Days 29 - 32

7-6-13

            TEAM OF THE WEEK!!!!! I definitely was not expecting this to happen but I am so happy it did. This will hopefully serve as the final motivation as we push towards the finish line, yet it still seems miles away. After a busy day working in order to complete everything before our team prize, we drove the Long Street with the faculty and had dinner at a restaurant called Mama Africa. Although this place was clearly for tourists it was still an awesome experience. The live African band playing American music and the delicious food and wine were a great way to cap a stressful day of work. I cant help but feel we got a little lucky winning team of the week this week since we didn't really foster the funding engagement but at least we finished it. I had a feeling we would have won it last week but seeing as they didn't choose one last week that didn't really happen. Last week we were incredibly busy trying to catch up to everyone after we dropped a client and picked up a new one, so I guess the hard work from last week has paid off this week. I’m also glad we worked hard today before dinner so that we could enjoy dinner just a little bit more and relax tonight instead of working more. I had a delicious lamb curry that unfortunately was diluted with bones but was still very tasty. Time to buckle down and focus on the deliverables.

7-7-13

            Deliverables, Deliverables, Deliverables. Eat, sleep, and breathe deliverables.

7-8-13

            This was probably the worst day of EESA to date. I don’t mean worse as in bad but worst as in most stressful. Today we implemented our social impact survey in order to acquire some data on how Silulo is affecting the people that it teaches. We also sent three people on our team to meet with Monwood to begin implementing our financial deliverable and see how we could acquire data that expresses the social impact of Monwood on its students as well. I was actually pretty excited about the day to finally start seeing how all of our hard work will pay off in the future. Unfortunately, my excitement quickly faded and I become pretty irritated with our situation. For starters, as we tracked the Silulo survey we realized we weren’t getting many responses. To be exact, by the end of the day we had three responses, which is clearly not enough to formulate reliable data. On a similar note, when the members that went to Monwood returned, they informed the rest of us that the primary school that Monwood sends the majority of her students to is closed all week. This makes it pretty difficult to track the student’s progress if we can’t speak to their teachers. Those were the two major blows today that really put my team and myself in a pretty crappy mood, which made getting any work done pretty difficult. I decided to take a walk with Erick and explain to him the frustrations our team was having and he was very helpful and supportive. He apologized for the situation we had been put in given our developed clients and said he would help us with our more difficult deliverables. This made me feel a little better but this day was definitely not a fun experience. It just doesn't seem like we can catch a break and everything keeps piling up on top of each other and nothing is getting done. All I want is a break or something that tells me to keep going. I’m definitely at a low right now.

7-9-13

            What a roller coaster type day. We started out the day by meeting with Erick about our current situation and to see if he could help us out with anything we needed. We talked primarily about the board of advisors for Monwood Playgroup and it turned out to be a very helpful conversation. He explained that we needed to develop the charter for the board and then find a list of candidates and interview those individuals until we could decide on a board of three members. He also informed us that should we be unable to completely have the board in place by the time we left, as long as we had one member who could carry out the rest of the procedures that would suffice. My biggest frustration is that everyone else one the program is using the tools we learned in all the lectures and applying them to their clients business while we had to learn completely new things in order to implement what our clients really need. On one level I understand that I am getting a great experience out of being here but on the other I sort of feel like I have been receiving something entirely different than what I signed up for.

            Fortunately throughout the day, we began getting some quality work done and things started to look up. During the meeting with Erick, he asked how many survey response we had and when I checked we only had 6 so I was pretty disappointed. At the end of the day when Erick made his rounds, he asked and we were able to tell him that we had 40 responses. Although 40 is obviously not a huge number given the amount of people that Silulo has trained in the past, I was very excited about the progress we had made. When conducting a survey you do not need too many respondents to get a solid picture of what the responses might look like so 40 was a big step. Id say things are beginning to turn around but there is definitely still plenty of work to be done.