Week 2: Official Entry No. 2

Karina Kirstie Paola Ayco
Habitat for Humanity International, Asia-Pacific

So we finally started official work at the office last Monday. The week started with what you can call an informal meeting of everyone in the office. Seeing that Habitat is a Christian organization, they gather together for prayers and say inspiring things at the start of every week. After that, their big boss, Rick, asked for brief updates on the different areas. This was particularly helpful and interesting for me because it helped me understand how things work and what the current projects are such as projects that fall under their volunteer programs like Global Village and disaster response areas.

Of course, before everything started we met up with our boss, Donald (who I think is a really cool boss) and had a tour of the office. Then we sat down to talk about what we had to do and how we should go about it.

I. Tasks accomplished during the week

The bulk of what we did this week is what I think is the hardest and most frustrating task of the entire project --- to input the data of all written surveys into the excel database that we made. And to think that’s just half of it. There are still surveys on-line. But the good thing about the online ones is that Habitat Europe has the program to transfer all of the data online into the spreadsheet in one go and they sent the information on how to do it over to us.

But I digress. Anyway, there are three evaluation surveys: volunteer member, team leader and host. The information that we have to input starts from 2006 up to early 2008 and is made up of a lot of teams. From our boss’ estimate, we have around 2,500 names all in all (printed and online combined). All of this information had to be typed one by one into excel. Imagine how tedious that is.

I consoled myself by reading the comments of the volunteers some of which were funny (not to mention hard to understand because of the broken English) and some of which were really touching and showed how the meaningful the experience was for them.

II. Problems and challenges encountered

Our boss only sent us one set of surveys to base the database on because it is the most recent and is what should be used. However, as we physically looked through the papers we noticed that there were actually three different surveys used over the span of 2 years. Most of the countries are still using the old survey which prompted our boss to email all countries to remind them to use the new ones. Anyway, this meant that we had to make 2 additional sets of databases where we can input the older surveys. This meant that we had to analyze again how to go about in doing the database. This was actually easier to do since some parts were similar. We just had to add the ones which were different. We also had to look through all papers and to divide it according to which format is used.

III. Knowledge Applied

I have to say, EXCEL. I never realized how useful this program is. And I guess in one way or another, English 11 lessons --- paraphrasing, summarizing etc. I am hoping that later on when we come up with the results and analyze what this means to the countries involved that we can apply more of our skills in critical thinking and analysis. I can’t wait for that part.

IV. General comments and suggestions

- Music helps while typing all the data. At least it keeps my mind off the monotonous work.
- I think that I know more Japanese and Korean names now more than ever after typing all of the volunteers’ names.
- How cool is it that sometimes an entire family joins a build? Talk about family bonding time.
-Some of the volunteers are still in high school. Nice to know that they help out in organizations such as Habitat.