I had an excellent three hour meeting today.  I bet I never in my life get to say that again about a three hour meeting.  With my counterpart and the Secretary Comtable, we revisited the three month plan and fit everything together for what I will be doing and how that will proceed.  I will be making an excel sheet and will put it here once I do.  Hopefully it will give everyone an idea of what I am doing, which right now is mostly just having a lot of meetings, but in a couple of weeks will be having a session or two every day.

One of APIC’s initiatives (APIC is my partner ONG), is to have a serious of sessions on how to start and run a business, for which they would like my help.  I was happy that, after looking at what they wanted to teach, I felt competent to help teach on several of the topics.  I also made a suggestion that is probably my first real attempt to change something they are doing, and they liked it a lot.  What they were going to do is somehow do a study of different types of businesses to see what was feasible.  Sort of a large scale feasibility study so that they could tell people in these business trainings what business they could go into.  Feasibility studies are good, but I thought it might be better if the people in the trainings did their own feasibility studies, and in the process learned about how to evaluate a potential business.  That way they could also make their own choices about what kind of business they want to start, which is better for them, and APIC doesn’t have to do some giant amorphous study of the feasibility of a million different tiny businesses.  Also, it helps to weed out the people who are just there because they think they will get something without having to work.  Anyway, point being that it went over pretty well and I felt like I actually contributed something good.

Which brings me to the ridiculousness, which isn’t so much an event as the fact that a small thing like that can put in such a good mood that you bike back to your house, not noticing the heat and barely hearing the petites yelling Toubabu at you, thinking that this is the best damn mood you have ever been in in your life, and if you were a little more of a sissie, you’d be balling your eyes out in happiness.

Instead I unrolled my plastic mat on my cement floor and took a nap until this afternoon, when I sat through another meeting, this one two hours long and in the local language of which I understand barely any.  I managed to stand up to be acknowledged at the appropriate time, and also met a French guy who works in the nearby national park, and therefor consider it a success.

PS – My posts have been filled with humourous tendencies lately, so take what I say with a grain of salt.