Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Angry Blog

(This was a couple weeks ago. Everything is fine now. We even got the original sent to us in the mail. Of course, DHL lost it for a few days, but sometimes those things just seem to happen.)

I’m angry. So we got this grant. I helped. But financial stuff, that’s not my stuff. I do content. Accounting is something else entirely. Not my problem. Well, tip for all future volunteers, it will be your problem.

So we had this agreement sent to us by the embassy about the money we earned. We signed it, and sent it back. Then they sent us the first installment of the grant to our bank account. Sweet, right?

Okay, so maybe I don’t understand banking here. Maybe I don’t understand banking for NGOs. But our bank had a problem with a large sum showing up in our account. We have to show them a reason why we are getting this money. Is that normal? My bank never minds when I deposit money in my account. They like it a lot. But this bank says we have three days to show them a document showing where the money came from.

So we do. But because we are working with a foreign embassy, the documents we are working with are in English. And the people at the bank don’t understand English. We don’t have the documents in Russian. Too bad they say. So we call the embassy and they don’t have the documents in Russian. This process is taking a few days so now we have one day to translate the documents into Russian and then get them notarized and then get them to our bank.

Why does this country work this way?

(And I won a new grant! Yay! Now I have a project to do. Good things the volunteer meeting is coming up soon too.)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Im glad you got a new grant . good work. keep it going.