Bike Training

Posted in Training, Events, Ideas, Lilongwe, Mzuzu, Ridiculous by Dom on June 1st, 2008

I was approached over a month ago by another volunteer asking if I would lead a training or workshop on bicycle maintenance. He had some questions, thought it would be great if I could get some of the tools from lilongwe to show him how to fix his bike, and maybe invite some others. I said sure no problem, I’d love to, sounds great. So some time goes by and we figure a date, this friday, would be best for us. It was the earliest I wasn’t busy. So this week I’m down in lilongwe for my term break and I’m thinking “Great, I can get the tools myself and bring them up so I know we’ll have them.” My plan then is to leave wednesday for mzuzu so I’ll have thursday to relax, friday for the training and travel again saturday and sunday. Well I decided to take teusday morning off from school research and internet to try to think what I want out of a school. However the transit house manager then approached me to help them maintain bikes because it’s my holiday and I’ve helped before. That wasn’t the plan so I’m not really pleased, but I go. We make a plan on how to handle the returned bikes, which to maintain and keep and which to get rid of. And we begin some maintenance.

Right, so this makes me see, yet again, how large this problem repeatedly is. So I go to talk to the GSO, the person in charge of the whole bike program. We discuss the current situation but he’s also curious about my training. I tell him it’s nothing big I just need to borrow some tools. He’s like ok, could you just talk to your APCD(kind of boss) about it. Sure why not. And he asks if I’ll do it again next week when there are a lot more volunteers around in lilongwe. I tell him probably, though I have reservations since Jon will be here. We schedule but I’m still not sure if I’ll keep the appointment or not. We’ll see. I digress. I am then called in by my APCD to the GSO’s office to talk with them. See we emailed the CD to clear the second training and they had questions about the whole affair. So I’m called in and told that they’ve decided to cancel my training in mzuzu…

I sit and think…how to respond.*

So I go on to explain the utility of the training and they understand that. Which was great. We’ve worked out a plan for the future based on this idea; which is a partial answer to the bigger bike problem. Fantastic. However, I’m still going north, and people will probably still be there, so now they’ve just not let me have tools. Which means problems go unfixed until this better solution can be enacted and performed, which in all it’s bureaucratic honestly probably won’t be until long after I’m gone. Unless I decide to care about the office’s problems and push it myself.

See, this is an example of how a seemingly innocuous request can become a huge ordeal and then even get nixed. Truly inspiration is what it is. Just not in a good way. Ah, policy.

*What they fail to see is they are completely irrelevant. They knew nothing about it two hours earlier for a reason. We saw no need to explain it to them. We need nothing from them except tools. So their “veto” is effectively meaningless. But how to put that tactfully was the problem.