Dedication

Jackie and I are dedicated to our work, let me tell you! We nearly floated away today because of our commitment to making it to a meeting we had set up with some USAID folks to talk about language and education issues.

Because they have a consultant here who's on a pretty tight schedule, we decided to meet this morning at the lodge where they're staying. It's a pretty posh place - actually, the same place that hosted the Ladies' Coffee thing last weekend by their pool side! It's a lovely place to spend some time, so Jackie and I didn't mind the excuse to go out there on a Saturday morning, even if it was for "business".

It was quite cool this morning, and sprinkling with a bit of rain. But as I was having my shower, getting dressed and making my coffee, it was slowly getting darker and darker. That's not quite supposed to happen as the morning progresses, is it? But we hopped in the truck and started our trek out to the lodge. We had to have quite a long discussion before-hand on which was the best route to take out there - there are two roads, both with their own hazards. One of the roads has some pretty serious mud pits (and it has been raining a bit lately), and the other road is just really, really bumpy and it's quite the experience to wind your way around the maze of cavernous potholes.

We opted to take our chances with the cavernous potholes over the unknown status of the mud pit.

So off we went. And as we went, it kept getting darker and darker. Of course, we don't have a decent truck here that actually has functioning windshield wipers (new ones have been ordered from another city up North, but have not yet arrived). So as the clouds came and the sky kept getting even darker, and the wind started whipping up, it was becoming somewhat difficult to see out the front window. It was all rather eerie - the mud huts and the dirt road took on a rather sinister hue, in fact.

Finally, just as we were rounding the last corner (about 2 km away from the lodge - but keep in mind you can't drive about more than 15 km/hr on the potholed dirt track), the heavens absolutely let loose. It was a storm unlike any that I've been caught in! I think all the rain that hasn't come in the past month fell this morning as we were driving to our meeting.

It just kept coming and coming and coming. So we just kept crawling along the road, praying that we wouldn't get lost in one of the potholes (some of which ARE big enough to swallow a small car - thankfully we were in a pick-up truck!). We eventually made it to our destination, but then had a second challenge: how to get from the truck to the restaurant of the lodge where we were meant to meet our people.

The rain wasn't abating at all, so we decided we just had to run for it. And run for it, we did, splashing through the mud in the flooded parking lot (don't think for one minute that this was a nice paved parking lot!). We arrived in the restaurant absolutely soaked to the skin, splashed with mud up to our knees. We were a pretty pathetic sight - we looked rather a lot like drowned rats. I was wearing a skirt that just goes to my knees, so my skirt wasn't too muddy, except that our truck also leaks, so I had had muddy water leaking down on my skirt whilst still in the truck. Jackie was wearing trouser (for you N. Americans "pants"), which she had rolled up past her knees.

And this is how we arrived to have a meeting with USAID consultants, who are in charge of budgets of millions of dollars in the education sector and get paid big bucks to live in nice sealed, air conditioned containers and drive around in brand new landcruisers with bullet-proof glass in the windows (seriously, they do).

Fortunately, the manager at the hotel took one look at us, had compassion on us and brought us some towels and kikoys so we could dry off a little and wrap a kikoy around our shoulders to keep a little warm during our meeting. We also had some nice hot tea to warm us from the inside.

And we ended up having a pretty good meeting with these two women. They gave us a really good perspective on things, and gave us some things to think about. I hope that we also gave them some things to think about and gave a good argument for why we're doing what we're doing over here in terms of the language policy implementation.

After about an hour and half of rain, things cleared up a bit. The consultants went back to their air conditioned containers, and Jackie and I went and sat by the pool and had a snack before heading back through the mud-pit to our compound. My skirt and sandals were still wet when we got home at 1pm!

Even trying to get to a Saturday morning business meeting around here is definitely not for the faint-hearted!