Scheduling

Even when people want to work with you, there are often numerous obstacles to implementing ideas in Maasai-land. Yesterday was a good example of how both my staff and I wanted to meet today, but after a day of phone calls and planning, it all came to nothing.
The idea was for me to watch one of our two partners conduct a training. Recently, both food security partners I work with began a project that involves a lot of community training. I had a clear picture of what I thought should be happening at the trainings, but wanted to check in to see if that was anything close to what was happening in reality.
The first plan was to visit a MIDI training. We were told last friday that a training would be happening in a town about 2 hours away. Monday morning we asked the trainer to confirm the time and place. She said that she wasn't sure what time the training would start so she'd get back to us. This was 8am.
At 10am, we still hadn't heard anything and I saw that the MFSP trainer was around and asked him if he was doing a training tomorrow. He was. This training was close to Najile, so we told him that if the MIDI training fell through, we'd tag along with him.
At noon, we call the MIDI manager again, don't get through to her and then send a text asking her to let us know what was going on. By 1pm she responds that, in fact, there would be no training tomorrow because the people weren't available.
At 2pm, I was in a meeting with the MFSP trainer and we set up a time and place to meet, 1030 tuesday morning at market. Things were going well from our perspective, not least because we wouldn't have to drive 4 hours round trip the next day.
All was fine until 10pm when I get a text from the MFSP trainer. His training was canceled as well, because people weren't informed on time.

So, over the course of the day, neither plan worked out, twice a training was scheduled without the attendees being aware of it and we ended up with two trainers with nothing to do tuesday. Such is life in Najile.