16/9 and 17/9: Working again!

Today I had to start working again; I hadn’t really looked all that much forward to it, but it was good. We started off by visiting the riverside group; they will receive the 3^rd loan next week, so we went over their loan applications with them and listened to what they wanted and all that. There are only four women left in this group, one of them haven’t been so good at coming to the training sessions, so the others had previously said that they did not want her to get the full amount, but now they are okay with it. Not sure how vise a decision this is, but we want to respect their choice. Around lunch time I had a lot to do, as I had to fill in a lot of stuff for my later travels to Kenya, so that I can visit some of the Plan projects. I first had to go to a store to print out the papers, then I had to go back to the office to fill them out, then back again to the store to get it scanned in again. A lot of hassle all in all, but at the end I could send the papers onwards. After that we got some office work done, and then it was time for a Swahili lesson. Two and a half hours, at the end I met my new teacher; PJ, whom I will have because he has a lot of time and I need a lot of lessons.  On Tuesday we started off by visiting the Tupendane group where we did business visits with one of the members; Witness. Witness owns a fruit and vegetable stand, she is doing okay. Today there was a funeral for a very important member of the community, so after lunch we went straight to the Ikasura group because no one would be there anyway so we just needed to collect the money. That meant we were back early and could get some office work done. We are creating an evaluation survey that we will hand out to all the women and hear from them what they think about everything relating to their loans, their skills, their training, us etc. Then I had to go met up with Camille, Freja and Laura to plan our Zanzibar trip and to book all the rooms. It was really fun, we got almost hold of every hotel we wanted, we ate cake and had milkshakes, only downside was how much my phone charged me for making all those calls, but I had fun while doing it! We had to call Imma, our regular taxi driver, to take us home as it had gotten dark. We like Imma because he plays very loud music, something we don’t get anywhere else, but sometimes you just need very loud music.