Day Fifty-Five - "Training"

I woke up at 6am to what sounded like buckets of water being dumped on my tent.
Sleeping in was an option today but of course I did not. The rain kept me awake. I did have a relaxing morning though.

We left for Arkel in the pouring rain. It didn’t stop raining until noon.

Knowing a little bit about what the road to Arkel is like is important in this story. The road from Transmillenium to Arkel takes about 10 minutes by foot provided it has not rained. When it had rained you have a whole other situation to deal with. For those of you who have grown up on a farm or ever been out to the section out at the Flinn farm, the access roads to the fields are a good comparison to the road here except I think the road here may be worse. There are good parts and there are horrible parts. There is a section very close to Trans that turns into a lake when it rains. Then there is a small ditch that turns into a creek when it rains. And then there is what I have dubbed “the ditch” which turns into a river when it rains. Seriously. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it today. Thank goodness we were in the car. It is becoming clear to me that I need to invest in a pair of gumboots. I may have said that already but I will be purchasing some in the future.

This is a section of our road, not the river though, just one of the lakes...very tricky to walk around, especially at night.



We had Forcier Consulting training today. It was more conversation about any issues we were having and learning how to determine whether or not our translator is doing his job correctly. Learning to decipher whether the translator is not telling you everything or translating what you are saying incorrectly is crucial for our work. You may ask the question, “what are the issues facing the youth in your community?”, the translator may say, “she is wondering about the youth and what they are doing”. There were better examples in the meeting, which made me laugh because they were so ridiculous but I don’t remember them. Basically you need to make sure you are very clear with your translator and if you say 10 words and the translator only says 3, he obviously is not translating correctly. And the same if the person you are talking to talks for 5 minutes and the translator only says a few sentences back to you. He is not doing his job. It would be perfect if I were able to download languages into my brain. That would be amazing!

We ate at an Ethiopian restaurant for lunch and it was so delicious. They were slow but the food was worth the wait. We will certainly eat there again.

Training was finished at 4.

We attempted to try a new restaurant for dinner but when we got there it was terribly smoky, the generator was deafening and all of the tables were full. There was no way we were going to enjoy a meal in in that environment so to Wonderful Chinese place we went. We had a very hilarious experience. Alexandra spent a year in China so knows Mandarin. There was a group of men speaking Mandarin behind us and I notice Alexandra was quite distracted listening to them. She leaned over the table and said to us, those guys have been talking about how beautiful we are for the last 20 minutes. And then…one of the guys was very drunk and came over and talked to us and they found out that Alex could understand them. They were horrified to find that she knew what they were saying. It was hilarious.

Peace!