Wanderlust Wendy

Old Habits Die Hard

I’ve always been a terrible procrastinator. In college, the semesters when my grades were less than stellar were the semesters when I didn’t have a sufficient part-time job. I take the free time for granted and I procrastinate. In the end. I don’t accomplish as much. Being busy in a way manages my time for me. There are only so many hours in a day to go around, and when the days are filled, I don’t have the choice to sit around.

Here in the Peace Corps, I have nothing but time. And as a result, I procrastinate, a lot. For the Books For Cameroon project, we are in the process of designing library management training for the participating schools and communities. Kate has compiled materials from two different sources to create the training manual. While I’ve delegated the training design to Kate and the others, I still somehow ended up with the amazing job of translating 30+ pages of document into French (note the extreme sarcasm.) I just keep telling myself it will be good for my French…

I have started on the translation work and frankly, it’s not that bad. But, it is a lot like in college when I have papers to write. I know all it takes is me sitting down and just doing it. Yet when I have the time to put it off, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing…

For the past few days, I have been obsessing with thinking about life in London next year and everything that comes along with that. Oh yes, battle of graduate school is over. I made a decision to attend London School of Economics next year! Anyway, I told myself I would reserve the entire Sunday to my translation work.

Naturally, Sunday gets here and my Internet was out all day. Internet makes my life a lot easier with the online dictionary. So of course, I decided the work can start tomorrow. Old habits die hard.

It is also no wonder Cameroonians never rush to do anything and are always nonchalant about scheduling. Why bother scheduling anything when things out of your control will happen and mess up the plan?

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