Saturday, July 31, 2010

66 days in...

My last blog is just a short snapshot of my worldview. Worldview can be described as the story we live by. Some of us live by many stories and flip back and forth between stories depending on what is most convenient or comfortable at the time. Unfortunately, I am among the first of those who switch stories when the going gets tough. Thankfully though, when we are honest with ourselves we can realize our own idiosyncracies and grow past our immaturities.

In this blog, I hope to give you a snapshot of my more day to day hands on experience.

So since my last blogg here is what has happened in terms of work. Me and my collegue travelled to Pemba, a city about 6 hours north of Nampula for two weeks. The mission of this trip was to make as many contacts as possible in this city as this is where a new microfinance office will open up in January, a daunting task. Basically, the task is to start a microfinance institution from the ground up. So we met with as many people as we could ranging from potential founders to the Governor of Cabo Delgado, the province. The rest of the time was made up of looking for a potential office, opening an account, and a billion other tasks. Then the next two weeks were made up of organizing a board visit and accompanying and translating for the board members. This entailed a lot of traveling, presentations, visiting beneficiaries, and making sure the monitoring visit ran smoothly.

So those are the activities of the last month or so. It may sound interesting to some of you and it may not. Whatever the case, for me, it was a huge opportunity and extremely stretching. I think a good summary of my work experience so far is that I have been meddling with responsibilities that I have no business meddling with. I am probably exagerating, but it certainly doesn't seem like it. My organization is as small as it gets thus I can't just sit back and watch. Here in mozambique there are only two of us my supervisor and me, and in Canada there are only two people. This is pretty cool cuz I get to learn a lot, but it also seems like we are short staffed all the time. Needless to say, it has been a busy month and according to the workplans I am bound to lose my mind before long.

Oops, crap! I gotta pack. I will have to finish this blog later. I am on the road again tomorrow to Nacala. Their operating system went down so my mission is to get it back up running again. See what I mean!? I have no business trying to fix a microfinance cooperative's operating system. I need Conor's techinical abilities, oh Conor please come visit, Mozambique is the most Latin American African country there is, you would love it.



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1 comment:

  1. Bahaha, the new tourism campaign: "Mozambique is the most Latin American African country there is"

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