Was planning on spending Good Friday in the office tying up a number of loose ends without the incessant bother of other people (other people - grrr). Planned exactly what I'd planned to do today, got everything ready right down to getting my boss to come in in the morning to turn the server on (don't ask). And what happened to These Best Laid Plans? Came into the office, turned on the generator, turned on my MP3 player plus portable speakers, danced around the office to Guns and Roses exhorting me to live and let die, turned on my computer. Nothing happened. Turned on the lights. Nothing happened. Turned on the fan. Nothing happened. All this while the generator was happily humming in the background.
Fuck.
The really annoying thing was that I thought about saving a lot of the stuff I needed onto my flashdisk yesterday afternoon but decided against it because I knew I would be coming in today and wanted a complete evening off. I kept thinking that if only I took a few minutes to save stuff, I wouldn't be in such a fix. "If only" - the most dangerous words in the English language.
The upside to all of this was that I basically just spent this afternoon on my balcony in my bikini (yes, I finally plucked up the courage to wear it. On a private balcony.) sunning myself and reading a romance set in the Middle Ages with knights and outlaws and Robin Hood, and plenty of hot sex. There are worse ways of spending a sunny afternoon...
But now, I've got the guilt. So much to do, and very little time to do it all. Am currently hosting our new Assistant Country Director of Programmes until her new flat is ready towards the end of April. She is a fantastic Ugandan lady with oodles of experience and with a definite appreciation for the importance of finance (not to mention a Cordon Bleu chef - we lucked out there!). We've been spending a long time talking about the structural issues of our organisation: mostly unsustainably number of tiny projects that we have and the frankly ridiculous number of sub-par staff we have to manage them.
Coming from a relief background, I'm used to working with severe chronic shortages of staff managing fewer but much larger projects completely funded by institutional donors. I'm also used to working in an environment where things move extremely quickly out of necessity and which is basically completely results-orientated. I know that in a development context, how you do things is often just as important as what you do and that you can't expect things to move as quickly when you're trying to "build capacity" as opposed to just getting things done. But bloody hell, is it frustrating. And the sheer lack of discipline in terms of financial management is really annoying simply because we have the luxury of a large amount of unrestricted income.
Our structure here makes no sense. We carry out 18 different projects with a total funding of around EUR5m. You can do the sums but it's basically a nightmare to manage and really really bitty to the extent that I'm not sure how much sustained impact we can be having being spread out so thinly. And we have one Project Manager for each project. Count them. They are not even managing their entire project budget - just the direct costs - and we still have one Project Manager for each project. And they still have difficulties managing their budgets. And don't talk to me about how much they're getting paid.
Anyway, rant over and onto pleasanter things: planning on doing plenty of touristy things tomorrow (Champs de Mars, here we come!) so get ready for some gorgeous pics. Thinking also about picking up some nice works of art for my rather bare flat. Hmmmnn. Something to take my mind of the amount of work to do on Sunday...
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