Getting started

I figure it’s about time I talk a little a bit about the reason I am here: my internship. The fact that I had been abandoned at the airport and that I received no answer to my frequent email requests to begin working a few days early (I wanted to beat the rush of interns, and to be honest, I was pretty bored) made me a wee bit nervous, so when I showed up at the visitor’s entrance to the ICTR I was pretty relieved that the guard told me I was expected. The internship coordinator Felicia took me to get my UN ID badge and then escorted me to the Office of the Prosecutor (which is actually several floors of a building, not one office) for my assignment.

I’m not sure if it’s the UN or Africa (probably actually a combination of both), but getting started was extremely slow and complicated. To get my assignment I had to talk to one person, but to get my computer I had to talk to someone else, and to get a computer log-in I had to talk to yet another person, etc. etc. and everything has to be done in a particular order (i.e. before you get your computer you have to get a log-in), but no one really tells you what you need to do, who you need to talk to in order to do it, or where those people are, and if you do manage to find their office, they probably aren’t there anyway. Some other interns arrived before I did so they helped me through the process, but I still spent a few days without an assignment, then with an assignment but with no computer, then with a computer but it didn’t work, and even now sometimes I don’t have all of the programs I need and everything is more or less 2 small steps forward and one big step back. The comforting part is that everyone is in more or less the same boat so we try to have a sense of humour about it. One girl I work with quipped that EDP, which is the UN tech department, stands for “Everything Doesn’t Perform” and another, noting that the elevator doors are the doors of death and are always shutting abruptly on people, said “They are the only thing that works fast here.” And one day the fire alarm went off, but rather than being alarmed we were all giggling uncontrollably because no one was really surprised that the ICTR would, with all of its other malfunctions, catch on fire. (Turns out it was just a fire drill and that we need to reduce our exit time from 12 to 3 minutes). To be honest, I shouldn’t complain because I was more or less set up in three or four days, whereas some of the interns who came later than me were waiting weeks for a computer.

All of this, however, has made me realize that just the enormity of the UN is probably the main reason that it hasn’t always (ok, usually) been successful at solving the world’s problems. Being down at the bottom of the enormous UN totem pole (unpaid interns don’t rank very high), I now have a much better grasp of just how hard it is when something goes wrong to pinpoint who exactly is responsible or, at the very least, who to complain to. I did consider calling up Ban Ki Moon if my internship goes awry, but somehow I don’t think this would be effective as I’m sure he has more important things to deal with, like civil wars, AIDS, denouncing Israel, etc.