Summing It All Up

I didn't meet the head of the Southern Africa department until my very last day at PSI. When I did, he asked me what I had learned over the past two months. I looked at him, and smiled, and said "Scanning." He laughed, I laughed, my site supervisor laughed.

In a sense, this was a very true statement - I did a lot of PDF scanning during my time at PSI. It was not exactly the bane of my existence, but I had been warned that being an unpaid intern at a nonprofit might merit this kind of work - and it was true. I scanned, I copied, I printed, I stapled, I made reservations for company bowling parties, I emailed, I fact-checked spread sheets, I drank free V8 from the company vending machines, and I ran one errand to Staples. I never had to fax anything (thank God). I was not by any means a necessary cog in the PSI machine, but every so often I helped make the organization run a little bit more smoothly, and when this happened I was aware of it. Even if that just meant making sure that someone's ergonomic keyboard had the right adapter.

I never had a formal orientation or any kind of training at PSI. This made for a situation in which I was really learning things as I went along. I didn't know the PSI acronyms, I didn't know where the media room was, I didn't know what projects we were working on, I didn't know what the term "private sector" meant (I'm still not sure that I could operationally define private sector, but I'm really good at saying "PSI works to find private sector solutions to health problems in the developing world..."). Everything at PSI was totally new to me - the entire world of nonprofits was new to me. I was happy to be at the office, and I felt that the office was happy to have me. I rarely found myself wondering when I got to go home, or why I was given such crap work to do, but I did feel like I was learning to walk and learning to run at the same time.

In the end, though, I got it down. I knew where the media room was, I knew how to scan a Brazilian passport, I knew how to access whatever computer file I had to access, I knew the acronyms, and I could sit through a brown bag lunch and understand (most of) what was going on. It's hard to articulate how a set of office skills is really in any way a helpful thing to have gained from my time at PSI - after all, becoming a good scanner wasn't exactly the goal of this endeavor - but scanning a document that proves that the Gates Foundation gave the organization that you intern for $4 million can sometimes be a really good thing.