Some days, I feel like I’m accomplishing very little. Part of the problem is that my expectations are still too high. I’m an American, and I’ve grown accustomed to seeing daily visible progress in (especially) my work. Africa simpy doesn’t allow this. I’ve told many people that you can have a to-do list, but don’t expect to accomplish anything on it, at least not in the short term. Even simple tasks are hard here, and much more time consuming than I’d like.
Take for example, the simple task of paying the rent. In the US, it’s an automatic withdraw from a bank account, or an online transaction of some kind. Here, I have to take money out of the bank (in shillings) over a period of several days (ATM limits) and walk it down to the property manager’s office. Sounds straight-forward, but it’s not. The finance guy isn’t always there (I haven’t quite determined the schedule because frankly, there aren’t any hard start and stop times here) and I often have to take a few trips before I find him. Then, when I do find him, he needs to calculate the exchange rate (the house rent is in dollars) and more often than not, I don’t have enough money because the exchange rate went up. Which means another day, and another trip to the ATM, 24 hours after the last withdrawal. Finally, when I have enough cash, it’s counted (thricely) and a hand-written receipt is generated. The training center rent is a similar process, but paid at a different office, and it’s emotionally painful becuase we’re quite behind on the rent and they hassle me, and threaten to shut us down every time we make a payment.
Relationships are also important and complicated here, not just because it’s Africa, but because we live in Jinja, “the Mayberry of Uganda”. Small town life has it’s own complications and you have to try your best to get along with everybody. So when a relationship is strained, it needs to be dealt with. So today I had a three and a half hour meeting with someone I have relational stress with, in an effort to sort it out. We had a godd relationship, events ensued and just like that we were at odds. The meeting was time consuming but important and things landed in a good spot. It was time well-spent.
Between taking Declan to and from school and cleaning the house in preparation for guests this weekend, my day was over.
I did manage to spend a couple of hours (after Declan was in bed) working on the server and client builds and also rewriting the html to accommodate all the software that we’re cramming onto the cards. I’m really close to releasing the details of our educational build. I have to do something even slightly technical every day or I’ll go nuts.
