Today was hard

Today was hard.  I have been trying desperately to remain calm.  Not to freak out.  To go with the flow.  On the surface I have succeeded.

When I went to Bishop McAllister Kyogera last week for their 10 year anniversary, the Principal (a reverend from eastern Canada) recounted a meeting held 10 years ago.  In this meeting there was a resolution to open a secondary school.  At the moment there was just a small church on the grounds were they were to house hundreds of children.

In two months.

The Canadian man fretted and asked every question he could think of to keep it from happening so quickly: “How will we get money to build the buildings?”, “Who will build the buildings?”, “Where will we find teachers?”, “How will we pay them?”, “Where will we get books from?”, “How will we find students who can pay tuition so that we don’t go broke?”, etc etc etc.

Knowing there was but two months to build a secondary school from scratch he was panicking.  But the others around him were not.  So he made himself go with the flow.  These people have done this before, he thought, in this environment, with these resources, and with their faith in the universe.  And so the Canadian stopped panicking and the school opened on time.  10 years later, even though it is in a small village in rural Uganda, it is one of the top secondary schools in the country.

I needed this story last week.  Because I was panicking.  About our World AIDS Day event.  And how we had no invitations out, no advertising done, no money, no, no, no, no.  So I decided to go with the flow.  These people have done this before, they have planned this exact event two years ago.  I stopped emailing them with updates once a day.  I stopped phoning them with questions and clarifications twice a day.  I did what I had to do and nothing more. 

Everything…will…be…fine.

Today we are two days from our event and we don’t have even near enough money.  At the meeting we learned that all the groups that had promised us money had not come through.  This was news to me.  Panic levels went into red alert.

My big issue is that I don’t want to let down our MP who is hosting the event on his land and is such a hard working individual that failure is not in his vocabulary.  If this flops then he looks bad, and I respect him too much to let that happen. 

Unfortunately instead of jumping into high gear my panicking just froze me to my seat.  Everyone else was jumping back and forth in the conversation and when I did contribute I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.  So I withdrew more.  Then the entire conversation went into Runyankore. 

It was like I really wasn’t there at all.  Very surreal.

The most amazing part is that through all these barriers they seem to have been right all along.  It looks like everything IS going to be fine.  They made a plan, they assigned tasks, the day will be a success!

Of course, we still don’t have the money.  And we have two days.

But they have a plan.  And they have done this before.

Breath…. Breath….