“Writer”

At one point early in my aid career, it was my job to be based in an HQ cubicle but to travel frequently to the field for the express purpose of writing primarily USAID grants. It was one of those jobs that was all about “customer service” out to our country offices, “empowering local counterparts”, and “flowing accountability downward.” Which meant, basically, that I was the fresh-faced, fresh out of grad-school, fresh meat thrown to the country-office wolves on a regular basis.

One colleague, based in a barren and mostly godforsaken country that I found myself getting repeatedly sent to took obvious delight in the fact that it was my job – not his – to craft the proposal language, develop the theory of the argument, ensure “good flow.” He was good with the numbers and so would look after the budgets and tables, he explained. But the word-smithing was my territory.

He dubbed me the “text bitch.”

* * *

If you want to work in aid, as much as anything else (and more than most other things) you need to be able to write well.

Yes, you need to have a degree and some technical or general skills related to aid, and you need to get experience. But when it comes to the actual day-to-day work, more than anything lese, you’ll find yourself writing.

Very often the tangible outcome of aid work – at least the tangible outcomes that stick around for posterity in head office files – are written documents. And those written documents – those briefs, those evaluation reports, those strategy documents, those white papers – all have to be written by someone. In the aid world (but not just), written documents are currency, and the ability to write well frequently translates into power. You take it for granted until what you need is 10 pages or 5 or maybe just one page of well-written text.

And it seems that writing, that act of transferring the substance of conversations into text – whether those conversations happen in a board room, around the coffee makers, at the pub – that act of magically solidifying ethereal concepts into tangible form is very often seen as the grunt labor of aid work. Everyone wants it to be his or her job to have deep conversations with traditional healers under the mango tree, to look appropriately dusty and haggard on CNN, to help fleeing little old ladies make it across the border, to pull typhoon victims from the rubble… By contrast, no one really wants to be the one whose job it is to miss happy hour in order to hunch over a keyboard pounding out a report or budget or opinion paper. Writing has become menial labor. Something to be weasled out of whenever possible.

Writing has become something to be pushed onto the desks of our text bitches.

* * *

Once you have a few years of USAID proposal-writing on your CV you can never really totally escape from it. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. You become one of those in your organization to whom people come when they need something written. And despite annoyance with some people who seem to be worse about dumping their writing, I’ve basically made a measure of peace with it all.

You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t get it written down it’s practically the same thing a not having it. You can have the most astute, penetrating insight on – well – anything. But if you can’t somehow turn that analysis into text, then, it benefits no one. I’ve sat innumerable fascinating discussions, led by sometimes absolutely brilliant people, many of which for all practical purposes might as well have never happened once the first after-hours round began to take effect… because nobody wrote any of it down.

I’ve been a lot of places and held a number of different positions since that colleague out in the desert gave me that inappropriate nickname. I am not the least bit disappointed that my current job does not require me to write USAID proposals as a core task (sometimes I have to jump in and do it if the team is stretched). I’ve been a technician, a manager, a team leader, an advisor… It’s been my job to explain budget deviances, to persuade boards, to negotiate with host governments, to fanangle agreements with partners… Sometimes I’m a cubicle-dweller, sometimes I’m a globtrotter, sometimes a cowboy. But the most constant constant across all of that is writing: email, reports, proposals, strategies, white papers, skype conversations, Facebook updates, this blog…

Don’t you dare call me “text bitch.”

But I’ll always be a writer.