disappointed

The helicopter got cancelled at the last minute due to rain in the mountains, so no trip to Khorog, no opening ceremony. Stuck in Dushanbe, doing ordinary work. It's okay, I expected that this would happened, but it's still a bit of a blow. Oh well, we really did everything we could to make it happen and the weather just did not cooperate.

The last couple of days have been productive, in particular the compliance review and planning process I went through with Focus Afghanistan colleagues yesterday. They'd flown up especially to meet with me, so I'm glad it went well and that we have some concrete action items to follow up on on both sides. I'd been planning to run the session with them based on the "working with USAID" PowerPoint that CS and I developed lo these many years ago for Pakistan and that I've used several times since. But then I remembered my adult education training from earlier this year, and thought harder about what we should really be getting out of our time together, and at the last minute I completely scrapped my prep and started over with a new plan. Good call on my part.

Last night we went to dinner at Salsa, the Mexican-and-whatever-else place that's a bit farther down from the office. It was surprisingly good -- I had a smoked salmon panini with pesto and cheese, the only decent fries I've ever eaten in Tajikistan, and tomato soup -- and they had Hoegaarden! Lovely time and because we left straight from work dinner was over by 8:30. We hopped in a taxi that was just parked in front of the restaurant and in very limited and broken Tajik got him to drop each of us off in turn. Me last. We were five and he had a buddy with him, so the buddy got in the trunk (hatchback) and we went four across in the back seat. No problem, except buddy had to get low when we drove past a couple of cops at one point. Total cost: TJS 30, or about $4.50.

Now I'm going to go run a little bit and stretch, then eat lunch (famished, did not eat a full breakfast because I was rushing to get out the door for the airport), and then knuckle back down to the emails that I've been slogging through this morning.

Only big thing left is the steering committee tomorrow, and then it's home again, home again, jiggedy-jig.