Ambition
The evening was spent listening to two speeches. My bank, the ABNAMRO, had set up a meeting for clients owning a business in the Delft region. I had to go. If only for the free drinks and food.
Actually, I wasn’t really interested, but Betsy thought it funny to meet former colleagues, so we went.
The director of the theme park ‘The Efteling’ had a nice speech and I might gotten a new client, so it wasn’t totally useless.
Meanwhile, we’re still learning Shona. Today our lesson was no less then four hours long and it was a lot. True, we’re starting to learn more and more, but our lack of vocabulary is evident. And listening to Shona, trying to understand what is said is still very, very difficult.
This Friday, I’ll be going to a convention on sport and development in Amsterdam where both my direct contact in Zimbabwe and his boss will be too. Recently, I’ve learned that politically, the organization, like the country I suppose, isn’t totally stable and there is a chance that my trip and work in Zimbabwe might be called off.
Meanwhile, I’ve started to contemplate my project in Zimbabwe a bit more. More and more stories are coming out of the country that suggest that Zimbabwe REALLY is in a big mess, economically and politically.
Although the country was in good shape until, say, 1997, the last couple of years everything has gone down hill, quickly. It seem rather pointless to help people out with some Internet-based management tool in the field of sport and development when 40% of the country has AIDS, many people nearly starve to death and unemployment is at 70%. I’ll basically be supporting a regime which, in many ways, terrorises its citizens.