DeannaInUganda

it's funny/it's awful/it's brilliant/it's totally sacriligious..i can't decide

This is one of the funniest websites i've seen in a while: the weblog of Anne Frank. I know it's wrong, but it's just too funny.

In other news, my life has been 100% taken over by the NYC project. Everything revolves around it - i haven't even considered going away on weekends for about the past month in a half, and I'm at the Aga Khan high school about four days of the week, either after school or during lunch. About two days a week a student gets sent over to my apartment in the morning before i go to work to pick something up, drop something off, or get an approval; all my dinners out with friends have become 'working dinners', and i hardly see any of my friends who are not somehow involved in the project. This never really feels like a hardship (because we really are all so motivated to have this project be a success) except when different personalities in the project don't pull their weight (usually its the students who fall into this category; the 3 of the 5 kids on my committee are total slackers;) or try to take over too much. Then it becomes exceedingly frustrating to put so much of my time into something only to not have all partners show the same consideration for everyone's efforts.

It's really quite amazing though how much people are so willing to help. Last week i needed to get posters, flyers, and raffle tickets both designed and printed within about 48 hours. Two friends stepped forward and bent over backwards to get it done for us, even though our requests were completely unreasonable, given that we wanted it all for free, and we wanted it in two days. The posters and flyers look great - so much more proffessional and slick than we could have hoped for, and the raffle tickets are exactly what we needed, and appeared with 24 hours of me asking over a (non-working)lunch "does anybody know a printer that can make us 5000 numbered raffle tickets in books of 10 by tomorrow morning?" I spent all day yesterday directing kids to hand out flyers and sell raffle tickets at a cricket tournament - i was so impressed with the dedication of the kids, and also by the fact that we had a tent, table and unlimited soft drinks for the student volunteers, all donated to us by a guy we know from the friday-night bar we all go to. Friends have volunteered to build our website, to provide transport for the students, to provide media contacts, to donate money or goods, anything we need really. It's really quite inspiring and makes me realise how giving people can be. I'm tired (10 hours under the african sun at a cricket tournament will do that) but it feels good!

posted by Deanna @ 11:01 a.m.