. Slowly, I am extending my TLA vocabulary. MTH is Maria Teresa Hospital, constructed under project LAO/002 and now in its third phase as LAO/013. PTC stands for Practical Training Centre – a small, high-class hotel to be built as part of the Hue Tourism School to allow student training and some income generation. WTP Water Treatment Plant under construction as part of part of Project VIE/012. IPC is nothing to do with PIC (Programme Indicatif de Coopération) but International Project Coordinator – the word used in Asia for CTP! TET is the Vietnamese New Year celebration that takes place in April.

I was lucky enough to have an initial mission very early on to experience the projects in the field first hand. Accompanied by Igor Wajnsztok, Operations Manager who is an excellent chaperone, I set off for Laos on 9 May. Here, we joined up with GDB (Geert de Bruycker, Regional Office Manager for Asia) for an intensive 10 days. Although I used to be a seasoned traveller, I have never spent so much time on the road – we spent an average of six hours per day travelling and on some days much more than this due to the distance between projects and/or their inaccessibility. For example, to get from the LAO/412 project office to the most accessible of the 187 target villages in the Ministry of Finance’s Community Initiatives Support Project in Oudomxay was a journey of two to three hours on poor roads. This involved crossing one river, passing four diggers in the process of road construction and on the return journey removing a landslide from the road by hand. I was reminded several times that weather conditions were good.

The mission was an excellent opportunity to experience first hand the surgical blocks, school administration block, proposed construction sites, etc. that I spend my time reading about in head office. A visit to see the increased yield of the of the peanut crop in demonstration fields as part of the agricultural extension activities of project VIE/014 particularly appealed to me – I originally worked in the food industry. But most of all, the mission enabled me to meet our project teams in the field and finally put names to faces and to hear about any concerns. The first problem encountered being on the LAO/013 project where the project number poses a problem, as people in Laos are very superstitious.

It was also good to understand some of the challenges of life in the field. Not just the temperature and humidity, communication problems (linguistic and technical) but also the joys of sharing your room with the insect population plus the daily wake up call in the Con Cuong district in Vietnam. Here, at 5 o’clock in the morning we were woken by military music blaring our from a loudspeaker, followed, 15 minutes later, by a woman’s voice giving instructions for the early morning stretching exercises (I am told).

On returning from my mission I am not only better equipped and full of enthusiasm to tackle my work as project officer but also find that my storytelling has improved. The children are fascinated to hear what the Vietnamese can transport on a motorbike – four fully grown pigs or one cow; the fact that Mummy had crickets for supper (a delicacy in Laos, not dissimilar to shrimps); or the nerve-racking technique of crossing the road in Hanoi (just walk at a slow but steady pace whilst all the traffic miraculously avoids you).

I still have a lot to learn, but, as Geert would say “This is just the beginning of a great adventure…”.

Sue Wagner, June 2004

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