We've been here 5 months (I thought i was being all profound but its not 6 months, Karen helped me with counting correctly)! This is overwhelming when I think about it. Time flies and yet goes so slowly here. We have not been very good about posting lately, for various reasons but will try to catch up on a few things over the weekend and do some more updating.
I know that the joke amongst my friends is that I have the "Chandler' job (Friends television reference). One factoid that I find interesting is that completely by accident I have ended up working in the same field doing very similar things to what my father did for his public health career. Also the newest coincidence is that- Keith and I are roughly the same age as my parents were when they went off ot Korea to do a similar ex-pat stint there which resulted in their acquisition of me! So - given that the theme of this post seems to be 'ME', I will continue and try to briefly explain why we've moved over here.
In June 2010 I was working on the previous iteration of the project and coming back and forth to Lusaka, and a proposal for a new round of funding was being submitted. To submit these proposals you have to staff it and I put my name in for consideration. Then we sat around and waited for a long time, to find out if the project was awarded to my company and if in turn there were no issues with me being staffed in the position. The project was awarded in November 2010 and we arrived here February 2011. My new position at the public health consulting company that I've worked at since 2001 as the Director of Monitoring and Evaluation for a US government funded HIV/AIDS focused project.
The start up the project has been protracted for various reasons, and only recently do I feel that we are entering the next phase. We still have minor setbacks, such as no network for our computers, no server for our files, and no phones but we can manage without those things or have found work arounds. The staff, of which we number 40, have mostly started by now and is very predominantly male which is also interesting since I tend to perceive public health to be filled with women being run by older men, at least in the states.
Keith and I have settled into a steady routine and for the most part I think I'm over my home-sickness. We have been having some adventures but I think neither one of us are those dynamic ex-pats one reads about, we are hunker down, figure out our landscape very cautiously and eat alot of kind of ex-pats. I wish I had more profound thoughts than that, but for now, it will have to do. One exciting thing is we begin foster care of a dog named Yoda tomorrow! Wish us luck, neither one of us really has any idea what we are doing.
