Yesterday was a very calm day overall. In the morning, I woke up feeling well rested after finally getting a good nights sleep. As I went about my morning routine, I heard a blaring noise—a religious recital repeating “Allahu Akbar”. This wasn’t surprising, I’ve been hearing the Muslim call to prayer all throughout my time here. In Arusha, the morning bus route took us past a small neighborhood mosque right around sunrise, so we got to hear the morning call to prayer almost every day. In Hawassa, though the most popular churches seemed to be orthodox, there were still some ringing prayers to be heard flying over the city.
Anyways, the volume of this prayer was quite new. I suspect that over the weekend a nearby mosque acquired new speakers and was showing them off or something. I’m glad that at that point in the day, I’m normally already awake, because I would be pretty angry if I was sleeping and my alarm was an unwarranted barrage of Arabic prayers. There’s also a Christian church very nearby the backside of the hotel (where my room now is) and every morning around 7:00am it seems that the sermon reaches its climax—the preacher enters into that loud sort of rhythmic chanting of prayer, accompanied by the whoops and ululations of the church members. Every so often the two prayers mingle with one another and it creates a very busy atmosphere lacking the quiet I usually prefer for my mornings.
Work was really productive (in the long run I guess). I was assigned a task where I had to identify all the unique IDs for village surveys that had mistakes or were duplicated. We need to do this because the whole monitoring department relies on correct surveys and reliable information from the field team, so anything with apparent problems gets sent back to the team for them to fix. Anyways, I was showed the process and it was very tedious, having to manually filter through thousands of surveys at a time to hope to spot inconsistencies or duplicates. I’m guessing the process would’ve taken about three hours for each project (and with seven projects that’s a lot of hours). Thankfully I decided to spend a few hours trying to go about it differently, and wound up creating a system to accomplish the task in about five minutes. If you can’t tell, I’m very proud of myself for this. I wasn’t sure my process was going to work until the final tests, so the three hours of learning how to do it and fine tuning it could have been wholly in vain and that was lurking in the back of my mind the whole time.
Anyways, that’s what I did from about 9am to 3pm. Other than that, I was very excited for yesterday’s work day because I was promised a new chair! A coworker here has just gone on maternity leave, so I get to borrow her comfortable chair for the next couple months.
I wound up staying very late in the office. It was nearly 6:30pm by the time I got back to the hotel. After work I didn’t do much. I did some duolingo for a while (and let me say, I’m putting in about an hour a day and I think it’s slowly starting to show!) and at that point I was ready to get in bed and read.