Thursday, 7.3. – Invitation Day

‘Home Office’ day. Since there is a public holiday tomorrow, I have to shift my meeting with my student group and after some calls and exchange of mails manage to move it to tomorrow 4PM in the Dutchess.

The morning and early afternoon are spent with sending out 11 invitation mails to all the banks we would like to see next week, providing them with the latest marketing brochure and the agenda I yesterday have agreed with Oliver Schmidt.

Hard to believe this takes half a day – however, still true. The internet connection is so poor that some mails take an eternity to get through. Apart from that, the browser occasionally simply breaks down and dematerialises my mail drafts into unknown black holes of the Ugandan cyberspace. So, whoever received those mail drafts and feels invited – we will see next week in Kampala who will show up!

Anyway – by early afternoon I have managed to send out the invitation with all details to 11 banks in total and already by early evening have received three written confirmations from major banks they will attend. This indeed is rewarding since it demonstrates we seem to be on the right path with our concept.

I close my email odyssey with putting together a status summary for GIZ and MMU (which takes another 3 attempts and 1.5 hours) and finally join Felix and Oliver Schmidt for tonight’s excursion to Kyaninga Lodge, where we have reserved a table for an (early) farewell dinner for GIZ (Oliver & family, Felix, Philipp) and ourselves, since our time in Fort Portal is moving into its final phase.

No photos today. The ‘MMU Dutchess Garden Office’ – my primary working space today – is not really to new and my facial expression on various system outages while working on the mails should better not be documented...! Perspectives for tomorrow look much friendlier and less IT-driven, since I will meet a Microfinance institution together with Geoffrey at 2PM to discuss the German concept of 'Dual studies' and see my student group at 4PM in order to instruct them for next week.