It should be noted that all the projects Jon and I have going on are done through a language barrier. Kolia (head of Polissya) and Tolic (head of ACET) have only rudimentry English skills, so all of our conversations are in Russian (although Kolia, to his credit, will speak in English when he can).
Sometimes this is frustrating, as was my last meeting with Kolia when I was just having a bad language day and so was he, but we had to hammer out details on a grant that is due on Friday. In particularly, we had to choose whether to go a for-profit or non-profit route on the bike project. He didn't want to do for-profit because he didn't want to get hit with taxes and other things, but doing a non-profit grant would mean commiting to doing a substance abuse project with the bikes and he's already proven himself leary of working with kids. He said he'd think about it and in the meantime the grant clock was running out.
Jon and I had another good meeting with Tolic yesterday, and to any random observers (and there are many since we do these in a cafe) it must seem an odd sight: Jon and I speak English to each other, but Jon speaks Ukranian to Tolic, I speak Russian to Tolic and Tolic has to constantly shift between Russian and Ukranian with both of us (and just as often forgets and speaks the wrong language). Tolic is completely on board with any project we bring him and was excited about working with Polissya on the bike project. They are already set to work together on the wall project, which will have 10 kids climbing while 10 are listening to a presentation on HIV/AIDS and Drug prevention from ACET and then the groups will switch (I need to start giving these projects names).
Since I've been the go-between for the two groups and have been doing it through a language barrier (as much Russian as I like to think I know, it's still not easy to discuss a detailed project in it; I can do it, it's just not easy) I decided it was best to get both into a room to hammer out all the final details.
As it happened, I had forgotten my cell phone at the library and when Tolic called it for me to find out where it was, Diana, who was giving a presentation there, picked it up. She offered to bring it to the cafe and then came along to the meeting.
While Jon was having fun climbing on the wall, I was ready to kill things. Peace Corps had decided for me that, in lieu of a profit/loss statement and a business plan, non-profit was the way to go. In fact, the profit group never even reviewed my grant (I submitted it to both to cover my bases). The non-profit side was full of holes. It looked like what it was: Polissya recieving money to buy bikes and ACET doing a seminar here and there. The goals weren't clear cut because Polissya didn't want to do more than give bike tours and I couldn't get them to commit to more.
I walked in the room ready to let Tolic and Kolia come up with a workable solution when Kolia said they were going the profit route--except he hadn't had time to write a business plan. It meant I had five days to completely rewrite a grant that had never been reviewed with a business plan Kolia had not yet written.
Add to that a lack of sleep and the fact that I hadn't eaten all day (I had to teach Saturday morning because we had a holiday on Wednesday and had woken up too late to eat breakfast and went to the Tolic meeting right after), and if I don't eat I get really pissy.
I left the room in a bit of a huff to make some phone calls to Peace Corps. I wasn't sure if it was even feasible to switch to the profit grant at this point. Luckily, I did not get a hold of anyone at Peace Corps who could give me information: it was a Saturday.
I went back in and told the entire situation to Diana and said "We have no time, I can't get a hold of anyone, have them figure out a way to do it non-profit."
Then I sat and things worked. Diana knows everything about my projects because it's all I talk about nowadays. In fast-paced Russian the three of them talked and argued for nearly the next hour while I sat there and rarely said a word. Diana, in other words, was me and did a better job of being me than I could.
By the end, the solution they worked out was this: ACET would train Polissya how to do their seminars (capacity building required by the grant); Polissya would conduct the seminars DURING the bike tours at rest stops (making the bikes a draw and intergral to the substance abuse segment required by the grant); ACET would donate materials for these trainings as well as pamphlets for the kids as an in-kind; Polissya would then conduct peer-to-peer trainings for the kids so that the kids could begin to take over the ACET side of the wall project, meaning that kids would teach kids about drugs and AIDS and then they could all climb together (peer-to-peer is very popular in the grants nowadays; sometimes you have to move with the trends to get the money).
The grant was suddenly workable, and all it took was removing myself from the situation.
Apparently the best thing I can do for Ukraine is make myself obsolete.
That's not a bad thing: with eight months to go, that is the base philosophy of everything I'm doing.
Anyway, post food, sleep and the meeting, I'm feeling a lot better.