Electricity will be the death of me yet!

I am so terrible at this blogging business! Well I'm going to blame it on the hecticness of my schedule. Work has been crazy insane lately; I feel like I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. There are about a million programs all going on at the same time right now and trying to keep them all straight is just a task in itself. I have been busy organizing my training that is happening on Wednesday; overall the planning went pretty well but I have to say there were definitely a few gliches. Everything seems to have worked itself out now though so I'm just praying that Wednesday comes and goes without any major problems. Because everyone in the office is so busy people have been throwing odds and ends at me to complete. For example, on Thursday on the Programme Officers informed me that she is supposed to be attending an Annual general meeting on Friday for an AIDS Network organization but couldn't attend because she had a presentation to give at a training workshop so that somehow means I got to go and represent CPA. The organiztion is currently in the process of creating and adopting their constitution so everyone was given the constitution to read in advance and make comments on. I did this (the night before because that's when I was told about this) and was expected to go and make comments on behalf of CPA. This could mean one of two things; it could mean that they trust me a great deal to represent them appropriately or that I was the only one available to go and they didn't really care about the meeting so they weren't bothered with who they sent as long as someone attended. I'd like to think it's the first one. I have to say that it was an interesting experience; people spent ages aruging over things that didn't really matter in the least and it went on for ages!! People spent ages arguing about certain things that I thought were obvious and when I explained what i was thinking there were a lot of "ohhh's and hmmmm's and some yes I suppose people do travel don't they?" Overall it was an interesting experience but I'm really glad I didn't have to stay until the end because I had another meeting to attend. It's been a crazy couple of days! On top of all this I've been trying to get the second newsletter for the year out. I've managed to convience them to extend the deadline until tomorrow...it's nearly done but not quite there. In the midst of all this my training workshop was yesterday and it went very well; I think I did quite well for the first time. I'm just really glad it's over but now I have to write the report...god I really hate writing reports...they are the bain of my existence!!

Haven't had time for much relaxing lately so there aren't many stories to share other than other work related but on Sunday I went to the pool to spend a couple of hours relaxing; it was very nice. Hopefully there will be some good relaxing this weekend to make up for the last couple of weeks.

Anyway, I'm going to sign off before the power goes off. I actually wrote this post on Sunday but the power went off while I was in the middle of writing (surprise surprise) so I apologize if some of it doesn't make sense but I wanted to post again so nobody gets worried about me going missing! Hope all is well wherever this may find you!

Until next time,

Welcome to Winter in The Gambia!

Well it's finally November and you can tell winter is coming!! Certainly not the winter I'm used to but definately winter for The Gambia; apparently winter starts near the end of November but it's already starting to cool right down by around 5 or 6 in the evening and I LOVE it!!! It's still hot during the day but not as hot as it used to be so I'm very happy...can you tell?!?!

Life has been moving along; work is picking up a fair bit now, money from the donors finally came in so there is actually work to do! There are so many activities on the go for November and December as well as people traveling outside The Gambia for trainings and workshops; I truly dont' know how everything is going to get accomplish....or accomplished properly I should say but I know that they will manage, they always do. There are going to be a couple of trainings upcountry as well so I'm hoping I will get taken along for the ride. There is one coming up at the end of November and it looks like I'll be spending my Birthday in Bansang (actually it will probably be spent on the road); it will be an interesting way to celebrate turning a quarter of a century!

I'm also very excited because on Friday one of the Programme Officers asked me to implement one of her trainings. Of course I won't actually be running the training but I get to do all the planning and logistics; basically everything from finding and confirming the venue and planning the activities for the day, choosing and inviting the resource persons and so on. I suppose it sounds a little crazy to be excited about such a thing consider it will probably be a lot of work considering everything else that is going on at the same time but this is the first time in 3 months that I'll actually be learning something useful!

Well enough about work, I've spent most of the weekend so far just relaxing; I will probably go to the market tomorrow to check out some fabric...I love being able to pick out fabric and take it to the tailor and make anything I want for a relatively cheap price! Then I'll probably spend the rest of the day lounging by the pool or maybe taking a stroll along the beach. Spent all last weekend at the beach; myself and a few of the VSOs went to Kartong. Kartong is a beach "town"that is just near the Senegalses border, it is approximately 2 hours from where I live by public transit. One of the girls had a couple of tents borrowed from the British High Commission so we set up the tents on the beach and camped out under the stars. Sounds a little cliche but it was beautiful; the beach certainly isn't as beautiful as some I've seen but it was very nice, you could see thousands of stars and the moon was so bright that you could walk around the beach and didn't need a flashlight. Even during the day the beach was totally deserted, it was just the four of us...and the guy who wanted to marry me but that's besides the point. It was a very nice way to spend the weekend; went back to work on Monday a little burnt but very relaxed!

Well I guess that's about it for now....I am currently working on uploading some photos onto facebook; it seems that it is a very slow process but there are a few there and I will try to add some more. Anyway, I hope this note finds everyone well.

Take Care and Until Next Time,

Oops

Wow...I'm really terrible; I didn't realize how long it has been since I'd last written! Well I guess I'll just start with a recent update because I don't even think I could begin to remember all the things that have happened over the last (nearly) month. Things are really just same old same old, I have to admit. Things with work have been picking up some. I guess it was last week now, I went into my bosses office and approached him about starting of some projects because I am bored (and yes I told him I was bored). There is now an Alliance building project that I am slowly working on; hoping to having a meeting with one of the Board members when he returns from Zambia about going forward with determining who CPA's members actually are. My boss also suggested a few other projects that I could start work on; it's nice because they are really interesting projects for the most part and they are things that I can work on at my own pace or put on hiatus if I get busy with other things. The VSO volunteer and I are currently working on creating the last newsletter of the year. The boss was wanting to have it our for the end of November but knowing how slowly things function in this country and considering we have just recently started we didn't think there was anyway that would be possible but it turns out that UNICEF (they fund the newsletter) needs to have a first draft to the printers by the 20th of November otherwise we might not get the funding for it. So it looks like we don't have a choice but to rapidly produce a newsletter in the next 3 weeks. Things are going well so far but I have to admit that I'm not looking forward to the inevitable stresses ahead of chasing people to submit their stuff. Fingers crossed that all goes well!

In other news, I am now doing some volunteer work on the side for an NGO called Education for All (EFA). I am currently trying to find a donor to fund their new strategic plan and once that has been completed I have to write a proposal. I was kind of worried about the proposal writing but I think anything is going to seem easy next to having to find a damn donor. Now I truly understand why people hate the donor community; they certainly don't like to make things easy or even comprehensible for potential grantees. I will stop with this now before I bore you all to death but truly a frustrating endeavor!

Not been doing much other than working lately; so much so that I really can't recall anything that I've done other than strolling the beach and spending time lounging by the pool on a Sunday afternoon...hmm not sure if that's a good sign or not...probably not.

I've been thinking more about traveling, it's becoming that time of year (although you'd never know it if it wasn't for the calender) where people start asking what you're doing for the holidays. I know that CPA doesn't close for any extended length of time but I'm allowed to take a week or two holidays so I'm trying to decide what I want to do with myself. With so many friends in the Eastern and Southern parts of Africa I was hoping to make a trip out there but it turns out that it is extrodinarly expensive to fly within Africa (I guess because most people in Africa can't afford to travel and if they can they generally head outside Africa; it seems that most people who travel within Africa do so only for business purposes). So I am thinking about what I want to do, I might price some flights at different times of the year and see how things go; I really do want to see something other than The Gambia and knowing myself I'll probably regret it if I go home and didn't travel so I might just have to bite the bullet and pay the extortionate prices. Well see what happens.

Well I guess that's about it for now, I will try to be more diligent about writing but I won't make any promises! I hope that all is well with all of you wherever you are in the world!

From the Smiling Coast of Africa,

2 Months and Counting!

Well, once again the last week has been a bit of a blur! I'm not even really sure I recall most of it. I guess I will start by saying that most of my goals from last time were successful...sorta. I managed to get my visa extended until the end of December this time and amazingly enough it required no bribes at all! The second goal of telling Social Welfare that their database is a peice of crap was a little less successful. The man coordinating the whole thing was quite impressed with the thouroughness of the job I did on making "comments"; however, said that most of the documents were copied and pasted right from the original document which meant that they couldn't be changed. The Director of Social Welfare said that it is not possible to change the wording of policies and whatnot. Hmmm, seems like the extensive comments on all 86 pages was a gigantic waste of my time! The Director did say that they would take note of the comments and would present them to the National Assembly the next time the policies and whatnot came up for review. Ya right...like I believe that! The whole document was so incredibly poorly written that I couldn't comprehend the majority of what was being said. I don't know why the policies are so poorly written but apparently the studies (which are also very poorly written) were actually written mostly by British expats so I KNOW that they were not poorly written so now I'm having a bit of a hard time believing that the database was a simple copy paste job. Either way, it's out of my hands now and thank god my name is not attached to it.

Work has been midly amusing as always; I have spent the last couple of days at a training for members of the National Assembly....most of the last two days have been spent in arguments but I think they are arguing just for the sake of it. Really it is just the majority leader that has been instigating all the problems. The training is continuing on until tomorrow but I refused to attend on a Sunday...they are not paying me enough to work 7 days a week!

These training sessions are always interesting but other than that life at CPA is quite dull; I will be starting work on the newsletter that is coming out and there are definately cool projects that I could be working on but other interns in the past have also worked on the same projects and their work has been neatly filed away and not looked at since so I'm not really sure I want to waste my time working on something that I know will also be filed away for "safe keeping". Recently I have been networking with a few people from other organizations; there is an NGO that is education based that is just around the corner from where I live and currently they have no staff so I am meeting with the head of the organization (the one man show) on Monday to discuss options for doing some work for them. He seems to think that he might be able to negotiate with my boss for taking me at EFA on Friday's instead of going to CPA (since Friday is a half day at CPA anyway); I'm not sure my boss is going to go for that but I could always go to EFA on Friday's after CPA or do some contract work on my own time. Afterall, they can't control what I do on my own time and CPA certainly isn't utilizing my ablilities so I'll go elsewhere and get some extra experience. I was also chatting with the Policy and Budget Analyst from one of CPA's partner organizations and he wants me to look in possible Canadian donors for the new strategic plan they are developing so I will also go and visit him sometime this week. It looks like I have a lot of work coming my way in the next couple of months but if it all works out as I hope it should be a great learning experience!

Some of my IPMP friends have now arrived in The Gambia and I have to say that it is very strange to be in West Africa and just run into someone from home on the street or in the internet cafe as it so happens!! It seems that time is just flying by; it's so nice having someone else in the office now as well and we've been hanging out alot since she arrived a couple of weeks ago. It's so nice now to have company other than my own! Well, I guess that's about it for now. Hope that everyone is well and it's always nice to hear from the other sides of the world!

We Shall See How it Goes

Well I have to honestly say that the last week has been a bit of a blur. I don't even recall the first portion of last week so it couldn't have been that exciting but I definately remember it being a busy weekend so I guess I'll start from there.

I went into work on Friday as usual expecting it to be a usual Friday but Musu, one of the program officers, asked me to go with her to partners planning meeting for Act!onAid. Act!onAid is one of CPA's biggest donors and every year they hold a planning meeting with their partner organizations to discuss the activities they have planned for the following fiscal year and to get input on what their partners think; it is also a new opportunity to bring new partners on board. It was pretty interesting to hear about some of the up coming projects but I think it was even more interesting to hear about the budgets. Some were incredibly small; I could believe the ambitions they had for an education budget of 700,000 dalasis (sorry, I don't know how many CDN dollars that is but just divide by 20 if you are interested)! Of course, like everything in The Gambia, the meeting started two and half hours late so obviously it went much later than it was supposed to. The last activity involved thinking of a witty name for the country strategy plan; a bit of a waste of time in my opinion considering it was 4pm on a Friday afternoon in the middle of Ramadan. Regardless, we finally got out of there and proceeded to a symposium given for the International Day for Peace. That was also interesting; most of the speakers understood that their address was to be SHORT but some must have thought they were the only ones presenting because they just continued to ramble on and on, even when the power went out, that did not stop them from talking, they just continued on. I think I finally arrived home that night around 7:30, only six and a half hours later than normal for a Friday. But it did not stop there. Saturday was the Global Peace Games; it is a "football" (so soccer) tournament put on by one of the NGOs here. It started late (do I even need to continue metioning that or is it just assumed by this point?), absolutely no one paid attention to the opening speeches given by the Secretary of State for Sport & Development and UN representative. The games were good though, our team lost but they did quite well considering most of the other teams were semi-professional clubs and I thought they did extrodinarily well considering two of our players played in their sandels while all the other teams were decked out in proper gear. So came the end of Saturday where I didn't arrive home again until about 7pm. Amat came over to visit and we sat outside chatting for a couple of hours because the power was out again (about the fourteenth time that week) and the candles were making the house extremely hot! Sunday was just a day of relaxation...definately needed.

Another week has come and is in the process of going. Njundu (the National Coordinator) is on a workshop in Kenya this week so the office is quite peaceful. The VSO intern also started work this week so it is nice to have someone to commiserate with. Have done absolutely no work yet this week and there is likely little to come other than proofing and making comments on a document that the Department of Social Welfare is putting together for a Child Protection Database. I had completed my part alredy because the meeting was supposed to be on Monday but they post-poned the meeting and didn't bother to contact us about it so now I have MORE time to make comments! Looking forward to Monday. Well I suppose that is about it for now. People always say "how can life be boring or mundane...you are living in Africa!" but this blog must be proof that life is just about the same wherever you are in the world....just different scenery.

Goals for this week:
- Bribe top immigration officials to extend my visa for "free"

Goals for next week:
- Tell the Department of Social Welfare that their database document is a peice of literary garbage.

What a Month it will be!

So it's only been a week and I'm trying to be more contientous about posting regularly. Sadly enough, I feel like I don't have much to write about at the moment. Work is plugging along slowly but surely; this week in particular is just dragging along. My theory is because the extended breakfast breaks no longer exist to break up the day. Ramadan arrived on Friday; it was supposed to start Thursday but like everything else in The Gambia it also did not manage to start on Thursday, apparently you can't start Ramadan if you can't see the moon and I guess it decided not to make an appearance on Wednesday evening so it started Friday instead. It's been an interesting few days to say the least; I actually fasted on Friday as well. I hadn't really intended to but I arrived at work knowing that I wasn't going to eat until after 1pm when I left the office but as it turned out there was meeting that afternoon that someone had forgotten to tell me about so I ended up being there until 4pm without having had anything to eat or drink so I just decided that I would continue on until that evening. It actually wasn't that bad, I didn't even really get really thirstyuntil around 6pm so all in all it went pretty well. I have not fasted again properly and don't really intend to; I generally fast at work because I usually feel too guilty to go and get food in an office full of tired and hungry people.

Ramadan has definately had an interesting effect on people; people's tempers have been better than I expected but they are all very tired all the time because they were up at 5 am to pray and eat before the sun comes up. As you can imagine, in a society that's already kinda lazy, this leads to futher slacking. Yesterday, one of my co-workers decided to take a nap in the conference room when the National Coordinator left the office fore a training seminar. Then the power went off for awhile and when I went back to her office a while later she had disappeared; her computer was off and her bags were gone. It was about 1pm at this point; the office now closes at 2:30 instead of 4pm because of Ramadan and she couldn't even manage to wait the extra hour! It makes me laugh and cringe all at the same time!

Other than that things are going well; it will be nice when Ramadan is over and Amat and go back to accompanying me to the beach so I don't get harassed. I was bored on Sunday evening so i decided to take a walk to the beach...BIG mistake! In the 40 minutes that I was there, 4 people invited themselves to sit down and chat not understanding "I want to be alone!" and that four doesn't include the one who caught me on my way home!! One guy suggested I give him my number so we can get together sometimes...and this was AFTER I told him I had a husband about six times!! Then I ran into him AGAIN, lucky me, when I was walking back alone the beach to go home and he invited me to his house for dinner. I near strangled the guy..."what didn't you understand the first fourteen times"!!! By the ned of the experience I was so frustrated so I don't think I'll be going back to the beach until after Ramadan...only 25 days to go! But overall things are good; can't believe it's nearly 7 weeks now. In a way it still feels like I've been here forever but in another way I can't believe the end of September is already approaching. It certainly doesn't feel like fall here...but I wish it did...without the winter to follow of course! Anyway, I hope all is well with everyone, wherever you may be.

Until next time,

Excuses Excuses

Ok...well I guess I haven't been so diligent about keeping the blog for the past couple of weeks; I really don't even know where the time has gone! I guess things have been pretty busy as of lately; work has finally picked up...well a couple of weeks ago now I guess. I have been busy writing reports, I don't know what the development world would be without all these reports which I am CONVINCED donors don't actually read! It doesn't actually take me that long to compile these reports (for a one day training, I completed the report in two days which apparently has never been done?!?!?) but of course life is never that easy because life in the office is all about democracy (interesting considering the country); everything has to be read by everyone in the office for them to make comments on and as I'm sure you can imagine, people forget about it, promise to take it home and read it and then leave it at the office or simply just let all the other papers pile on top of it and it takes weeks before you get it returned to you to make the adjustments. I find this particularly interesting because there was such stress that the report needed to be written by a certain date because it absolutely HAD to be sent to the donor...that was probably about two weeks ago now and I still haven't seen the necessary revisions. But that is life at CPA. This week I am at another training session in Brikama; this one is for final year students at the Teachers' College and they are being trained on Child Rights, Child Protection, Corporal Punishment and Alternative Methods of Discipline. It started on Monday and will go until Thursday; it has been an interesting session so far. As per all trainings here in The Gambia, we were late to arrive. I kept encouraging them along but all to no avail and we were an hour late; thank goodness one of the facilitators went there directly from her house and as a result was on time. Luckily we arrived only for the power to go out a short while later; it was out of about 3 hours and the room was boiling!!! Lunch was supposed to be from 1:30-2:30 but (Gambian style) it was not ready on time; it was finally ready at 3:45, just 45 minutes before the session was supposed to end for the day but of course, everything here starts late and runs late so we did not end up finishing until 5:30. By the time I got home it was nearly 7 and I was exhausted only to do it all again today. Today really wasn't much different; we were 2 hours late this morning but the power didn't go out today, lunch was on time and we finished a half hour early (only because of the looming thunderstorms I'm sure) so I guess all and all it was a pretty good day. Hopefully the rest of the week will continue just as nicely.

But of course, just because the end of the week comes does not mean that the work is done. On Saturday, the youth group, Voice of the Young, is having their monthly General Meeting. I was given (or rather forced) the task of giving this months presentation. So on the first Saturday of Ramadan I have to give a presentation on Effective Communication skills to a bunch of tired, hungry and thirsty teenagers...should be interesting...I guess I should start preparing at some point....maybe Friday.

Other than that things have been quite relaxed. I had my first Africa dress made last week in anticipation of wearing it on Friday but when I got it back from the tailor the skirt turned out to be about 6 inches too long! So I took it back today and told him he MUST have it ready for Thursday (the tailor is in the same town as the training this week which is quite far from where I live so if it is ready by Thursday the driver will take me to pick it up, otherwise I have to make my own way there and I am refusing to do that)! So fingers crossed that that works out!!

I'm sure there are other stories to tell but I am running out of time and I should probably get back before it starts to get dark and I trip over the sandy road. I have been trying to upload pictures but none of the internet cafes have the proper plug ins; one has told me that they will install them but I'm sure it'll take ages. I tried emailing but then the internet crashed and that didn't work either so I guess it might be a little while but I am working on it I promise!!!

I hope that this note finds you all well...I haven't heard from some of you in awhile...you know who you are but I hope that things are well regardless. Hope to hear from you all soon, it's always nice to get news from home. Anyway, take care and until next time...

From the Smiling Coast of Africa!