First day

I was really eager to do a good job on the first day and, in truth, I’m still not over the jet lag, so I was awake by 5 am. It gave me lots of time to get myself organized for my first day at CMF. Nine o’clock turned out to be too early cuz Tej was in a meeting but by ten Nikunja and I were walking down to the offices of CMF. It’s not very far – maybe ten minutes of dodging traffic.

There is a very strong relationship between CECI and CMF since CMF was actually begun through a CECI project. Nikunja knew everyone there and introduced me to Tejhari (the CEO) who then introduced me to everyone else. I am still not very retentive with the names. Ruchi (a young Nepalese woman with the title Senior Program officer) was assigned to work with me exclusively for the time I am here. She is smart and beautiful as so many of the women here are. She holds an MBA from the University of Nepal. It was refreshing to work with her. We spent the morning analyzing the document situation of CMF and fairly quickly came up with a workable structure or hierarchy for sorting the documents. We discussed categorizing by document type and assigning other attributes based on the document type. She listed the CMF Strategic objectives which were very impressive. We realized that all the projects fell under one or more of the strategic objectives and so determined that this would be an extremely important attribute for project classification.

I went off to Trendy Cafe for lunch with Anne Burnside (a former CMF volunteer) and Amel (sp?) an Armenian lawyer studying at Harvard and doing a fellowship research project in Kathmandu at CMF. I ate Dal Bhat for the first time (the national Nepalese dish) and really enjoyed it.

After lunch I went up the road to CECI Place to pick up the HP laptop that contains the software I want to use for the project then headed back to CMF. Everyone was at a meeting so I settled into Ruchi’s office and tried to put into place some of the structure we had discussed in the morning. I ended up puttering around until 5 pm and noone showed up so I headed back home. Hopefully tomorrow we will be able to put a full day’s work in.

Bernie came over in the early evening and we ended up at Buzz Cafe for beer and nachos. His first day was quite productive and he has lots of plans for his time with the Non-timber Forest Product group. We discussed families and generally got to know each other better. Before long the kids and Anne joined us. A dart tournament got underway and Bernie headed home. It wasn’t much later that Anne and I left the kids to the tournament.

Tomorrow morning at 5:47 am Nepalese time there is supposed to be a full solar eclipse. I intend to go up onto the roof and try to take some pictures – as long as it isn’t cloudy or raining.