Meeting Surprise!

So often we are asked what a day in our lives looks like. Honestly, so many days look so different it’s hard to tell. Sometimes it’s an easy routine of keeping life going, other days it seems there is a mad scramble of work and keeping your nose above water. Other days are entirely unexpected and surprising, like one day a couple weeks back for Matt.

            We had gone to the local ministry of emergencies the day before to ask about visiting a local earthquake area that was in need of response. That evening Matt got a call from our engineer that the governor wanted us to come to a meeting the next day at ten. This is not entirely unusual, we have a pretty good relationship with the local government and we like to know and relate to them well, so we sometimes come by to meet and talk about common priorities and meeting them. So, Matt dressed up expecting a few minutes in the office with the highest official here and a chance to introduce himself as director. The other people at the office were a bit surprised to see him in a tie, but you have to make a good impression.

            Matt and our engineer, we can call him Greg, made it to the government building a little early and didn’t go up to the office but instead went into the large auditorium for major meetings. It seats about 200-250 people and was rapidly filling up. Ok, so this is unexpected. We’ve seen this before though, everyone stands up to report and they probably want us around just in case the ministry of emergencies needed to point us out as helping out with housing in the earthquake response. That is what we thought until the governor came in anyway.

            Now, it’s always a bit challenging to follow any language when native speakers are speaking to one another. It’s even harder here with “government language” which is a little more “pure” so unlike anything normal people speak. Even at that, Matt was pretty quick to recognize that this particular meeting had been called by the governor to bring in all the NGOs and have them report publicly on what projects they had planned in the main town here in the coming year. This is slightly awkward as we pretty much had settled on not doing any projects here, since our last few have had little positive response and a huge amount of headache. It was even more fun when the government presented a list of priorities they had which they expected us to meet in our projects. Luckily a few other groups were in line in front of us, though Matt got slightly more unnerved when each one was soundly chided in front of the entire room of every official or representative of importance in our town for not planning a project meeting these government priorities. Yay. Did I mention the tv camera? Yeah, this is big enough for local news to be covering it.

            Inevitably, despite possible prayers on Matt’s part for a small local disaster to end the meeting early, it came time for our NGO to report. There was more than a slight murmur in the room as the ONLY foreigner present walked up to take his turn. At least our engineer got to come up to help with the report. Matt made his little spur of the moment speech offering what our NGO could do (luckily water was one of their top needs and water is what we are doing mostly these days). The governor seemed to be happy to meet him and hear our report and we did manage to get out of the customary public shaming. There was another nearly two hours left of listening to needs and complaints from the community and assigning tasks, we don’t know if we will actually get a list of things we need to do or not since it wasn’t decided in the meeting. Matt did manage to get out of it without offending the entire room, and it seems this is one way to introduce the new director to the community. He even got to be on tv that night it seems.

            They say everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. It seems ours is in a local tv station in the remote mountains of Central Asia, but you take what you can get.