Generally speaking I work quickly. Speed and efficiency please me. So living in Benin has its challenges. One of my colleagues is very good at what he does, but he really takes his time to think everything through. Fortunately my predecessor told me about this, so from the beginning I knew that patience would bear fruit.
The internet drives me to distraction. Literally. It is hard not to become distracted when I am sitting looking at my connection counting off the seconds "33 kbps, 0 kbps, 45 kbps, 67 kbps, 0 kbps, 112 kbps, 28 kbps..." as I pray that it will hold steady enough and especially not cut out before I have finished sending my work files to the central server, or sending an email to which someone needs an immediate response. (Please don't send me emails which require an immediate response!)
I also like to plan. At the moment I can't plan our work very well because one of my colleagues is off sick, and a lot of the work on my to-do list is work which I know would be best done with him present. And now that our consultant has "postponed" (a new date has yet to be found) our next checking week, the work on the to-do list is less urgent, so I am reluctant to insist on the other two of us doing it in that colleague's absence.
My afternoons look flexible on paper. I am supposed to do Spanish with Benjy and Eve, and in past years we scheduled that in for Monday and Thursday, and when occasionally the internet wasn't working well enough, we moved it to Tuesday/Friday. But nowadays the new website requires a better connection, even to the point of using videos (where they really aren't very necessary), so I feel like every afternoon I have to say, "We'll do Spanish if the internet is working!" and then if the internet isn't working at 3, I leave my computer on so that I can check the connection at regular intervals, ready to grab a child if it suddenly starts working. This makes it much harder to plan outings or even fit in spontaneous visits to other people.
My evenings are relaxing. I don't even bother to check whether the internet is working. Sometimes I write emails which will (hopefully!) be sent the next day, sometimes I read ... but often I crochet. At last, something which depends entirely on me, and which gives me a sense of satisfaction because I can always achieve something visible!
People tend to say that God puts us in these kinds of situations to teach us patience. But I wonder a bit about this. Overall I think I am a pretty patient person, as people go. Yet I also feel sometimes that having to continually exercise patience wears me down and actually makes me less patient. What do you think?
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