Day 2 The Laughing Cow

How often have you seen this? The office opens at 7.30 and closes at 4.00pm. If you need cash to visit a project or buy materials you have to wait until 9.00 before finance will give you the money. Whose interest are they serving?

I asked for bread and cheese for breakfast. I got two slices of nan bread and an entire circle of Laughing Cow cheese triangles. I only managed two of the eight cheese triangles, spread as you can imagine across each nan bread. So I reckon I am on bread and cheese for at least the next 4 mornings. Otherwise food is good, although nan with everything is quite a challenge. I think I have eaten 8 nan breads today.

Work is beginning to take shape. The organisation is concerned about its admin costs and I think they have a point. However some of the costs that they think are admin, are not very administrative at all - they are simply managed in an administration department. The people who look after the stocks of water pipes, the people who evaluate the effectiveness of the program are not administrators. Unfortunately all the program people are in one building and all the rest are in another, adjacent, building. So like in so many organisations the rivalry develops and anyone in the admin building is deemed to be an admin cost.

Having said that there does seem to be excessive layers of management and I suspect that a lot of the administration feeds of itself and does not focus outwards. Now where have I seen that before???

I admire their honesty in raising this with their funders and seeking to solve it before the funders make any cut. There seems to be a genuine concern to support the extremely poor people in rural Afghanistan by pushing resources out to the programme. If this willingness can be maintained then the job of making painful changes should be possible.