Day Twenty 29 and 30

You know how sometimes after a weekend at the beach, you feel more exhausted than before you got there? That was where I was at Monday morning struggling to do a market analysis of the other big NGOs operating in Somalia. The goal was to find out the different programmatic approaches other NGOs are doing in Somalia and what if anything could the organization I'm working for try to incorporate into their mandate.Prior to making such a recommendation, it is necessary to know my organization;s capacity to expand to other areas, which I am learning at the moment. To make things more interesting, many of the staff at the Nairobi office are resistant to change - they want to continue doing the same emergency programs that they have been doing for the last few years because for good reason they do them well. I am not suggesting to stop trucking water or digging bore holes - such things are crucial daily needs. Water is life. However, how did the society in Somalia (outside Mogadishu) function before the collapse of the state, the civil war, and now the extended droughts? There was water at one point and there were schools. My question is what is the community's other long term needs and moreover maybe they can direct us to establishing a higher quality of life instead of us showing up in a toyota land cruiser and pointing at sites for the next borehole.