Pending…pending…pending. This post has been pending for some time now. Much of our life here with Peace Corps Swaziland is in a pending state. Currently, with two grants in the works for our library and chicken cooperative projects, our pending lifestyle has finally consumed us. It's not such a bad thing really, I mean our patience with all things is growing exponentially, as more and more things hit the pending stage, but there is a small drawback. Eventually, all of the pending is actually happening, and it's usually actually happening when we would be fine for it to remain pending a few days. Let me try to explain using last week as an example.
On Monday of last week Grace and I both received notice that our grants were approved by the small grants committee of PC Swaziland and PC Washington. Each volunteer may have one active grant at a time so Grace’s is a grant for the KaLanga Women’s Chicken Farming Cooperative, and mine is for library renovations at St. Paul’s Primary School, but I must add that Grace wrote both grants. She has grant writing and monitoring and evaluation gift, and I have a facilitating trainings gift, we’re a good team if I may say so. Anyways, both grants approved and immediately moved into the pending category of our lives. It takes up to two weeks for the money to actually get to my account for my grant, and it takes up to two weeks for Grace’s grant to get posted on the PC’s fundraising website. (Hence why Grace uses the term grant reluctantly, she prefers “monitored fundraising”) So, it's Monday and we already have two pending projects. We need to paint the library whilst the primary school is on break, but with the grant pending, painting is pending. We need to deliver 100 poultry transport crates to the Co-op before the chickens reach full maturity in the next 2-3 weeks but with the grant pending, delivery is pending. We also have a very successful permagardening project still underway. We officially finished all of the training sites last week and now, pending completion of each caregivers own permagarden, delivery of seeds, seedlings, and buckets is pending. As you can see, much of our life is pending.
What happens when pending moves to actually happening is a source of much stress and excitement in our lives. As many of you know, we were set to meet my mom and brother for a vacation to Victoria Falls,in the midst of all the pendingness (Yes I made up that word). We will be in and out of the country and our community intermittently over the next three weeks, but with the expectation that pending will move to actually happening in that same time frame, it's been exciting and stressing to build-in pending work days to our vacation. On Thursday of last week, we were incredibly happy we did build-in some pending workdays as we bought seedlings and buckets for 3 gardens to plant over the weekend. After planting those three we had already made a plan to plant 5 more when we return to Swaziland next week. Pending to actually happening. We have time allotted to paint our library on two weekends depending on when our grant money moves from pending to actually happening. We have several times identified where we’ll be passing through Manzini and able to place our order and setup delivery for poultry crates depending on when pending moves to actually happening.
This blog post has now been pending for 4 days as we’ve explored Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and Zambia, but it's time for it to actually happen I think. We’re headed back to Swaziland eagerly anticipating the sudden rush of things actually happening.
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