Report

The present report will discuss a very successful interning experience with Mercy Corps-Jordan via the World Citizenship Program (WCP) during the months of July, August and September 2004. It was a truly special experience, professionally, intellectually and culturally.

In Jordan, Mercy Corps works with the Jordan River Foundation, which aggressively raises funds from government and private sources domestically and internationally in order to administer two strong rural development and child safety programs in Jordan.  Mercy Corps supplies guidance and training, development expertise and management skills to Jordan’s major growing NGO. As a Mercy Corps intern, I participated in Mercy Corps’ capacity-building efforts for JRF staff in areas that are my strengths as an anthropologist, helping to build particular skills for JRF staff and an appropriate knowledge base in order to implement the various projects effectively.

I was regularly asked to translate extensive training manuals, international correspondence, recommendation letters and JRF website articles between Arabic and English. Before my internship, JRF-Mercy Corps relied on private translators who charged a lot and did not deliver as fast or as well because they were not sufficiently acquainted with the concepts and terminology of development.

I was also asked to review the English language style manuals of JRF, and the JRF proposal writing guidelines, with their improvement, as needed, in view. As an anthropologist, I contributed significantly to the work of JRF-Mercy Corps in this area by editing and critiquing survey manuals and methodologies and accompanying JRF workers to the field in order to maximize the qualitative and statistical values of collected data.

With Mercy Corps’ support, I prepared a series of training workshops, some of which focused on the theory, history and methodology of holistic and integrated socio-economic development. Other workshops helped develop the skills of cross-cultural cooperation and learning especially between Jordanian NGO’s and US nongovernmental and governmental sectors. A key aim was the illumination of those parallel aspects of Jordan and the US cultures that are likely to foment a lack of cross-cultural understanding, or even conflict that can impede successful cooperation and mutual learning in the area of development. The aim is to turn those aspects from obstacles of difference into constructive strengths of diversity.

Photo Gallery

Kamal Feriali, WCP intern, with north Badia sheep at a sustainable community farm created in partnership with Mercy Corps and the Jordan River Foundation as a part of the Rural Community Cluster Development Program.