ABSTRACT
The more closely we become acquainted with these [donors], the more evident it becomes that many of them work in an extremely ineffective manner. [W]e have noticed that where one person worked last year, now 4–7 people do the job of this one person. [We were incorrect in] viewing recent political changes as erasing a bureaucratic system which held paper as a god and had an unlimited number of forms and documents. [R]escued from the grasp of the Soviet bureaucratic system, we have been delivered not into a fresh current of enlightened work and stimulating initiative, but into a painfully familiar world of bureaucrats.… [D]onors began to demand that work hours be accounted for in [time sheets]. They require the workdays in the chart to be marked with eights. Just as under the Soviet era, we can fill in our eights; they don’t necessarily mean anything though, nor can they suggest to us how to more efficiently organize our work…. Nevertheless, they teach us how to fill in our eights. 1
