TAS meetings

Posted by Ali

Wow, so many things have happened at work in the past few days. Yesterday around mid-morning Max buzzed me and asked me to come to his office to have a meeting with him and Yona and two officials from the Tanzania Albino Society who were on campus to discuss two of our upcoming projects. I went, of course, but a good chunk of the meeting was in Swahili with Max and Yona inserting a few sentences here and there in English for my benefit. But I was able to drink some hot chocolate, since someone had brought some into the office for guests and us to share. You might think this an odd drink for Africa but we had had a rain storm about an hour before the meeting and I was pretty freezing. The hot chocolate did wonders to warm me up. Anyway then Max said he had to go into Arusha to talk to immigration and try once again to get our work visas and do a few other errands so he said he'd leave right after eating lunch and then hopefully be back by 2 (when our one-hour lunch break ends) and then work with me and the two TAS officials on how to improve our proposal for ADRA Australia that is due on Oct. 5.  Well, lunch time ended and I had the albino people in my office and Max didn't show up. It was a little distressing since I didn't really know what I was supposed to talk to them about and figure out and also, it was hard for us to understand each other. They each knew some English but the lady definitely knew more than the man and tried to translate for him whenever possible. I really wish I knew Swahili but sadly I don't yet. Anyway finally it was close to 4 p.m. and the lady had to get back to her office in Arusha to lock it up and so we ended our meeting and said good-bye. Max got back about 15 minutes later...

And today was more of the same. The man, Ernest who is the chairman of the national TAS headquarters in Dar es Salaam, stayed at our campus last night in one of the other cottages and then we were supposed to have more meetings with him, Max and I. Well, we talked together for about half an hour in the morning before Max had to go back to Arusha with Davona to meet some friends of theirs. Meanwhile I was supposed to continue on with the discussions from yesterday with Ernest on my own. I was flabbergasted. I thought we'd covered every aspect of the projects for those two hours yesterday. But apparently there was more to talk about. Eliza, the secretary, came to my office to help translate, but then after about an hour she said she wasn't feeling well and that she was going to go to the hospital and see if she had malaria (people here use the hospital the way that we use doctor's offices. Doctors here are almost all at the hospitals and so that's where they see their patients). So after she left we didn't really get too much more accomplished. Finally we absolutely ran out of topics to discuss and so Ernest went to the main office to wait for Max to return. He got back about half an hour later and then we had yet another meeting where I sat and listened to more Swahili and tried to pick out some words. And there was no hot chocolate this time. Oh well.

I'm getting nervous now about our ADRA Australia proposal. The first draft has to be turned in on Tuesday and Max still hasn't seen any of it that I've been working on while he was traveling and in the past few days since getting back. Oh well...at least it's a first draft. But I've pretty much done as much as I can do by myself and now I need Max to look it over and add to it or adjust things a bit. In the meantime I've been working on editing and formatting a finance manual for our office. The finance director is quite knowledgeable in accounting and finance matters, but his written English could use a little polishing. I quite like this task. I've been missing editing and I always enjoy making a document look nice and uniform. There are some things that I've been highlighting, though, that I have absolutely no idea what he was actually meaning to say and so I'll have to try to figure those out before I'm totally finished. Anyway, all I can say is that my grant writing skills are getting worn a little thin and my editing skills are enjoying the new challenge. Oh new grant writer, please get here soon. Oh work visas, please let that be possible...