pakistan day

Was too busy and then too tired to post yesterday. Lasted just past 9 PM and then woke up at 5 AM. I'll get the hang of this time zone eventually.

Anyway, yesterday was productive. Did some prep work for my trip to Karachi, where I'll be meeting with three of our sister agencies: Aga Khan Planning and Building Services, AK Health Services and AK Education Services. Lunch again with Karim, Salman and Nusrat. We talked about the differences between Muslim and Christian sects, which was pretty enlightening for me and I hope for them a bit, too.

Spent a good chunk of the afternoon going over the finances for the OFDA flood response project with Nadeem, who's the grants finance officer at AKFP. It was great to just be able to sit with him and see how he's broken the budget down and how he's tracking each agency's spending. Helps that he's a really friendly guy and knows the budget backwards and forwards. Amazingly, this is the less-complicated of the two budgets that dominate his time. The other project he works on has eleven partners! I shudder just thinking about that, five is enough. More interestingly (to me, anyway), we went over how we can use some of the savings from certain parts of the project, like non-food item distribution, to cover parts of the project that need additional funding, like the mobile medical teams.

After that, Karim and I met with Mark A., the OFDA Humanitarian Program Specialist who deals with our project in-country. We talked about the lay of the land in terms of the response so far, and how USAID/OFDA was likely to move forward as the emergency part of the response comes to an end in most places. OFDA has been funding early recovery programming since the very beginning of the response, but funding for that type of work is no longer likely to come from them. However, they're trying to work with the rest of the USAID Mission to make the relief-to-early-recovery transition as coherent as possible.

We went over a couple of the issues that have come up with the project and there really is no replacement for a face-to-face meeting to get everyone on the same page. Not going to go into too much detail but the way forward is clear now. Can't ask for much more out of an hour-long meeting. Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet again next week, when I'm back in Islamabad.

Today is Pakistan Day, which means the office is closed and there's no work. I'm going to write a few emails and then venture out from the Serena for the first time. I've gotten some suggestions from Ahsan, who works on housing stuff and will be coming with us to Karachi tomorrow, about places to go and things to see. My friend from high school, Kate, who spent a chunk of her childhood in Islamabad, also gave me some recommendations. Karim said that if he was feeling up to it he'd give me a call and take me around, but his back was still hurting yesterday so we'll see. At the very least, I'll get to one or two of the big markets and a couple of the famous viewpoints in the hills just outside the city.

That's all for now, I guess. Probably more later when I get back from my excursion.