Thursday, October 13, 2005
Wednesday the 12th
I thought things were going to be winding down. I’m not teaching any more, and just have to shepard through the last arrangements before the Entrepreneurship graduation on Nov 5, and finish what I started on the eucalyptus oil project. Well...
At the Rotary Club meeting last night, they decided to make me the head of the Community Service Committee since I have gotten them so involved in the Entrepreneurship program. Even though I will be leaving Mwanza at the end of this month. So it doesn’t mean too much, except that it means attending a couple of Board Meetings starting tomorrow night. And it means that they will probably donate $220 to the Graduation Ceremony, which takes us out of the bind made when the expected contributions from the bankers did not materialize. Great news, but it does complicate my calendar a bit.
Gunje, my Headmaster friend from the Burundi border, said he would be in Mwanza over last weekend, and would bring samples of eucalyptus leaves to extract. I tried to contact him for confirmation without success. He appeared at my door this afternoon, and we had a long talk about our lives and about eucalyptus. His phone hadn’t been working. I tried to set us up to meet the lab people tomorrow but they are busy and Gunje has to catch the 5am bus back to the border on Friday. So I will take the samples to the lab and talk about the analyses without him on Friday. Setting up the equipment and running the oil extractions will be fun, but will be more time carved into my schedule. And no chem experiment ever goes right the first time.
We have a major meeting of the entrepreneurship instructors on Saturday to finalize our plans for the graduation. The Director of VETA has asked to sit in. And now Anna is coming from Dar es Salaam to represent TechnoServe also, with a separate agenda of finding out what is planned and what has been going on.
Next week I have to get copies of the best 12 business plans to the bankers for judging, and pick up their results later in the week.
That’s before the usual stuff of writing writing reports on my Peace Corps activities, project and grant summaries, collecting books and stuff that has to be returned to HQ, deciding how to unburden myself from all the stuff I don’t want to take back with me.
But all this stuff is my own doing and I actually feel pretty good about it all, so how can I complain?
I thought things were going to be winding down. I’m not teaching any more, and just have to shepard through the last arrangements before the Entrepreneurship graduation on Nov 5, and finish what I started on the eucalyptus oil project. Well...
At the Rotary Club meeting last night, they decided to make me the head of the Community Service Committee since I have gotten them so involved in the Entrepreneurship program. Even though I will be leaving Mwanza at the end of this month. So it doesn’t mean too much, except that it means attending a couple of Board Meetings starting tomorrow night. And it means that they will probably donate $220 to the Graduation Ceremony, which takes us out of the bind made when the expected contributions from the bankers did not materialize. Great news, but it does complicate my calendar a bit.
Gunje, my Headmaster friend from the Burundi border, said he would be in Mwanza over last weekend, and would bring samples of eucalyptus leaves to extract. I tried to contact him for confirmation without success. He appeared at my door this afternoon, and we had a long talk about our lives and about eucalyptus. His phone hadn’t been working. I tried to set us up to meet the lab people tomorrow but they are busy and Gunje has to catch the 5am bus back to the border on Friday. So I will take the samples to the lab and talk about the analyses without him on Friday. Setting up the equipment and running the oil extractions will be fun, but will be more time carved into my schedule. And no chem experiment ever goes right the first time.
We have a major meeting of the entrepreneurship instructors on Saturday to finalize our plans for the graduation. The Director of VETA has asked to sit in. And now Anna is coming from Dar es Salaam to represent TechnoServe also, with a separate agenda of finding out what is planned and what has been going on.
Next week I have to get copies of the best 12 business plans to the bankers for judging, and pick up their results later in the week.
That’s before the usual stuff of writing writing reports on my Peace Corps activities, project and grant summaries, collecting books and stuff that has to be returned to HQ, deciding how to unburden myself from all the stuff I don’t want to take back with me.
But all this stuff is my own doing and I actually feel pretty good about it all, so how can I complain?
