While I never thought that my life here would be boring I did think that I would have more down time than I have had in the last 2 days. Here is the story. . . .
Tuesday was a normal day, meeting with the Minister of Agriculture and his Deputy Minister and sitting with them for about 1.5 hours and discussing the finer points of development in South Sudan. In short he expects all of the partners (international agencies and NGOs) to be transparent and open with the state government about their goals and results. The last thing that he wants is for their to be overlap of projects when there is so much work that needs to be done.
I get home to the hotel on Tuesday and order my hamburger and chips (french fries) and sit down to study and my cell rings. My co-worker calls to tell me that he is not feeling well and needs to go to the clinic and someone who lives in his compound is taking him. I tell him to let me know the outcome.
15 minutes later, I get a call that he is felling worse and he is by the side of the road and I need to go to him. Keep in mind that I don't have the car. So I call the driver and have him come and pick me up. 30 minutes later the driver arrives (he had to walk back to the office and then come and get me) we arrive at where my co-worker said he was and he was not by the side of the road but actually in a clinic. What he thought I could do since he was already receiving medical attention I was not sure but I went in anyways.
I talked to the very nice doctor who had already run some tests (malaria and typhoid) and had the results. He had typhoid, go figure, glad I updated my vaccine! She decides to treat him for malaria at the same time since they usually go together (even I knew that one) and writes up his bill, 155SSP for treatment. While that seems high it really is only $50, but my co-worker did not have that much with him so he needed me to loan him the money so he could get treatment. What was I going to say, No, of course not, I said sure just pay me pack on pay day.
The big problem was that my co-worker was in charge of two meetings on Wednesday that he would not be able to facilitate these meetings so it fell to me. Now keep in mind that I had only been in town for less than a week.
So my first meeting on Wednesday was with all of the partners that deal with Food Security in this area. I had to present what my project had done in the month of May and what we were planning on doing for June. Luckily another co-worker had sent this ahead of time and I had time to read up on this and knew what I was presenting. I was able to meet the other partners in town from WFP, Canadian Red Cross, Caritas, CRS, FAO and the others. It was an interesting meeting.
The second meeting was more of a challenge. The farmers spoke several different languages so we had to translate everything into 2 languages and I don't think that they agreed on much. By the end 8pm I was ready to say take it or leave it but I just decided to say nothing and let the staff from Juba take the lead. It was not a fun meeting.
By the end of the day I was ready for a shower and bed. I am glad that today I can just catch up on emails and update everyone on what it going on because I have a meeting tomorrow with the Governor of the state and I have a feeling that it is going to run long.
I have a feeling that I am going to have a lot of days like yesterday coming up!
No comments:
Post a Comment