First Day!

Thanks for coming back! Hope that story wasnt too in depth for you; however, I can't make any promises for future withholding either. Read on at your own risk. But that said, I appreciate the both of you, or hundreds of you who are out there reading - I will try to update whenever I can, and will do my best to keep it lively. But this blog, my first, is more for me that for you. In all the crazy things Ive been through (or better put, gotten myself into) in my life, my biggest failure is that I have never written them down. And now in my 27 year old,post-blast concussed brain, I am already forgetting some of the great stories that have made me who i am today; keeping this blog, and thus having the pressure to write for others sake, is how Im actually writing for my own.

And now, a caveat to post number one. please do not think that Im afraid of, disgusted by, or otherwise snobbish to the conditions I found in the hotel, or any other situation i will write about. I would not be here if i didnt know the wonders of developing countries, and definitely would not have chosen the career path I did if i lived a way in which i needed everything to always be kosher. ill be writing accurate descriptions not to make comparisons or judge, but to convey what I am experiencing for those of you out there who may never have been lucky enough to enjoy the adventure and excitement that traveling outside of the disneyfied tourist zones brings.

OK. thursday morning. So I was up at 8, after three unsatisfactory hours of sleep, when I got my first real taste of africa time. We headed for the office, about 4 blocks away, and i met some of the employees of the ngo where Ill be working for the next several months. really nice people. we promptly got to work, writing a schedule for the annual update meeting that would be taking place tomorrow and saturday. there were 12 items on fridays schedule, 3 of which included the words break for tea or break for lunch. No s#*^, we were almost finished finalizing the schedule a mere two hours later. I wanted to shoot myself. after a short lunch, we returned for the afternoon work. i was going to put together a quick briefing on how to write effective grants. i pulled a couple of pages off the web and began cutting and pasting some key points. i was joined by an employee, and after an hour plus of us getting the wording and examples all tailored exactly to our organization, he offered for me to now compare this new document to a powerpoint he had saved on the same comp, which had been given to the organization by a professional grant writer when she had come to speak at the organization last year. i wanted to punch my face through the concrete wall. i knew it before i left, but the message was still slapping me in my extremely jetlagged face: efficiency, apparently, was not going to be the name of the game while in africa. time to sit back and enjoy the ride.