I made it!

Made it through the week.  And basically got everything done, though it was tight.

I still have to email off the electronic copy of the primer that I was checking today back to the team so they can make some fixes while I'm away this week, but that's easy (I hope!).  There have been a few interesting and rather crazy things happen this week!

1. An opportunity came up to do some teacher training with the formal education system this week.  So I've been scrambling, and I mean scrambling, to put something together and find someone to facilitate it, as they wanted us to go to a town about a two days' drive away - next week!  Can't do it.  But I put stuff together and was complimented by the good Dr. in the Ministry of Ed on our "brilliant plan"!  Anyway, I'm still just praying that the whole thing will be postponed by about a month, so I can actually go and help facilitate!  It's an exciting development, which has taken us a LONG time to get to... but typically, nothing happens for 3 years, and then boom - they want us to do something with less than a weeks' notice!
2. A funny thing happened on the way to K-town... two of our colleagues were trying to travel to a small town outside of Jb to attend a celebration for a new church and school centre.  This project is loosely associated with our organization (and in fact, I visited it a few years ago, when it was just getting off the ground!), so it was important for some representatives from here go to attend the ceremony.  Because they didn't want to spend so long on the crazy muddy, insecure roads (lots of banditry in that area at the moment), they decided to fly with a small mission aviation program.  I was sorta waiting for a phone call to let me know that they had arrived, but I was waiting a rather long time... finally, a phone call... from a nieghbouring COUNTRY!  Oops.  The airstrip at their destination was too muddy, and the next closes airstrip is in a different country!  So they had to spend the night there, then wait for immigration offices to open this morning so that they could get back to this country by bus.  In fact, they ended up spending nearly 8 hours on the road today, anyway, and missed half of the two day celebration.  And now there's the issue of getting back to Jb...!
3. We've got some new faces on the compound, which is turning out to be a lot of fun!  The woman is actually my age-mate, as well, which is a nice surprise.  I have a good feeling about this - it's been a long time since I've had another woman around my own age living in such close proximity.  So I'm really looking forward to getting to know her a bit more.  I had her and her husband (along with 3 others!) over for dinner tonight :) 
4. Because of the new folks on the compound, we had a group dinner last night.  We also have a few out of town visitors who come for consulting and various other work things periodically.  Just as one of them was telling everyone that he'd never seen a rat on the compound here... Sean jumped up from the table and almost got attacked by the little furry long-tailed creature who was dancing on the kitchen counter!  Yup, the little rat was watching us eat our spaghetti feast, and I blame Ben who mentioned that he'd never yet seen a rat!  Isn't it ironic, don't you think?
5. I had to be in a meeting this morning, but some of my friends tried to climb the mountain that overlooks the town today.  Apparently, it's not allowed anymore.  The, um, well, "officials" have moved in and they're keeping very close track of who goes up and down the mountain and why.  Apparently, you now need a letter from a very important high-up person to be able to hike on the mountain :(  Not a good sign of things to come.  
6. The meeting I was at this morning was with a language group who are really keen to start translation work in their language.  It was pretty exciting to see 30 of them gathered together in our little conference room, discussing and planning and plotting the best way to start developing their language, which hasn't really had a standardized written form yet.  Some of these folks travelled a couple of days from their home area in the mountains to get to our compound to attend this meeting - and they came at their own expense, with no compensation from our organization (and really, that's saying a lot for this situation, where it probably cost a lot of them about $50 to travel by bus here - and these are not people with a whole lot of disposable income!).  But they seem really committed and ready to do what it takes to get a program going in their language.  So we will see what we can do to work together with them!
7. Tomorrow, I'm off to Uganda :)  Whoo hooo!  A week off.  I really feel like I've earned it, as I've been doing at least 4 different jobs this week - Acting Bilingual Education Coordinator (in planning meetings to coordinate and plan the activities of 6 language teams over the course of the next fiscal year - which literally meant sitting in meetings for 6 FULL days!), Orientation Ombudsman (putting together a detailed schedule of orientation activities for the new batch of folks and making sure the work load is spread out over all the "old-timers" on the compound, also researching possibilities for language learning opportunities), literacy consultant (checking and advising two language teams on their new primers), Technical Advisor to the Ministry of Education (meeting in the Ministry and putting together a plan for language and education issues for in-service and pre-service teacher training modules).  Yup. I think I've worked enough this week to make up for taking a few days off next week!