First Week Working for Save the Children
From Westport, Connecticut
The bathrooms are a Pepto Bismal pink and make me dizzy every time I walk in. Oddly, we have a mailroom which seems busy but there are no individual boxes, just 20 large boxes with acronyms that recommend departments. The carpeting is varying colors of brown and looks like something I helped rip out of a house years ago, only this has the added benefit of duck tape patches. And the climate is absolutely freezing on my end of the building, even though it’s roasting in other parts. There are combinations of cubes and offices, scattered oddly about with my cube on the end of the building that looks out at a small complex of Westport townhouses. Also scattered about are huge pictures of children and a variety of art that looks like it was dragged back through a series of airports and has now been awkwardly framed.
There are more Americans here than I would have expected, with most employ
ees being female something I will need to adjust to. And for the most part, things are like how you would expect them when you go to work for any big organization. There are usual departments: HR, marketing, international programs, US programs, information technology and all sort of other departments. And besides the ugliness of the building, I could be anywhere … at ANY organization.
Or at least that’s how I felt until I went to an ALL STAFF meeting on Wednesday. I had no idea what to expect; my expectations of such a meeting require singing START ME UP and then clapping beautiful spreadsheets that show massive growth. But this was nothing like that …
People joked and greeted each other in the way you would expect. And we tacked through some quick things: introducing new guests which included an introduction of yours truly. But soon enough there was a long presentation on Ethiopia … on both the grim statistics on Ethiopia and the optimism that we have learned something from the 1984 disaster. And then it went to the variety of programs that dealt with anything from work for food, hand water pumps for women, water rights, starvation tents, AIDS, and food distribution. Nobody in the room looked remotely shocked, but everyone seemed like they were processing. Maybe thinking of the magnitude of the situation or just relating it to another disaster they have worked on, somewhere else in the world.
And soon enough we were off Ethiopia and back to what I can identify with. The launch of a new corporate style guide … a key way to make sure that everything that comes from Save looks and feels like it came from Save. People were again chatty and witty. The transition was absolutely amazing …
The contrast of the familiar with the unfamiliar amazes me. I walk along the river of Westport to go get my coffee at Starbucks. I wear relaxed girl clothes. And I spend hours talking to people about training … How can we ensure people have the skills they need in every corner of the earth? What are those skills? What tools do I need? What content do we create? Can we buy this content or should we build it ourselves? The list is so familiar that I have to stop and remember if I changed locations. And yet the basic cause is miles away … miles away in remote places of Ethiopia with issues that I can only begin to grasp.
