Tick, tick, tick .....

The clock is ticking on my time here.

My good friend Betsy, in reading over the task list of things I am trying to accomplish while I am here, was right in pointing out that with only three weeks left, that I need to be careful about picking out which projects I can actually complete while I am here, that I need to go home with some successes under my belt.

This was good advice and I spent quite a bit of time yesterday thinking about just that.

And I came to the decision that I probably am not going to get to grant writing for Realistic, as much as I would like to. I probably won't get to the "elevator pitch" paper for LEAP. I probably am not going to get to the tutoring of LEAPsa students, and I am not going to get to other things on that list.

What I AM going to get to, though, is the NPO paperwork for Iso'Lezwe.  That stack of papers is going out on Monday.  I AM going to write two more grants for them, both of those are going out next week.  I also am going to help Subina and Sarah with the Entrepreneurial/Leadership workshops - there are three or four of those scheduled now.  I also feel good that yesterday, Subina and I sat with Joyce and a couple of the caregivers, and two of the volunteer medical doctors, and we formed a sort of Five Year plan.  It was complicated and slow and (from my American point of view), tedious, (I hope that word doesn't offend anyone, it was my perspective in the moment), but we were able to put a form around the three stages of the clinic.  Phase 1 is getting basic supplies for the caregivers and running the clinic out of Joyce's house.  Phase 2 is having the shipping container in Kalkfontein, open and ready for patients.  Phase 3 (which in reality may never occur, but we planned for it), is a medical clinic is built by the government.

One other thing I am going to do is to document more thoroughly our work here.  There is tremendous redundancy here from year to year with new MBA's coming in, and only a bit written down for the new people to learn from.  When I arrived here, it literally took four weeks for me to figure out Iso'Lezwe, and that was about three weeks of wasted time.  There HAS to be a better way to transfer the information from year to year.  Maybe this blog will help those that follow after me on this journey, maybe not.  I don't know if anyone reading this can really envision, from my words and my photos, what it is like to sit on a plastic  milk crate, in the sand and dirt in the front yard of a house in an informal settlement, and form a business plan, while half the group is speaking Xhosa, half the group speaks the language of Congo, some are speaking Afrikaans, and half the group speaks a heavily accented English.  (yes, I know there are too many halves, there.  Welcome to Africa :) )

And with that, it is off to work I go.