Well, the run-up to the sit-in is officially underway. The police have sealed off several roads around the red area, where the office is, as well as the trunk road from Peshawar, which is the capital of the one province where the main protesting party, PTI, is in power. That's no inconvenience for me since I'm living right out the back door and across the driveway. But it's a major inconvenience for all of my colleagues, not to mention hundreds of thousands of other people. It'll be interesting to see how things play out over the next few days. Will the protesters succeed in removing or going around the roadblocks and through the tear gas and rubber bullets that the cops are already using closer to Peshawar? Will transportation within Islamabad be affected, or just on the roads connecting it to the airport and Rawalpindi? How long will all this last, given that winter is coming? Will the PM or Supreme Court make a move that mollifies the protesters?
Nobody seems to know. Anyway, the security threat to me is nil, so the only things I'm worried about from a selfish perspective are being able to find a place to live and a car to drive. Also, finding out when I'm going to get the rest of my stuff, which is apparently stuck in customs in Lahore.
Today was pell-mell: I had back-to-back meetings almost all day, and at the end AI told me to write my objectives and send them to him tonight. One thing that's dawning on me is the sheer volume of (digital) paper that I'm eventually going to be responsible for reviewing and signing off on: every single concept note, proposal, communication item, and internal strategy or report. Also, the SPO for health gave me an introduction this morning to our health portfolio, and one of the things he said at the end was that no one is going to give me a budget, but everyone acknowledges that my department's work is critical. So it'll be up to me to build funding into every proposal, and to build my team that way. I knew that, but him saying it so plainly brought it home in a good way.
Now it's time to leave the office and go to the gym. Enough work for one day, there's always tomorrow.
Nobody seems to know. Anyway, the security threat to me is nil, so the only things I'm worried about from a selfish perspective are being able to find a place to live and a car to drive. Also, finding out when I'm going to get the rest of my stuff, which is apparently stuck in customs in Lahore.
Today was pell-mell: I had back-to-back meetings almost all day, and at the end AI told me to write my objectives and send them to him tonight. One thing that's dawning on me is the sheer volume of (digital) paper that I'm eventually going to be responsible for reviewing and signing off on: every single concept note, proposal, communication item, and internal strategy or report. Also, the SPO for health gave me an introduction this morning to our health portfolio, and one of the things he said at the end was that no one is going to give me a budget, but everyone acknowledges that my department's work is critical. So it'll be up to me to build funding into every proposal, and to build my team that way. I knew that, but him saying it so plainly brought it home in a good way.
Now it's time to leave the office and go to the gym. Enough work for one day, there's always tomorrow.
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