Good news...

Mr. Hassan Abdel Moneim Mostafa, the Regional Representative of the International Organization for Migration's Mission with Regional Functions for West and Central Asia, or as I call him , Hassan, came to our little office in Muzaffarabad today. And what a treat it was. He only stopped by for a few hours, but he saw our office and all the latest improvements, visited our two project sites and talked to the staff. It was a great visit for many reasons. Mostly, Hassan is just a great guy. Expansive, gracious, generous, thoughtful, a real old time gentleman, Hassan is an Egyptian diplomat who has been with IOM for years. I enjoy his company and he is the only boss I've had who obviously works at putting people completely at ease.

Anyway, he was suitably impressed with what we have done here in teh past few months. We have finished several projects and gotten another HUGE project well underway after a slow start. So, Hassan and I had a discussion and he agreed that as soon as I feel comfortable with the status of the programs here, I can be on my way to Amman. I think it will take to the end of this week to get things running properly and then a few days to hand over the operation to my replacement and a day or two in Islamabad and by Thursday say, I can get out of here. Just great news all around.

OK, I'm tired and still have not finished my Pakistan piece. I'd like to get to it tomorrow, but I have hired 20 new staff and I need to plan the training for them for Friday and the rest of the weekend, plus I am finishing designing the database for tracking the houses we are building and setting up the standard operating procedures, designing the forms we are using for those procedures, and choosing the last bits of decoration to go on the park we have finished plus writing my handover notes and collecting all the emails that we have used to communicate with the contractors for the houses and passing all that along to my replacement. Anyway, I don't see finishing it for another few days.

More to come