Autumn Planning Day

August 20th

Today’s a planning day with Soraya. We meet up in the District Office, harmonise diaries (mostly social things and the forthcoming VSO training week for new arrivals). Then we pencil in dates for the eleven follow-up resource-making training sessions after yesterday’s pilot day so that we cover the whole of Muhanga District. It means I’ll have a lot of formal letters to write to the Districts and I mustn’t leave them until the last minute like I usually do!

Soraya wants to talk to Claude about his expectations for her but of course he’s out to Gisenyi at some meeting or other, so it ends up with us doing our own things as usual.

I take Soraya over to the post office and introduce her to the postmistress and arrange that she’ll be sharing the same post box as Tom and me.

By now it’s getting pretty close to lunchtime, so we adjourn to “Tranquillité”. In the afternoon I go home to the flat. What I’m supposed to be doing is writing these letters to the districts and arranging the training. What I actually do is sort out all the missing blog entries during the family holiday. There’s no chance of me being able to remember all we did a fortnight ago in sufficient detail to make it interesting, so I decide to do a series of picture essays – after all, with the family here we did take lots of photos. So I’m compressing pictures and selecting ones to show the world, and that takes up most of the afternoon. A good job done, too and quite a load off my mind.

I also prepare emails to send to the Dutch about the Shyogwe project, and while I’m at it I write down all the latest Gitarama gossip to send in emails to Cathie and Geert. Even in the three weeks of August there’s a lot of changes, and if Geert in particular came back here tomorrow he’d be surprised at how much if different from his last days at the end of April.

I’m supposed to be fixing for Soraya and I to do an inspection tomorrow at Ruli ADEPR school, but when I ring Emmanuelle I get a torrent of such fast French that I can’t really absorb anything except that she’s at a meeting tomorrow so it’s not convenient. Blast; I’ve left it too late to try anywhere else.

In the evening I go to the internet café and upload lots and lots of material onto the blog, but there are still all the holiday photos to do. The connection gets slower and slower (there’s so many people using the machines that there’s not enough chairs for all of them) so there’s no point in trying to fiddle around with pictures. That’s a job for tomorrow.

Best thing about today – feeling that I’m getting my autumn planned out more efficiently than I did the spring term!