Work in Progress: Office Life

Remember that giant pile of reports which was unceremoniously thumped onto my desk in Nairobi? It has followed me to Mombasa and on the journey, it has grown and engulfed all sorts of other things. Like the Blob.

The Resource Room, threatening to eat me alive.

Luckily, I know how to fend off the Blob, the heaps of invoices and receipts and contracts and financial reports threatening my very 21st century being. Copious cups of Kenyan mixed tea, bright orange glasses to shine through the dust of the Resource Room and digitization. 

I spent two days locked in the depths of the Coast Water Services Board compound, a muzungo hidden away in "the library," the locals euphemism for the dark, dusty dungeon where years of files line the shelves and warnings against a fall towards the dark-side paper the walls. 

Anti-corruption posters like this one are everywhere: in the office, in the bank, in the post office.
They all show the same message: corruption is really bad. But how effective are they?

For two long days, I worked through lunch and late into the afternoon. I flipped through pages of newspaper advertisements and shipping reports from Germany. I warded off paper cuts and sneezes with the hope that eventually, someday soon, I would flip through my final binder, see sunlight and interact with human kind once more. And on the beginning of the third day, I made it. I typed in the final date and final amount paid, shut the book with a snap, and strode back home to my office in Mombasa Water and Sewerage Company.

Ok, ok, clearly this is a dramatization. As an intern, I am assigned various tasks to give me exposure to all sides of work as a engineering consultant. This particular  task was to document how CWSB, our client, spends all their money from World Bank. CWSB and other water service companies throughout Kenya get large loans from the World Bank and from Agence Francaise de Developpement for WaSSIP (Water and Sanitation Services Improvement Project). Understandably, the World Bank would like to know where their money is going. And, lucky for them, Seureca has deployed their intern (me) to go through all the hard copies of finance reports for CWSB, document everything from hiring a consultant to supervise the improvement of the Tiwi boreholes to buying new chairs for  the office (and extra comfy chairs for the executive office).

Really, though, it was surprisingly interesting. Going through the binders of World Bank-financed projects was like going through giant scrapbooks and trying to piece together a mystery of receipts and bank notices and copies of checks to see when, and if, services and goods had been paid for. 

However, as much fun as I had in the CWSB compound, it was nice to walk down the block and return to my own Seureca office in MOWASCO compound. As you can see, I am very happy in my office.

A Word Document! This is the best! An exciting venture away from the familiar gridwork of Excel.
And Doris is just a pro at locating documents within the confusion of the office network.

Engineering is a lot more playing with data in spreadsheets and less playing with models and fun techy-stuff  than I had expected. I have become very familiar with Excel and such advanced functions as sum() and average(). I've been a little surprised about how little of anything I've learned in school is applicable in the real world. When I first came, I had a project to figure out the head loss through a series of meters in a test bench. I got really excited and tried to use all sorts of equations which I had learned in Introduction to Fluid Mechanics this past semester. Alas, none of them were actually useful in the slightest and really only served to confuse me. Engineering in the real world, or at least with Seureca, requires less of the general technical knowledge I've been learning, more very specific technical knowledge (I know all about domestic water meters now, just wait for my next post to see), and an large amount of intuition, to figure out just the right way to play with data so it shows you the secrets it holds. 

And when I get stuck or my eyes start burning from staring at my computer screen for too long, I can take a break and try to memorize all the roads in Mombasa, thanks to the convenient map above my desk. 

Or better yet, grab a cup of tea and a few biscuits. On my first day, I prepared my own cup of tea, taking a teabag and dunking it in hot water in what I thought was standard tea-making practice. As I went back to my desk to enjoy my beverage, Doris, our matronly office manager, clucked her tongue "No, no, no sweetie. What is that? It is so dark. Don't you use milk? Here, let me make you a cup of tea." Apparently, tea in Kenya is prepared in a different way compared to the rest of the world. Always available in the office is a thermos full of milk, steaming hot. Pour this into a mug along with a heaping spoonful or two of sugar and dunk in a teabag of Kenyan black tea once or twice and you have yourself a cup of good Kenyan tea, pale, milky, sweet and delicious.

 Or sometimes, when my tea gets cold and the map is memorized, I spin my chair around and smile brightly, in true Elizabeth fashion, at whomever looks up.

So excited to be working. Danstone, our driver, was the recipient of this joyful smile.

However, my co-workers haven't quite gotten used to my surprise sunshine smiles. They laugh or mimic me or give me looks and  ask "Why are you smiling at me like that?" My supervisor, Guillaume, even commented something about how threatening my smile was. I have never thought of it that way before, but I am in Africa and it is true that male baboons bar their teeth, in a manner very similar to my quick smiles, to show dominance/be threatening and scary.  So I suppose I should be more wary of grinning "meanly" at people.

We even get wildlife in the office. It may not be a Black Night-esque goat fighting for its life, but we all get excited when we find giant  moths in the office. They are much more welcome than the mosquitoes we Doom every morning.  But the real adventures come when I escape the cozy confines of the office and drive off to the field....