Great Work!!

[5 février 2009]

not the best way to start the semester :

Even though my classes don't start until monday, I returned to my internship at Ni Putes Ni Soumises this week. After spending all last semester planning trips around my fridays at NPNS, I decided early on that I would avoid that at all costs this spring. So I shifted my class schedule around, letting me place my full day at the office on tuesdays, with my half day on wednesdays. Perfect. So I went into the NPNS office early tuesday morning, eager to ring in the new semester with a day full of translating and fact-finding. After making the customary trip to greet everyone with a Bonjour, I sat down with Mar to get my assignment for the day.

She told me she had an important project for me to work on dealing with a governmental program called Espoir Banlieues, which could be translated as "Hope for the Suburbs". It is a set of programs spearheaded by Fadela Amara (the Secretary of State for Urban Policies / founder and former president of NPNS) intended to de-ghettoize Paris' suburbs, using some pretty lofty and sometimes controversial tactics. My job was to read several articles, research the program's website, find comparisons to similar programs in the US and abroad, critique it from the NPNS viewpoint, and create a report to sum it all up. This report was to then be distributed to the rest of the team in the office. That's a lot on my plate, non?

So I got to work on the summary, wondering how long it would take me to do all that. After a quick lunch, I joined Mar in the conference room. A group of university students from Delaware had asked to stop by during the last week of their month in Paris. They had been studying women's rights and other social issues in France, so a visit to NPNS was definitely in order. I helped Mar out during her presentation, since she isn't used to speaking in front of large crowds in English. I had a pretty good time, and took the opportunity to schmooze a bit with some fellow Americans. After this, I sat back down to work on my project some more before I went home for the day.

A few minutes before 6, I started packing up my things and congratulating myself in my head for a successful first day back. But I spoke (to myself) too soon, because Mar then asked me, "Are you leaving." I said yes. "Well, are you finished with the summary?" I said no. "You know that was supposed to be done today, right?" I had no idea. Apparently Mar had explained all this earlier that morning, but I hadn't understood, either because my ears aren't quite fluent or because I was a little taken aback by the sheer amount of time and work it would take to finish it. Well, there wasn't much I could do, so I apologized and told her I'd work on it a bit that night and finish it the next day. Then I left the office, feeling pretty crappy about all of it.

The night wasn't totally ruined, though, because I met up with my host mom and her friend right after I left work to go to a special presentation at the Music Conservatory. It was a kind of master class on ethnomusicology, but open to the public. The guest speaker came to talk about Mongolian and Tibetan monks and their specific style of chanting. Sounds boring? It wasn't, because these monks use a technique where they can produce two notes at the same time -- using only their voice. It's called diaphonic singing, and it's pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I still have not mastered the art. But I'm not giving up any time soon.

Anyway, back to the NPNS saga... I got up wednesday morning, got dressed, did some reading on Espoir Banlieues, and went to grab lunch. Since I had been coming into the office at 3pm for my half days all last semester, I assumed it would be the same this spring. But yet again, I was wrong. Around 2:30, I got a call from Mar asking where I was. She said I was supposed to be there at 2. I told her I was on my way. Once I got to the office, I explained my confusion, which she wasn't too angry about, but she still seemed put off about something. She explained that due to my deadline-mixup the day before, pretty much the whole office was hounding her all day for the report. See, she wanted it tuesday night so she could look it over and send it to everyone wednesday morning. Now it was wednesday afternoon and there was still no report. 

Understanding the gravity of the situation, I split up the remaining work with Mar and got cranking. We finished it in about an hour, then she sent it off to the coworkers. What a relief. And it was actually a pretty interesting little project. While doing research, I found out that one of the more controversial aspects of Espoir Banlieues is the fact that they want to use busing to help increase diversity and success among suburban schools. I don't know if you recall, but we tried using busing in the US to do accomplish a similar goal. And it FAILED miserably. So heaven knows why Fadela and Sarkozy want to try it out over here...

With that out of the way, I finished my half day at work writing up my weekly press review, in which I find news articles from around the world dealing with women's rights and send summaries to all my coworkers. Piece of cake. I got that done, said goodnight to everyone and headed home, feeling much better about my second day than my first. Buuuut, that feeling didn't last long. As soon as I got home, I received an email from Karim, the web guy at NPNS. I had attached the wrong file to the email I sent to the entire office, so no one actually got my press review. Instead they got a useless .dat file. So not only does everyone know it was my fault that the project summary was way late, now they all think I don't know how to operate Microsoft Word.

Great work, Cody.

Well, that's the conclusion of the tale of my terrible beginning to spring semester. In other news, I saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (aka Forrest Gump 2) today with Genna. Man was it long, but I actually liked it quite a bit. Also, I'm going to a conference with NPNS tomorrow that's all about Espoir Banlieues. This conference is the entire reason I had to write up the report in the first place. We want to have ammunition for the question and answer session with Fadela. Things should get interesting. And it's being held in Dreux, one of the suburbs. I say any chance to visit the ghettos is a chance I'm willing to take.

Happy Travels

-- Cody