Hilarity in the office

Today has been a better day. Turns out things like budgets and plans do exist, they just forgot to give them to me. I could've lived without the near heart attack yesterday caused, but maybe I should just learn to be less anal retentive. We had a good meeting today about starting up peace cells in Liberia, so we can start writing a grant for that purpose. PCO recently established its presence in Monrovia, and now it's time to start doing something more than assessment. We also had some fun around the tribal leaders forum. It looks like our meeting will in fact take place next week. However, a man who lost the election for chairman of the Elder Council, a body born from the forum, came to protest this morning (unannounced of course). You should note that the election in question occurred in January, and he's been cranky ever since. He says it wasn't democratic because he didn't win, because he's more educated than the man who did in fact win. Basically, this man has a pretty distorted view of democracy, in spite of his alleged multiple master's degrees. Then again, this same man claims to be Archbishop of West Africa for a church that he refuses to name. Apparently he has taken his complaints about the Elder Council election to Presidents Kufour (Ghana) and Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia). I wonder if they laughed as hard as we did...

But the most amusing part of the day centers around my investigation of the construction costs for the PCO school's latrine. One of our volunteers donated the money for the whole project, but some of the money never made it to the finance officer (and thus never made it to the bank), and the receipts don't add up to the total donation. I'm fairly certain that the project manager involved pocketed the money, but I digress. I was reading over the project budget and found a line for "hookers," of which the desired amount was 8, at a unit price of 48,000 cedis (roughly $5). I really don't know why a bathroom with six stalls needs eight hookers... ;)

Otherwise, things are progressing. Only one more working week left. This weekend I plan to take it easy, maybe do some day trips, but nothing too far from home. Travelling here just stresses me out. Next Wednesday is Liberian Independence Day, so the camp will be rockin' for most of the week, as apparently this is a very big deal.

However, I guess now I should go back to toilet duty.