As I was sitting at my desk two weeks ago at work, my boss comes up to me to talk to me about Youth2Georgia (Y2G). Our organization supports and funds a youth-led NGO called Youth2Georgia. By the end of the month, my boss wants each youth worker to write a success story about their work in the community. It is a great idea because writing success stories would provide us with a qualitative data bank that we could show our donors. A lot of organizations worldwide have the practice to write success story to document the work they do. Even Peace Corps has an entire page on its website dedicated to stories, some of which are success stories.
My boss sent me one of the success stories that the youth workers wrote him in December. The stories need to be in English so that our donors could understand them. For this particular success story, the English, style, and format were all over the place. I typically speak Georgian to the youth workers, so I was confused that they were able to write a success story in English. After reading the success story, I came to the assumption of how they wrote it in English. The whole thing looked like it was plugged into Google translate because the verb tenses and sentence structure were off. I am fluent in two languages and Georgian is the fifth language I’ve studied. From experience, no two languages are alike enough to translate something word for word. For one thing, sentences are structured differently among languages.
Also, the success story’s first paragraph didn’t even have anything to do with the topic. My boss agreed that the translation and format were off. I volunteered and told him that I could do a success story template or form. It would serve an instructional page on how to properly write a success story. He asked, “Would you be willing to explain it to them?” “Yes, I’m sure I could spend 15 minutes going over the main points.” He liked that idea and that was the end of our conversation. A few hours later, he comes up and tells me that he set up a meeting for 4 p.m. that following Monday. Then, I see an e-mail that I was allotted about 45 minutes to cover the topic. So based on that e-mail, my 15 minutes turned into 3 times as long. With that, I figured I should get cracking on creating a PowerPoint presentation to go along with it and prepare for the following Monday.
Last week was the day of my Success Story training presentation. Now, if I was sitting in my corporate cubicle back in my old job, I would have gone to the conference room 10 minutes early and set-up. The projector would be turned on and the presentation would be ready to go. People would trickle in a few minutes early with notebooks in hand. In Georgia, it is a different story. First, my counterpart who was supposed to be my translator disappeared around 2:30 p.m. and I haven’t seen her since. I had e-mailed my work to her for review and I didn’t hear back to see if it was any good or not. At 4:00 p.m., I haven’t seen or heard from anybody to see if the meeting was still happening. But I’ve been in Georgia long enough, I knew that things just must be running late. I was writing e-mails calmly because if was going to happen, it would eventually.
Sure enough, the Youth2Georgia manager comes up to me at nearly 4:30 p.m. and tells me that they are ready for me. I smiled, grabbed my phone, and followed him downstairs. Flashback to America, people would assume that the meeting was canceled due tp the delay. Either way, I go downstairs and we set up the projector for my PowerPoint. My counterpart did a great job translating and co-facilitating. She added a lot of examples from her experience that fit my presentation’s narrative. Thankfully, I was able to understand her translations and her examples. I understood enough Georgian that I was to incorporate her examples in my later slides as I was presenting. And that is another thing, when someone in America translates, they translate the exact thing the presenter says. Here, they might go off and add their own flavor like my counterpart did. It could be a good thing or a bad thing. Yesterday, it was very much a good thing because she knows the youth workers better than I do and she adds value in ways I can’t.
In regards to the presentation, I taught the youth workers that they should think of success stories in 3 parts: the situation/issue, the response, the benefits/results. In order to remember that, I basically told them that these parts are essentially the before, during, and after. Each part deserved its own paragraph and should include details and data in a concise and direct way. Breaking it down and providing a formula was so helpful. Sitting in that room reminded me of some of my teachers in high school and college. I did not make any assumptions to what kind of education they had or have, but it simply reminded me of mine. I thought to myself that the only way I was able to whip up something quick was because I was taught how to think critically and logically.
The youth asked great questions during the presentation. One of them hit home, “how can you measure success so we can write about it in the success story?” I responded, “If you are asking how do we measure impact, you can’t. You measure success through tangible data.” I reminded them that just because you can’t measure impact, there are other ways to measure success. It is important to account for attendance and skills taught. For example, you can do a training on hand sanitization. You can teach someone how to wash their hands and how to prevent spreading germs. You can test them to see if they do it properly. However, you can’t actually know if they will always wash their hands properly or at all after that class is longer over. I concluded with, “I’m here for two years and I may never know if I was a successful Peace Corps Volunteer.” And that is the thing, an impact is difficult to measure and it might take years for it to surface. But that is the line of work for most (if not all) non-profit workers. We realize that the true impact is hard to measure and instant gratification might not always be the case. At the end of the day, it comes down to faith. I have to have faith that the life I’m dedicating is worth it at the end, even with no proof.