Helping People Help Myself

I am managing one ongoing project in Rajasthan and two new projects to be initiated this year.
Taking over an ongoing project is always tricky because you don't know the background and history in detail even though you may have briefing sessions with a previous person managed the project. This is project is implementing community-based watershed to increases awareness of water management in villages, build water structures to extract underground water and to store it for daily usage as well as for cultivation and other economic activities. The project covers a desert region, so called Marwar region, the east part of Rajasthan where people continuously suffer from lack of water.
This project is funded by Italian Development Corporation and managed by UNDP although the implementing partner is responsible for ground work.
My task of this project is more like a project supervisor who check plans, financial management, human resources and quality of the project team's work. I cannot work in villages everyday but I can still feel that I am closely working with people or for the eventual beneficiaries. However, not only advantages to deal with this project, I am having some struggles and I will be by the end of 2009 when this project will be closed. Anyway, it is a good challenge and a good learning process that I wanted to experience.