It’s been a while since I’ve written in my blog… though time seems to pass in a strange way so it’s hard to quantify when or what. Think I haven’t been in a writing mood.
I’m writing this sitting on the banks of Lake Kivu, in Rwanda. I’m on the hotel balcony, watching as the silhouettes of the palm trees fade into the darkness of the water (see the photo for the view early morning). If you haven’t guessed, I’m on my R&R. I’d been in Kindu for 9 or 10 weeks, and was feeling ready for a break. There was a doubt/cynicism that it would actually happen though (very easy for UNHAS to break down again) which meant that it was only when I was on the plane that I realised I did actually have a few days off. Of course, everything didn’t go quite as expected – I was hoping to jump off the plane at Bukavu and go to Burundi on R&R, but the plane decided not to go to Bukavu that particular Friday so I went to Goma and Rwanda instead. That’s actually worked out really well – I enjoyed spending time with Matt (Tearfund colleague in Goma) and my friend James, who I know from uni. Having been in Kindu with limited social interactions for the last 2 months, I was wanting to be sociable rather than introverted this time!
Don’t really have much to say. Am obviously feeling very uninspired at the moment.
2 weeks later: Never got round to posting that. When I returned from Goma I went straight to our sub-base and then directly onto another town to do a Needs Assessment (see next post). Then it was spending time with our visitors from the UK (dairy milk chocolate!!!!) and designing/writing a new project. Now, I’m in Kenya (yes, I know, difficult to keep track of which country I’m in!). I’m on the DMDP (Disaster Management Development Programme) which is a week of training with other people from Tearfund from the North & South Sudan programmes, the Afghanistan programme and a couple of partners. This week is on the Quality Standards, which looks at how to integrate Accountability (giving beneficiaries influence on the programme and the resources to be able to hold us to our promises), Conflict Sensitivity (looking at whether our project is positively or negatively impacting tensions in the area), the Environment and Sustainability. Some of the stuff I know already, through either reading or previous experience – it’s good to have some space to think about how we’re doing with our projects in Maniema though… A lot of the concepts are actually quite straightforward. The difficult thing comes in finding the time/resources/staff capacity in actually implementing them. There are other aspects with are really complex and very situation dependent – they’re really difficult to gauge and it’s a case of making the most informed decision that it’s possible to make.
It’s quite a treat staying at this conference centre. The food is AMAZING – choice of a large buffet of dishes by some excellent chefs, including salads and vegetables. The desserts are slightly weirder and I sometimes avoid them, but that might be just as well considering how much main course I’m eating. Think I’m regaining weight! We went on a bush walk yesterday, where we walked out of the centre and 5-10 minutes later we were watching a large number of giraffe (14!), zebra and wildebeest. I particularly like the giraffe – they’re such graceful animals. It’s also been really good to get to know some of the people from the other programmes – swapping experiences with them and also being able to relax with people of a similar age and culture. There is quite a range of nationalities, but there are 5 or 6 other people from the UK. Wonder how many of the people on the course I’ll end up working with in the future?!
By the way, please don’t think that all this talk of Rwanda and Kenya means that I’m on holiday all the time… It’s true that these weeks came fairly close together, but I do work hard at other times. Honest!
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