Money for jam

Last night I made my excuses and gave dinner a skip. I was exhausted and the thought of making polite conversation just did not appeal. This morning when I found out who all had gone I was really happy that I did not. There has been some conflict between some of the SA participants because of payment (or rather non-payment) of monies and to have to sit through a whole evening of the tension would have really irritated me. So I made my excuses and went to sleep early.

This morning I received the news that the project (whose meeting I am at) decided that the project that I coordinate is so important to the region that they increased the funding that they will be giving us. Of course it comes with additional work but this is work that was always on the cards but that we were unable to undertake due to financial constraints. So look out Mauritius, Madagascar and Comoros - I am on my way to visit!


To get to today, it has been endless! We started off by reading through the meeting report paragraph by paragraph to get the document and budgets unanimously approved. Oh my goodness, this was pure torture because once again it boiled down to semantics among more other issues. The best thing (!) was that at 13h00 the translators got up and walked out the meeting. They only work for a specific number of hours at a time and are quite inflexible about working for any amount of time extra. So the meeting ended with much frustration as participants from both language backgrounds (French and English) were unable to follow what was being said a certain times. The representative from the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome keeps on reiterating that the translators are the real mafia who control everything! Actually he has been my saving grace through the entire meeting because he has an amazing sense of humour and has been quietly quipping about almost everything over the past five days.


We ended the day with another paragraph by paragraph analysis of the second meeting's report. I guess it is a way of getting everyone to agree that the documents are a true representation of what was said during the meeting but it takes forever.


So I have one more night in Mombasa and tomorrow will blog from Nairobi. Hopefully when I do blog, I will be overjoyed by India beating Pakistan in the Champions' Throphy. GO INDIA!!!!!!

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