2/10: Gustav’s birthday!

Today it is Gustav’s birthday! We are going to celebrate it tonight by going out to dinner. We started off the day by going to the CHE group, we needed to do four post loan interviews, only three were present, but it took so long to do them that it was okay we didn’t need to do that one more, as I was already late for my Swahili lesson as it was. This means I only got about one and a half hours of lessons today, which is not enough in the big scheme of things. Though it was really interesting to listen to all the women and hear about their businesses, it is incredible how big the gap is between some of the women, one had 300 chickens that produce a lot of eggs for her to sell, so she turns over a big income, another who sells solar power and something else I forget and also gets a big income, but then there was one who owns a shop, that has very little income. They have all gotten the same amount of loans, but they use it so differently. My Swahili lesson had to end at 3 pm, so down to 26,5 hours, because then Iddi was coming to pick me up so that we could go to his office and talk about the Mt. Meru trip, what to bring, when to meet and so on. He is going to be our guide with Nasoro, Nasoro is climbing Mt. Meru now, so we would meet him at the gate or on his way down and then he is going to go up with us again. There might also be the same cook and some of the same porters, like Jackson! We planned to meet all of us Friday evening to discuss everything and so that everyone will be comfortable about the trip and get all their questions answered. Then I had a lot of texting to do to tell everybody, we are none now, about it. I did that after meeting Camille, Laura and Freja at Africafe for a milkshake. Afterwards we went to Damacus to celebrate Gustav’s birthday. Damascus was on the Lonely Planet map, but there was nothing at the site of the map showed us to point us towards Damacus, it turned out that it was in a completely different direction, but close. There we got it birthday ready for Gustav and when he came sang him a birthday song. The food we were supposed to cook ourselves, so we could decide, it just took a long time. It was really nice and there was a guy playing the guitar, so we got home a bit after we are usually back, but it was still before 11 pm, and as we don’t have a curfew so that shouldn’t be a problem, but it seems it was. But then they should just give us a curfew, if they are going to make a big deal out of it. But other than that, it was a good day.

30/9 and 1/10: Never be idle

On Sunday I had been speaking with Camille about which part of Switzerland the new volunteer might be from, it turns out he is from the French part. This means that he does not speak English, which makes it a bit difficult to communicate though of course I speak a bit French, but I am not home all day, but of course the children doesn’t care which language he speaks so that won’t be a problem there. Today at the Riverside group we talked to them they were supposed to bring books and things so that we could do bookkeeping refresher training, but of course they didn’t, but I just hope they bring it next time. We had a lot of things to do at the office, but not so much time before my Swahili lesson, as it was right after lunch, after Sunday I still needed 33 hours and after today I’m down to 30 hours. I also had a lesson Tuesday which means there are 28 hours left. On Tuesday as Chrissie is in Zanzibar and Gustav was feeling unwell I was the only volunteer to go to the field, which didn’t really matter so much as none of the two groups had prepared what they were supposed to. In the first one there was only one person present because the others had to go to a government thing because the want to learn how to and get support to plant mushrooms. I had lunch at Elizabeth’s place, which was really good. I met her 4 months old boy, he was really cute. Otherwise I have been busy planning Mt. Meru and Zanzibar and having all the Swahili, so there is plenty to do, but as Thomas Jefferson once said: it is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.