Pang’ono Pang’ono
Don’t you just hate the holidays?
I got back to the office after my sojourn in Liwonde eager to get back to freeing money up to bolster our rather precarious foreign exchange reserves. To my dismay I found almost all of my colleagues away on leave, with those that remained so over-burdened with other people’s unfinished work that they couldn’t spare a second for our attempts at troubleshooting for projects in dire straits.
I do realise that my desire to work over the New Year marks me out at as incorrigible geek, as did my insistence on staying in with a friend and a couple of drinks on the eve, thus avoiding the social commotion of a party. But things were going so smoothly before my departure, I’d actually spent part of my time in Liwonde thinking up new ways of getting information from a couple of truculent projects, so imagine my dismay at the lack of progress that greeted my return... That said, things are starting to pick up again, as witnessed by the files I’ve been obliged to take home. The problem is that with our momentum dissipated, we’ve been finding it harder to find fruitful avenues of approach with some of the projects we’re working with. A number of them have problems so intractable that we cannot do anything except recommend to the PS that we never agree to the same conditions again. Others are running into problems to do with the lack of capacity within Malawi (how do you spend money earmarked for construction when there are no qualified civil engineers in your district?), things we need to change over the long term. In the meantime, we need to be more realistic about what projects we can actually institute.
While this project is ticking over slowly, I’ve been working on an audit of how we work with donors and how we need to reform our data collection practices. You can be assured that when that swings into top gear, you’ll be treated to an industrial-strength rant regarding the poor practices donors think they can get away with because we haven’t been chasing them up with the vigour we should be. That should change when we finish this review, however. I’m very tempted to name and shame a few right now, but I’ll bite my tongue till we see how they react to our requests for reformed working practices.
* * *
So, with work a little slower during the festive period, I’ve started my Chichewa lessons, having hit a wall in my attempt to learn through osmosis. My teacher, the brilliant and cheerful Keating (and yes, I hate that bloody film, too) has already improved me no end. I can already insult people pretty effectively: sindimakonda Diouf; amanyansa kwambiri (I don’t like Diouf – he’s always being a shit). More prosaically, I can now communicate relatively effectively when talking about people, though inanimate objects (requiring the memorisation of noun groups and associated rules) is a bit trickier. All in time, all in time…
In the meantime, a prize (or, rather, praise) to anyone who can translate the following:
Ndikanokhala ndi ndalama, ndikanopita ku Nyika
I got back to the office after my sojourn in Liwonde eager to get back to freeing money up to bolster our rather precarious foreign exchange reserves. To my dismay I found almost all of my colleagues away on leave, with those that remained so over-burdened with other people’s unfinished work that they couldn’t spare a second for our attempts at troubleshooting for projects in dire straits.
I do realise that my desire to work over the New Year marks me out at as incorrigible geek, as did my insistence on staying in with a friend and a couple of drinks on the eve, thus avoiding the social commotion of a party. But things were going so smoothly before my departure, I’d actually spent part of my time in Liwonde thinking up new ways of getting information from a couple of truculent projects, so imagine my dismay at the lack of progress that greeted my return... That said, things are starting to pick up again, as witnessed by the files I’ve been obliged to take home. The problem is that with our momentum dissipated, we’ve been finding it harder to find fruitful avenues of approach with some of the projects we’re working with. A number of them have problems so intractable that we cannot do anything except recommend to the PS that we never agree to the same conditions again. Others are running into problems to do with the lack of capacity within Malawi (how do you spend money earmarked for construction when there are no qualified civil engineers in your district?), things we need to change over the long term. In the meantime, we need to be more realistic about what projects we can actually institute.
While this project is ticking over slowly, I’ve been working on an audit of how we work with donors and how we need to reform our data collection practices. You can be assured that when that swings into top gear, you’ll be treated to an industrial-strength rant regarding the poor practices donors think they can get away with because we haven’t been chasing them up with the vigour we should be. That should change when we finish this review, however. I’m very tempted to name and shame a few right now, but I’ll bite my tongue till we see how they react to our requests for reformed working practices.
* * *
So, with work a little slower during the festive period, I’ve started my Chichewa lessons, having hit a wall in my attempt to learn through osmosis. My teacher, the brilliant and cheerful Keating (and yes, I hate that bloody film, too) has already improved me no end. I can already insult people pretty effectively: sindimakonda Diouf; amanyansa kwambiri (I don’t like Diouf – he’s always being a shit). More prosaically, I can now communicate relatively effectively when talking about people, though inanimate objects (requiring the memorisation of noun groups and associated rules) is a bit trickier. All in time, all in time…
In the meantime, a prize (or, rather, praise) to anyone who can translate the following:
Ndikanokhala ndi ndalama, ndikanopita ku Nyika
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 8:24 PM
