I had such a good work day today. Not that I accomplished a lot (well, I did get two meetings organized, which is quite big since it’s really hard to get anyone from the government to have a meeting), but because I was able to face some of my fears.

• phoning people I don’t know or haven’t met face to face before. I’m getting much better at this essential skill. I got quite good at it back in Canada, but here it’s doubly hard because people usually don’t understand stand my English accent over the phone. I try to speak really slowly and to say things clearly, but sometimes it’s just hard to get your message across. It’s funny how I really have no trouble standing in front of a lot of people and speaking. But the phone is a whole other animal.
• going to government offices and actually figuring out where I need to go. My kiswahili is definitely improving. plus, people get so happy when I speak a little bit of kiswahili. Like this person I was told to go meet (I just got their number and I couldn’t even get through to them on the phone. I just showed up.), his whole attitude changed immediately when I started speaking the little bit that I know.
• convincing people who didn’t want to come to the meeting (it’s election time, super super super busy for government people) to come. will know if it actually worked on the day of.
• and this one I’m not really sure if it’s a good thing, but hey, it got my job done: I phoned one of the planners this morning to ask if I can drop by today to organize this meeting. She said she’s too busy. I said I’ll drop by to just hand her the letter. So I showed up and actually got the meeting I wanted. If this was in Canada, I probably would have just sent an email and it wouldn’t really be organized.

Yes, I did spend half the day in the car (and goodness gracious, I really don’t want to be taking the taxi that much, but the public bus just takes too much time, plus if I got lost, it would be a disaster). But we all need to celebrate the little successes.

P.S. it constantly amazes me how I can just go talk to the heads of various departments without really too much scheduling. I’ll talk about my thoughts about this in another post.