I walked into the secretary's office, on a dual mission. The best kind of mission, because if one fails, you've always got another, so you can justify your efforts.
Unfortunately, the second half of the mission was to tell one of the secretaries that her relative had failed the year because of excessive absences and falsification of documents. I've always had a good relationship with her, and was afraid of the consequences of telling her.
So I told her I had news, and that her relative had to be failed. She grabbed my hand and started to walk off, saying "What about that peanut butter you promised me? When are you going to bring that in?" It was a relief to hear that it was no big deal - it was probably what she had expected all along. But it was a surprise, as most of these things are.
I get routinely called into offices, expecting the worst, but end up fixing a fax machine or copier. Then once in a while, I really get ripped into for something I hadn't expected to cause a problem.
And honestly, this is the last challenge of being here - to stop being so surprised. I come in to these situations with a certain list of expectations that I thought I had carefully cultivated over these couple of years only to find that I am once again wrong. Dead wrong. And surprised about that. So what I'm saying is that I just need to stop being surprised about being wrong. I need to let myself be more human and to realize how unpredictable others are.
Interestingly, it was this quality that I noticed in the returned volunteers I had met - a hesitancy to predicts others' actions - that made me admire them so much. And so I want to see that in myself, too.
And, by the way, the other mission I was on was for money which (unsurprisingly) wasn't there.
Surprisingly, however, it arrived an hour later as they said it would.
Peace
John
