Archive for 'slice of life'
I managed a short trip to Swaziland last week. Just one night in Mbuluzi Game Reserve was enough to re-charge my batteries. It takes just an hour and a half to drive to the Swaziland border from Maputo, and 10 minutes beyond the border is this small, but beautiful, game reserve.
With over 300 bird species [...]
There was an absolute torrential downpour of rain last week, flooding the roads of Maputo and preventing a number of colleagues arriving at work. It was a bit of a wet welcome then for Beverley Warmington, DFID’s Director of West and Southern Africa and Chris Murgatroyd, the Head of the Directors Office.
I have pictured Beverley [...]
It ended up being a relatively late night on Tuesday, due to a working dinner which came at the end of a full day of discussions on the Global Fund. I say relatively late, as my working day normally begins when I open the DFID office at 7.15, so anything that extends the day beyond [...]
During the last few months, I've been working away at my desk job in London, as well as making a couple of monitoring visits to Zambia & Madagascar. As a keen cyclist, I was interested to meet the Zambikes social business in Lusaka, who've been building high quality bikes in Zambia, including a Zambulance and a Zamcart - bicycle-propelled medical transport and a heavy load [...]
The DFID office in Mozambique is quiet now, with many people already on leave. However, we still have a couple of important meetings before the end of the year, discussing financial management and planning for the annual review of the health sector early in 2010, so I am back and forth between the DFID office [...]
Yesterday while on the way to the hair salon, a 20-minute walk from the DFID office in downtown Beijing, I was stopped by several strangers asking me for the directions to the labour market. I can figure out from their outfits and accents that they are young rural women who are coming to Beijing to realise [...]
Last Thursday, at around 8.30am, I sat in the queue at the Sir Sanusi Hospital waiting to see the doctor. There were 15 of us in the women’s queue and about the same number in the men’s.
Two men came in suddenly carrying an old man. They sat him on the floor as there was no [...]
Nigeria is currently going through its own mini World Cup fiesta. After many months of doubt, deliberation and dubious ‘readiness reports’ the FIFA Under 17 World Cup is on and much of this football crazy nation are intensively following the super Eaglets quest for glory, to restore national pride and re-capture their 1999 Crown.Â
It's hard to [...]
My colleagues and I went to Mbuji Mayi (capital of Kasai-Oriental Province) for three days to attend the opening ceremony for the first water network out of eleven that will be constructed in Mbuji Mayi using DFID funds. The day started early and we were at the airport by 6am. After a short plane trip and [...]
If someone had suggested to me six or seven years ago that I would end up working on climate change, I would have taken it with a pinch of salt. If I thought much about the issue at all I would probably have been in the Bjorn Lomborg camp – the lauded and vilified (in [...]
