The Most legitimate excuse to ever reschedule a meeting, ever.

I was in very high hopes today before setting off for the office. I had convinced my director that staff meetings were important for the organization to function properly and currently they had never even heard of the idea, yet alone have them. She thought it was a wonderful idea so we arranged a staff meeting to be held at 10 AM on Monday, right there in the office. We said our good-byes for the weekend and I said I was excited for Monday.

My walk to work is a solid 20 minutes, unless I get stopped by a drunk or someone who just wants to talk. One situation quite pleasant, the other not so much. At the end of my daily journey, I go through a small gate that opens upon the office of Community Based Tourism (CBT), with whom we share half of a building for our sales floor and then have a secondary building for our offices around the corner. I stopped in to CBT to say hello to some tourists from Belgium since I had a little extra time. I apologized for having to go to work and we parted ways. I turned the corner and guess what? The second building is not there. Literally, it has been demolished. It no longer stands. Not one brick upon another. Biblical type stuff!

I went up to the workers that were half standing/half working and asked them if anybody was here. They said no and that the meeting was over there (pointing) at the “something I didn’t understand” building. I said okay and left. The Belgian tourists caught me leaving and poked fun at my plight while I went toward town to go use the internet, since my morning was now free.

I ran into my predecessor from Altyn Kol and while he thought the building being torn down was strange, he hardly seemed too worried. I guess that is what happens when you only have 30 days left in country. We went and helped a friend of his with some web page stuff and decided to check in at the office just to see if anyone had shown up. When we get there, of course all the women of Altyn Kol are carrying and stacking bricks to help with the demolition of the building.

My director came right over to me and started asking where I was this morning and that everybody was ready for the meeting and that I wasn’t there and so on and so on. I explained that I had come to the building that no longer existed and was quite honestly confused and assumed that they had just failed to tell me the meeting was cancelled because, I don’t know, the building was demolished. Apparently, they had told the construction guys to tell me the meeting was at the “something I didn’t understand” building. I asked where that was and Trent (my predecessor) told me that was the home of the sowing cooperative.

Long story short, we rescheduled the meeting for the afternoon and it was a smashing success. All the women seemed to enjoy it because they actually got to find out what the other people were doing and had a chance to air their problems in a constructive matter. My director even scheduled another one for 2 weeks out! Things are going too smoothly around here when the only problem is a demolished building.