Beavering away like an ant!!

Ok. So today Vivian and I, who does the accounts here, got down to the real work in hand, in front of an audience of little black ants running over the desk! Eek, where did they come from! I must be getting more resilient by the mere fact I even contemplated sharing a room with them...and only swore at them a couple of times! Ok so I only counted about 3, but then some tiny little ones appeared, not sure if they were procreating before my very eyes.


It’s also the first time I have shared a small office with a very large consignment of condoms - obviously waiting for free distribution. A very serious issue over here due to the incidence of HIV/Aids, so not too many jokes in the comments please! :-)  A picture of the said boxes is below (well give me a break I’ve not been out much today).

It is the first time I have done one of these assignments but my first observation (when I manage to move beyond my obsession with the plumbing) is that you do need to be very self motivated and organised, there is no one going to tell you what to do other than yourself. Although you don’t have to look too hard to find what to do! I guess every assignment will be different and it suits me to manage my own tasks and workload.

Vivian and I got off to quite a good start this morning. I showed her some of the things that I set up over the weekend, including some pivot table reporting in Microsoft for her expenses. Then we moved on to the free accounting Software I had downloaded called TAS. The task was to replace the archaic cash book and get it on to TAS. First off all I had to get Vivian to bring the reconciliations up to date, and as you can see from the picture, we are not talking a small notebook here. I think she is as keen as me to see it go! Unfortunately, we were going great guns with the software until we tried to enter a cheque withdrawal of several million Kwachas. Now it might sound a lot but with £1 being equal to over 7,000 kwacha it’s not really! The system was just not for having that many digits in one bank transaction. So things have grind to a halt having eventually admitted defeat and e-mailed TAS support. Looks like it might have to all be on Microsoft.

Say hello to Vivian - at least one of us was working! But then it is all about mentoring!!

I am about to go off to the ZNBC studios soon (Zambian National Broadcast Corporation) with the guys. They are running an SMS competition and a live draw is being done tonight. It was meant to happen on Saturday but the technology failed. Do you think I will bump in to anyone famous? Maybe George Clooney is on a ZNBC chat show! Maybe George Clooney hasn’t heard of ZNBC just like I hadn’t until Thursday!