Project Run Through

It’s somewhat of a running joke at Kaguya that none of my blog posts refer to the projects we are working on this summer. Not fair but kind of true, I guess when compared to Grahams blog

So I figured I would start writing waaay better project updates than he does. Challenge accepted.

The goal for the time that I leave Kenya is to have created a Board of Directors that will create both security within the bank and member engagement within the community. Please note that the six members that will be elected for this position a) probably won’t speak English b) have probably never worked within a formally structured job setting before and c) are completely volunteer. The elections run until Saturday, May 26th, after which we will have our six board members. The first day of training is Monday, May 28^th. And from that day, there is thirty days until my flight leaves Nairobi to return to Canada.

Within those thirty days is 5 days of board training, two days of audit education, one full-fledged board meeting, one bank day celebration,  dealing with the Barclays saga (to be explained soon, it’s completely comical) as well as determining how to deal with Honey Care Africa (another situation that makes me break into hysterical laughter just thinking about it).

As of tonight, the end of the third day of voting for the Board, 30% of the members of the bank had voted. We haven’t yet reached 100%, but we’ve got until Saturday evening. At a minimum, we are hoping that over 50% of the members show up, to really promote democracy. [side note: people here love the idea of democracy, though they have trouble grasping the full concept. I congratulated Maurice on the fact that we had a 44% turnout rate for the focus groups last week, and he told me he was upset. When I told him that no, 44% for a focus group is really good, he accused me of not believing in democracy, because it would only have been democracy if all 280 members had attended. I told him that democracy was providing every individual an equal opportunity, which we had done. He refused my answer and that conversation ended pretty quickly]

Actually, just realising that there is little over thirty days left almost gave me anxiety. More like a shock that my trip is a little under half-way over.