Budget cuts...

It's an official holiday here in Haiti and am in the office reading through an email sent by HO on our 2009 budget.

I'm in shock.

I knew that things were bad in Ireland, not to mention the rest of the world, and that funding is going to be hugely affected as a result but I didn't think it would be this bad. Our unrestricted budget is now cut by almost half - this would be cutting our already stretched 2009 budget by almost 20%.

I feel like crying... There's so much need in this country and the projects we were proposing to do would be less than a drop in that ocean. But now, not being able to do that - it's fucking heartbreaking. From a selfish point of view, it would probably also mean significant staff costs, and these are people who I've grown close to and who have often worked for us for a number of years.

Oh fuck it. I'm getting drunk tonight.

PPS New Look

Decided out of boredom and procratinating (strange how they go together) to change the look of my blog. You can never have enough pink...

PS Tina

Tina the Invisible Cat is no longer invisible - in fact, ever since I came back from Mozambique, she is now Tina the Co-Dependent Cat who Tries to Eat All My Food and Follows Me Everywhere.

She is now purring in my lap while I type. Hurrah for 10 days of neglect.

[PPS. In case you got the wrong idea, I didn't leave her totally alone - got my maid to come in every day to feed her and change the litter...]

Back to reality. Well, my reality...

Here's a little piccie of a very brief reunion with some friends during my 36hr transit through London last weekend. You don't know this but I left about 2 mins after this picture was taken. Needed to do some last minute shopping, you see. But that doesn't mean that I don't love you guys - it was really really important shopping...

Anyway, it was a crazy trip to Maputo, Mozambique. The journey there was brutal: TWO overnight flights and a 6 hrs stopover in London where I literally had to call a friend from the airport desperately hoping for her to take me in for a few hours as I'd stupidly lost my flat keys. By the time I arrived in Mozambique on Sunday, I was a complete wreck with the combined sleep deprivation and messed up time zones. It was not pretty. But I did manage to buy myself the third season of Supernatural so the geek in me was happy if a tad more spaced out than usual. Which, for those of you who know me well, is pretty frightening.

The finance conference/workshop itself was fantastic - learnt a great deal of stuff and was given a number of really useful tools with which to navigate my NGO's ridiculousely complex financial systems. It was also great to meet people who think the same way I do - the well known "NGO Accountants of the World Unite Syndrome" [you don't know it, but we'll rise up and conquer the world, just you wait...]. So what we did was mostly bitch about Programmes...

The bunch of us happily bonded over detailed fantasies of long and intense induced agony for project managers who cannot manage their projects, shared experiences of fraud, incomprehension over our organisation's accounting systems, and really excellent seafood. One of the guys there used to do my job in Haiti so we gossiped quite a bit over the peccadiloes (mostly sexual) of people we knew [had to say that I was shocked at a person who I though was so sweet with teddy bear eyes was cheating on his wife...]. And I had a number of common acquaintences with another person there so we did the obligatory "My God, the aid world is SO small" - something that's repeated without fail at practically any expat party you go to in the capitals of Third World countries.

Oh, have to mention the bollywood movie. Fantastic storyline: "blind girl falls for guy and they have a one night stand but guy gets killed in bomb attack before they could get married but then actually turns out to be a number one terrorist who faked the whole thing but then accidentally turns up injured at the girl's doorstep 8 years later (girl can obviously now see) and finds out he has a sprog but of course now she doesn't recognise him because of aforementioned blindness (not to mention the dead thing) but now, of course, the Indian army and his fellow terrorists are after him because he has a trigger for a nuclear weapon...". God, that was a fantastic film. And what is sad is that I'm actually very very serious.

Didn't really get to see much of Mozambique, unfortunately but was bloody impressed by the pavements and electricity and tarmaced roads. And the fact that we could walk around at night and not fall into a sewer or get kidnapped - I mean, they had STREET LIGHTS and what seemed to be 24hr electricity ie no generators. It took a bit of getting used to...

Anyway, the journey back to Haiti was a lot more fun - and was done in nice easy stages. Also the in-flight entertainment was a lot better [have to mention THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM here with Jackie Chan and Jet Li - crap film but come on: Jackie Chan and Jet Li and just about every kung fu cliche you can imagine - absolute heaven...]. And I got to have that 36hrs stopover in London (reference photo above).

The stopover was definitely mucho crazy: got in at 7am on a Friday morning and spent a couple a couple of hours navigating Heathrow and left luggage. Crashed at my long-suffering friend's swanky pad in Marble Arch, went over to my flat in Notting Hill with one bag and came out with two (which kind of defeated the plan I actually had which sort of involved getting rid of stuff), met some friends for lunch (and had a pretty dull conversation about plumbing and electric wiring - sorry guys, it was dull), persuaded another friend to skive off work early for Starbucks, met people for after work drinks where I literally became Prometheus for a good couple of hours (those were good times), and then had great drinks, pizza, no Nargiley (blasted thing wouldn't work), great conversation and even greater sleep. The next day was basically crazy with last minute shopping and the meet up with other friends at a place where someone apparently felt the need to cut their thing off. Yes, THAT thing. Well, the place was called Zizzi so I suppose the decision wasn't completely random.

The thing which really struck me is how life goes on. You can go away for a number of months which are so intense and so filled with incident and drama, and then come back and things are pretty much normal. And it's actually a hugely comforting thought - that somewhere out there, people are just living their lives and are more or less OK, and that's day to day life. This is a pretty transitory life and gets crazy and pretty surreal at times, so it's good to remind yourself of what normal life actually is about.

OK then, that was completely nonsensical and probably really patronising - didn't really mean it that way... Moving on.

This week, however, was basically a bit of a write off - had a huge amount of work to do but got very little of it done. Just felt completely out of it - you know when you do stuff but can't focus or get stuff done. Idea was to work today to catch up but what did I do instead? Finally tried out my pool and watched Spaced. And wrote this blog entry. Way to go, Caroline. Not really looking forward to tomorrow - have a huge amount of guilt for all the things that I'd promised people but haven't yet done. And got an internal auditor coming in next week. Bugger.

Better get to work.