A Day in the Life.....

At some point during my second or third week here in Kibondo, I settled into a pretty comfortable routine. My alarm starts ringing a little bit after the roosters next door start to really hit their stride and a few minutes later the buzz of the fluorescent lights as the power comes back on in the compound works like a secondary alarm clock that’s built into the house. This means that by 6:45 each morning, I’m awake and getting ready for work while the water for the tea boils. For the first week or so, I’d multitask during breakfast, writing notes to leave for Prisca. After several consecutive days of leaving notes with different versions of “you do not need to cook dinner today,” only to get back from work in the evening to find several hotpots lined up on the table, I decided that Prisca apparently thinks I need to be fattened up …. literally every other item on the notes would be taken care of while the no-dinner-items were being completely ignored. (A friend of mine who’s spending this year in Cairo joked about the success she’s had so far on the “developing nations diet” …. Tanzania might fall into the developing nations category, but if Prisca has anything to do with it, I’ll end up gaining weight this year, not losing it. (And before you question how much say Prisca really has in the matter, think about how effective the “finish your food, there are hungry children in [insert 3rd world country]” line was when you were growing up and then consider how that effect would be multiplied had you actually been in that country at the time. Wasting food = something that’s just not going to happen.)

So these days, I have more time to enjoy breakfast since realizing that Prisca will cook what she thinks I should eat means that I can spend less time writing her notes in the morning. Around 7:50 or so, I leave the house, duck under the Nkya’s gate, say hi to whichever member of their menagerie is closest, and then head up the road to the office compound. Although things could change, so far the job itself is for the most part a typical office job and tends to be either feast or famine … a lot of what I do involves preparing reports (reports to send to donors, internal reports to compile for the project, reports to send to the TCRS-Dar office, annual reports, semi-annual reports, quarterly reports, monthly reports … lots and lots and lots of reports) and since most of those reports have very similar deadlines, certain times of the month/year promise to be quite busy and other times will probably be pretty slow. I usually break for lunch around 1pm – there’s a canteen on the office compound so everyone once in awhile I’ll bring leftovers from the house and eat in my office, but on most days I enjoy Rhoda’s cooking and my co-worker’s company over at the canteen where I’ve also established a bit of a routine….i.e., a seat on the sunny-side of the porch and cooked bananas with cabbage (a whopping $0.60) or beans & rice ($0.30) when I feel like mixing things up. Then it’s back to the office until around 5, when I lock up and head home for the evening.

My first week in the office coincided with the deadlines for several semi-annual reports, so those first days had significantly less downtime than this past week. The upside of having downtime has been that I get to indulge some of my organizational neuroses … in other words, the files are in order, the computer is virus-free and entirely re-organized, and the dust has been cleaned out from under the keys of the keyboard. In addition to making me happy, all this organizing has also helped me familiarize myself with the ins and outs of the project’s activities, donors, and reporting mechanisms, which is always a good thing. I’m also the office’s human version of the Microsoft spell/grammar-check – which many other people would probably find tedious but I absolutely love to do :)

So there you have it … nothing terribly exciting but all my co-workers are friendly and I’m happy just knowing that I’m a cog in the wheel of an organization that does a lot of good for a lot of people in this part of the world.