the P word

as a kid my dad would always threaten us about the "P word" -- that is, PROCRASTINATION. he would always ominiously warn us of avoiding it and due to this i've come to despise procrastination. instead i embrace efficiency and punctuality. i like things to happen quickly, on time, even better early!

good thing i wound up in senegal.

that's sarcasm, if you can sense it. it seems like other than americans and chinese, everybody else runsat least 15 minutes behind. i remember my first experience with it was in navajo country where everybody said "oh, you're on navajo time now." then with my african american friends, "we're on black time." there was "guatemala time," "salvador time," "nica time." back in america again, it was "latino time" and now in my present life, it's "africa time." i hate it. i say it admittingly, proudly -- i HATE it. it drives me nuts and i have a hard time coming to terms with things not getting on time.

so it's driving me batty that i started getting ready for pepinieres the first week of march and nobody came to me for sacks until april. i finally got the sacks out and then nobody filled them until about two or three weeks ago. and now people are seeding and more people are coming and demanding tree sacks when i'm out of sacks and i have to explain that i planned things to start in march so that i could get exact numbers of how many sacks we needed so that everybody could get them but yet (and not at my own fault!) it didn't work out. i have no mercy for those who are late but unfortunatly other people's procrastination has gotten in the way of my work and schedule.

i had planned the year around the idea that things would be done around may and that between may and june we could all chill while we waited for our trees to gain strength and grow -- giving me time to work on other projects, have my friend visit, and travel. but of course everybody procrastinated and did not start their work until a few weeks ago -- but then i had the kid's pepiniere day, my latrine-building project (which they've also been procrastinating on), and my friend's visit which shuffled around my priorities and now there is a constant barrage of people demanding seeds and my tree nursery is a mess and others are asking me to supervise pit-digging for the latrines and i am suddenly swamped in what just seems like disaster after disaster as i see the seeds not germinating and running out of seeds and all of my planning and timing of things going to shit. half of this is development work -- program planning and trying it out and most likely finding out that it doesn't work but i was just so...hopeful for a good season. i dared to hope and was disappointed. now i think about going back to site and facing the disaster of the pepinieres when it wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't done everything so last minute and as of now, the only reason i want to go back is to see my cat (which is ultimately -- i know -- a little sad). okay, end rant.

i just wanted so badly for things to go well and i thought it was for a while but now i am discouraged and dragging my feet to get back to the village. of course i love my village and some great things have been happening but i just...i guess i'm just tired and this procrastination crap is getting on my nerves.

we'll see how things go in the next few weeks...