It is also nice to note that so far atleast, the many doom sayers have been proved wrong. I will admit to having been amongst those who feared for what might happen when this huge influx of visitors wandered unassumingly into one of the  crime centres of the world might, but so far, touch wood, things seem to be under control and save for a few reminders of how dangerous the roads can be, the whole event looks safe and happy and full of the colour and energy that you can only find in Africa.

Perhaps more surprising to me is how little the build up to the event seems to have captured the Danish imagination. From what I can deduce, despite qualifying in some style in a sport that after the European Championships of 1992 is definitely a national treasure (if not quite to the sacred level that is reserved for handball), the streets seem eerily quiet. The Irish pubs may be packed, but they are full of English and Americans, French and Mexicans cheering on their homelands, not Danes.

Of course, the boys in red are yet to play and maybe come Monday the whole of the city will be bedecked in red and festooned with drunken faces of an equal hue. Being of the Jack Charlton generation and having lived in England through the last two world cups, I was expecting to be engulfed in a three month long nationalistic marketing orgy where ever brand under the sun attempts to wrap itself in the green white and orange or red and white of St George to boost the summer sales. Not so here, where save for one or two Carlsberg posters, the team and the national flag seem to have barely penetrated the commercial psyche, but perhaps this is just a sign of greater nationalistic maturity rather than for a lack of interest or passion.

Denmark it must be said, is a country ridiculously in love with its own flag to begin with, so perhaps it is just difficult for the untrained eye to spot the last few remaining spots on public buildings and private homes where they might be able to stick up a few extras to make a special point for the World Cup. This is also the country that invented the painting of flags on faces (or so I am told) so fingers crossed I am in for a massive surprise next week as the country erupts with passion and the party makes its way from Cape Town to Copenhagen.

It’s not every week that I open my copy of The Economist to be greeted by the words of somebody I have met. Bishop Joshua Banda is a high profile Zambian: the leader of a large evangelical congregation in Lusaka, a successful business man and as it happens, chairman of the National AIDS Council (NAC). It was in this final capacity that I worked briefly with him during last year’s Prevention Convention. In fact the last time I saw the gentleman, he was at the podium presenting the Vice President with a long list of resolutions aimed at reducing the incidence of HIV in the country in which the protection of the rights of sexual minorities featured prominently.

It was therefore with a degree of surprise that I read that Bishop Banda’s recent propulsion into the full glare of the global media was due to some remarks he made in asking Western agencies to refrain from criticizing policies towards same sex couples which did not reflect “Zambian values.” Surprised, and yet when I gave a few more moments thought, perhaps not quite so taken aback.

Before I go any further, I feel the need to clarify that I do not condone the discrimination of any individual on the basis of their sexuality or any trait for that matter. As far as I am concerned, we are all created equal under God’s eye and the good Bishop, through his diligent study of the scriptures, should be more aware of that than most. However, the point that he was making was specifically regarding the rights of Western agencies to comment upon Zambian laws and widespread attitudes and that I think that is far more interesting and worthy of debate.

For if we are honest, our own conversion to the rights of homosexuals has been a rather recent phenomena. Although the Zambian law on homosexuality is unquestionably draconian (up to 14 years imprisonment, recently updated to make sure that both men and women could be afforded the same punishment), there are many places around the world (the Middle and Far East spring to mind) where an equal lack of tolerance is on display and we would not have to travel too far back in our own history to find such laws on our statute books. We may now consider our societies to be reasonably equal on this measure but it has only been of late that such equality arrived and it certainly far from complete or universal.

Equally interesting to consider are the multiple special interests that lie behind the visible clashing of cultural gears that make such headlines. For example, the Ugandan MP who called for the death penalty for certain homosexual acts was widely reported around the world, as was the call made by Obama to President Museveni to ask him to reconsider the motion. What was much less widely noted was that the vast majority of funds that fuel such religious fervor come directly from evangelical churches back in the US who having considered their own country lost to ungodly beliefs, feel that their donations can atleast encourage another parts of the world to remain spiritually pure.

Thirdly, one cannot deny the special link that exists between HIV advocates in the West and the gay community. It is totally understandable that a disease originally referred to as GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and which caused such loss of life and suffering within the western gay community should retain a strikingly high number of physicians and activists from that community. In truth, in generalized epidemics such as Zambia’s the impact of same sex relationships on the overall rate of HIV is marginal at best (1% of new infections by the official statistics though this is undoubtedly an underrepresentation due the challenges of working with a community forced underground).

I was honored to briefly meet one of the only lesbian and gay organizations brave enough to operate in Zambia. I don’t doubt for a minute the bravery of their members or the importance of their work  in the struggle to create a fairer and more liberal nation. I just have to wonder if this is not a journey that they and the country need to travel by themselves, unpleasant as it can be to watch from the sidelines. In the meantime, my prayers will be with Bishop Banda and the unquestionable clarity of human equality in the hope he can become such a powerful advocate from within that there simply isn’t a need for an outside voice.

Enter the powerfully simplistic beauty of the randomised controlled trial. The genius of this scientific approach is grounded in the mathematics of large numbers. If you take two groups sufficiently large to represent the natural variation of any population you care to consider, and randomly assign one group to receive the intervention whilst the second are similarly monitored but without the intervention, then the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune can be allowed to cancel each other out and you can focus all your energies on figuring out whether what you are doing is making its mark or not.

The fundamental importance of this form of scientific enquiry is such that nothing in the field of modern medicine can hope for widespread adoption without proving itself in this way. The level of sophistication within these trials has grown to compensate for any number of additional discrepancies generated by the frailties of human nature. Members of the control group are typically given a placebo (a sugar pill or saline injection) to ensure that the patients own perceptions of treatment are equal. Equally, health care professionals are also often ‘blinded’ from whether they are giving out active drug or sugar pills, lest their own concious or unconscious communication to the patient change and thus make an impact on the outcome.

This emergence of ‘evidence based medicine’ has allowed us to move from the world of trying things because they look like they might work (think leeches at the turn of the century) to the acceptance and rejection of many modern medicines based solely on hard clinical data. Transitioning from the pharmaceutical industry, I was shocked by how infrequently this level of rigour was applied to the many interventions that are designed and funded in the development world. A beacon of light in this darkened space is Dr Esther Duflo and her Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can watch her giving an overview of their work here.

Her team aim to bring all the rigour of scientific enquiry to social engineering in the hope that it might advise and inform and shape future policy. Gratifyingly, her work is already placing several well researched cats amongst the development pigeons. For example her team has shown that micro-finance in many cases does little to foster enterprise in the way its backers claim, at least in the short run. At a more pragmatic level she has shown that ensuring teachers show up to teach is a better strategy than paying students to learn and that the best time to encourage farmers to invest in fertiliser is just after they have harvested this years crop (and funds are abundant).

There are many who argue that it is impossible to apply this form of rigorous scientific enquiry to the whole spectrum of development and social engineering and are particularly aghast at the idea that you might ‘withhold’ a certain support from a needy community just to prove a point. Yet this to me is wooly brained development thinking at its very worst. The scale of the problems faced, the scarcity of resources and the quantity of work required to implement real change all speak to me of a profound need to know that every single intervention is proven beyond doubt to be worthwhile and of differentially greater impact than anything else we could be spending our money and time on.

So here’s to Dr Duflo and her team, may they defeat the sceptics and move us to a world of ‘evidence based development’ where the aid equivalents of leeches are consigned to the history books and we let rational evidence cut through the fluffy thinking and lead us to focussing our efforts only on those things that make a real and lasting difference.

The pharmaceutical industry to which I have returned to is in a pretty bad state. Across the world, the ‘blockbuster’ drugs (those with annual sales above $1 billion) that have fuelled the sector’s growth during the preceding decades are coming to the end of their patent protected lives and with few exceptions there are no new treatments of anything like the commercial significance to replace them. The slow death of the pharmaceutical blockbuster has been on the horizon for several years but will probably reach its apogee later this year when Pfizer’s Lipitor (a statin for controlling cholesterol) comes off patent, wiping a colossal $13 billion from the firm’s turnover in the blink of an eye.

Yet the slow demise of the industry as colossus will not cause many tears to be shed, if anything you can detect a sensation of schadenfreude as many feel that a sector that had far outgrown its value to society is cut back to something approaching its useful size. How did my industry, which was once held with the highest of esteem as the epicentre of industrial research and technological advancement loose this lofty standing? When did the world of “big pharma” join the ranks of “big tobacco” and “big oil” in the line-up of usual corporate suspects in the popular imagination?

Well you can probably point your finger in any number of directions.  The tactics of the departments within which I ply my trade – Marketing and Sales, probably have more of a case to answer than most in explaining how such a overwhelming negative image of the industry has emerged. In a crazy couple of decades of unparalleled expansion, drugs were promoted too aggressively, doctors were entertained too lavishly and some of the basic tenets of what makes our products so important were lost. I plan to come back to several of these topics in future blog posts.

Yet I can’t agree with those who feel my industry should operate entirely on a research basis stripped of all means to promote its advancements. As a personal project during my time in Zambia, I tried to convince a number of key individuals within the Ministry of Health to consider an extremely useful treatment for the management of oral thrush (a particularly painful infection suffered by AIDS patients that reduces their ability to eat and hence their long term survival) which we manufacture and supply at cost. The many closed doors I encountered reinforced something that I have long known to be true – good drugs do not sell themselves. Like it or not – Doctors, pharmacists, whoever – are all human and a degree of push from sales and promotion is thoroughly necessary to get things moving, no matter how compelling the clinical case for use happens to be.

In sum, I am not here to absolve the transgressions of my industry or plea for your sympathy. We have worked ourselves into this particularly nasty corner and it is entirely down to us to rebuild the trust and respect necessary to build our way out. I do however like to believe that coming from a new generation of pharmaceutical marketers who have seen the error of our predecessors ways and are committed to changing things from the inside, I can be part of the solution rather than the problem.

At the end of the day, we still invent and produce some of the most important products that an individual is likely to rely upon during their life. There is an old expression in the UK health service that nobody ever got better with cups of hot tea (please don’t get me started on the non-science of homoeopathy). There may not be massive breakthroughs bursting from our pipelines but there are still plenty of important new advances for major diseases in development.

In the meantime, I have decided to laugh rather than cry when a stranger at a party sniffs haughtily when they hear what I do for a living before moving on to fawn over somebody who works for the marketing department of a trendy vodka. Like or loathe the industry, you can’t argue that many of our products continue to provide real help to many patients and to society at large. If I have had a good day, somebody might just be one tiny step closer to a revolutionary cure for hepatitis, if the vodka guy has a good day he has hastened the cirrhosis of the livers of a bunch more impressionable drinkers.

This weekend I have been enjoying the comforts of a warm welcome back to my childhood home of Ireland. At close to 1,5 years since I last visited, this is the longest single period of time that I have been away and as much as I enjoy the adventure of life far from its shores, there is something unmatchable in the comfort of returning to the house you grew up in and filling your self with some very familiar home cooking (Viv, your lemon stuffing still makes a chicken!)

This time around, I was particularly interested to understand what life looked like post the economic crash that the country has experienced in the intervening months. Recently a new friend in Denmark asked me to describe Ireland to them and I had to admit that I really wasn’t very well equipped to give them an accurate answer. Having left over 11 years ago and spending not much more than Christmas’s and the odd weekend back there since, I am painfully aware of how much has changed and how little I really know of it compared to the country I grew up in.

Mine was the probably the first generation that felt no economic urge whatsoever to emigrate, I was one of a very small number of graduating class to leave, something that had become tragically routine during the decades before and is indeed commonplace once again. The mega boom of the 2000′s was something that I watched from a afar and the mega bust of today is equally something rather foreign to me. The half empty car park as we circled Dublin airport told me that all was not as I had left it. The lack of gridlocked traffic on the M50 ring road confirmed it. This bubble had certainly burst.

Sharing stories with friends of how it looks on the ground was a sobering business. A friend shook his head as he explained how an acquaintance was struggling to meet the mortgages on 4 houses – all of which were now in negative equity. I began shaking my head with wonder as to how a 32 year old came to own 4 houses in the first place and exactly what kind of mentally retarded bank manager might have deemed him credible for his second, third and fourth mortgage application.

The best answer anybody seems to have is that the whole country fell under a collective trance, enraptured by the lure of easy money in a property game where nobody seemed to loose out, save for those who failed to play the game. Now there are ghost towns of half built homes in satellite towns across the country, so badly built and so unlikely to be ever filled that that they are seriously considering knocking them back down again.

It is of course no fun listening to friends recount the challenges of finding a job or even getting paid for the work they do carry out. Yet I can’t help but feel that Ireland will bounce back from all of this, for all the madness, Ireland does not deserve to be the I of the PIGS. As one of the most youthful workforces in Europe, demographics remain on our side and our open labour laws have allowed a whole battalion of Eastern Europeans to both arrive and depart again with a minimum of fuss. The multinational investment that so dominates our economy is primarily of the high tech, plant and equipment variety which is thankfully hard to withdraw in a hurry and the government (and indeed the people) seem relatively serious about pulling in the spending and getting the public finances back in order.

For sure there are a couple of lean years ahead of us, but there is no doubt in my mind that Ireland will remain fundamentally changed and for the most part greatly improved from the decade I have watched from the sidelines. Its car parks may be less full now, but the gleaming airport I flew in and out of is as transformed as any other part of the country since I began using it as a stepping off point 11 years ago.

What started out as a daydream during a relaxed little run on a steamy night in Lusaka turned into a much more concerted training regime that spanned the full climactic range from those early months in the hot and heavy tropical rains of Zambia to laps around the frozen lakes of Copenhagen in the final weeks of preparation. All, it must be said, completed in the same two pairs of black shorts (raising more than one or two eyebrows in Copenhagen at least)

What kept me focussed throughout was the incredible stream of generosity that flowed from many of your bank accounts to the Run Lozi Run fund and culminated last week with my parents hosting a  coffee morning back in my home town of Blessington. With the help of many many family and friends from the locality they added a massive €1,100 to the total in a single morning!!!

It therefore gives me incredible pleasure to finally wrap up the Run Lozi Run funding campaign and tell you that thanks your amazing collective generosity £8,000 /€9,200 / $11,400 or perhaps most impressively 60,000,000 Zambian Kwacha is on it’s way to N’gombe Home Based Care.

"Please receive and accept very warm greetings from he entire membership of Roma/N'gombe Community Home Based Care and wish you God's abundant blessings"

They have already taken their first instalment and Bernard their treasurer kindly wrote to me to let you all know where the first funds went:

• Staple maize meal was procured to support 40 families for the year
• Infant formula was supplied to protect 10 babies from HIV in their mothers milk for the year
• Food supplementation for 20 babies who will be kept from malnourishment for the year
• Transport costs to ensure that a further 20 mothers can take their children to the hospital for regular post natal care each month
• Funds to pay for X-Rays for 10 children per month attending clinic

I know that the community group will be getting a chance to watch their YouTube video’s soon thanks to my old colleagues at the Alliance so a few more important viewers will be added to the 500 who have already watched. For those who have yet to have the pleasure they are here and here. Katherine, that old red beret of yours is becoming very famous!!

Since the first time I had the fortune to visit N’gombe and meet this amazing group of dedicated and hard working individuals I have remained convinced of the immense good that they continue to provide directly to those who need it most and I am delighted and proud to have been able to connect the generosity of so many of my friends and family to their incredibly good work. You can be sure that it has made a difference.

Thank you one and all.

This week I have been trying to digest a remarkable report from Human Rights Watch on the state of Zambia’s prisons. During the last 18 months they managed to  interview prisoners in six facilities across the country and the picture they paint is no less shocking for perhaps its tragically predictable state:

A couple of statistics to put things in perspective:

1. Number of people in Zambia’s prisons = 15,000
2. Number of people Zambia’s prisons were designed for = 5,500
3. Number of physicians dedicated to Zambia’s prisons = 1

As an example, Lusaka central prison built in 1920 for 200 inmates is now home to over 1,100. Conditions are so bad that inmates must take turns to stand, sit and lie down in order to try and grab even the smallest amount of rest. There is a constant lack of food with almost all prisoners subsisting on one poor quality meal a day – a dark irony as many prisons are based on farms which produce vegetables for sale to generate income for the state. This complete lack of basic services forces vulnerable inmates to trade their only resource, sex, for food and basic clothing.

As one might imagine, the health situation in these facilities is beyond horrific. Basic sanitation and hygiene is singularly lacking and the rates of HIV are far higher than in the population at large. Given the complete ban on condoms in the face of  high rates of both consensual sex and rape, it is unsurprising that many more inmates leave facilities infected with HIV and other diseases than when they arrive. TB is of particular concern with the high levels of immuno-compromised individuals packed into densely crowded cell blocks leading to very high rates of infection and mortality from this treatable disease.

The captains are police in the cells—what they do in the cells, I don’t know.  Sometimes they do punish their friends in their cells—I don’t know how they do it. They have their own court, without the officers involved.
– Officer in charge, Mumbwa Prison, October 5, 2009

As with so many of Zambia’s government services, prisons are under staffed and so authority for maintaining discipline, particularly at night, is delegated to prisoners who act as cell captains. Within this role they are free to decide who to punish and who to reward with especially harsh treatment meted out to fellow inmates suspected of sodomy.

In the men’s blocks, prisoners who fall foul of their guards or cell captains are sent to the penal block where they are stripped and placed in a cell of 1×2 metres. Water is then added to ankle height and depending upon their transgression, the inmate must stand or sit in dark confinement in this fetid water for anything up to 3 or 4 weeks. In the women’s blocks, punishments can include stripping prisoners, covering them in mud and forcing them to sit in the baking heat of the Zambian day until night falls.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing statistics unearthed by the report is that 37% of those in Zambian penal system are on remand. Due to the chronic lack of staff and capacity within the justice system as a whole over one third are therefore still awaiting their day in court.

It is very hard to know what to say about this Dickensian situation. It goes without saying that each and every aspect of these degradations (and there are many more in the report) are in direct contradiction to the multiple charters on human and prisoner rights that Zambia has signed up to. Yet there are many in Zambia who are forced to live lives that are squalid and without basic services and it should probably not come as any kind of surprise that the prison service is in perhaps the worst state of them all.

When day to day life is such a struggle for so many ordinary Zambians, should we be surprised that this report has generated only very limited comment in the country itself? I am sure that if we were to dig up a report from a visit to a British prison in the 1850′s for historical comparison, we would hear very similar stories and a similar silent indifference from the public at large. Heck, we might not even have to travel back in time!

Is it OK to accept such horrors as being merely symptomatic of the state broader woes? I would be particularly grateful if some of my Zambian friends and readers could provide some perspective on all of this.

I can only conclude that we all remain human beings, whether guilty of a charge meriting incarceration or not (and for 37% of Zambian inmates we don’t even know that). To hear these stories is yet one more grim reminder (as if it were needed) of how bad things can be at the bottom and how much worse again at the bottom of the bottom.

I wish I had more to offer, I don’t… I just felt it was important to share.

]]> http://berkeleysblog.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/the-view-from-the-bottom-of-the-bottom/feed/ 0 berkeleysblog http://berkeleysblog.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/getting-volcanised/ http://berkeleysblog.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/getting-volcanised/#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:32:40 +0000 berkeleysblog http://berkeleysblog.wordpress.com/?p=965 Read more]]> It has been an interesting week to sit back and observe how things we take for granted can, every now and then, give us a sharp nip on the backside and remind us exactly how feeble we can be in the face of forces greater than ourselves.

I was afforded more than enough time to reflect on all of this as I sat (slightly illegally) on the floor of a series of trains as they zipped across France & Belgium, moved at a more sedate pace through Germany before finally limping back home to Denmark. A total journey time of 22 hours – a trifle in terms of African travel times – but by European terms long enough to be considered an enormous (and rather wonderful) adventure.

That such a developed continent could be brought to a standstill by a minor eruption on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic is surely as poetic a reminder of our frailties as you could wish for. All those high powered executives don’t seem so omnipotent sitting on their suitcases at Heathrow. Had the volcano cut their lines of communication, then all hell really would have broken loose. Suddenly all those apocalypse now films of the last few years don’t seem so far fetched.

We who have had the fortune to be born into a world with this ‘assumed efficiency’ often loose patience with the pace of change or the ability of a government or institutions to generate the desired response in the developing world. Yet a week like the one just past illustrates how much can come off the rails when just a single cog goes missing, and that in our own well manicured back yard.

The lesson to me is clear: We are only the productive efficient workers we pride ourselves to be in the developed world because we stand on the shoulders of tens of thousands of others who keep the roads tarred, the lights on and in this particular case the airways open.

At 8:45 on the dot we were off! Well to be accurate the 100+ elite runners somewhere down the end of the vast avenue were off whilst the rest of us jogging plebs made our way gently forward inching towards the starting line. Thankfully with the advent of electronic chips that only start your personal race clock as you cross the start line, this was all conducted with the maximum of good humour and absolutetely no pushing and shoving. As the only person (male or female) running in an ankle length dress this came as something of a relief.

Once we were under way I immediately began to understand why people get addicted to these things. It certainly isn’t for the weeks of endless training, but dashing through the streets of Paris with lots of Parisiennes cheering you on is a Sunday morning pastime that is not without it’s charms. Clearly the Zambian attire attracted more than my fair share of attention, most of it positive – I certainly knew that any time I heard ‘Allez la jupe’ or ‘Allez Mademoiselle’ there was more than a passing chance that it was me and not some lady in a dress somewhere behind me they were cheering on. I like to think that my red beret drew a final extra ounce of Gallic support from the the many chic ladies of Paris who appreciate a good hat as much as any beautiful woman around the world.

A special word of commendation has to be given to Manon, my official videographer who not only managed to find me twice amongst the masses to grab some video but even sprinted ahead of me amongst the crowds to get a third passing shot. Her final cut will hit YouTube later this week.

The race itself proved to be remarkably painless, much more of a mental than a physical challenge  - all about keeping your head down and focusing on your pace rather than letting your mind wander as to how many miles might be yet left to go. By the time that I was beginning to feel any sort of discomfort, there was less than 10km remaining and I could focus every ounce of mental energy on convincing myself that slowing down with 35 of 42 km already completed was just plain ridiculous. So it was a pleasant shock to finally look up and see the clock read 3:32 as I passed the final bend and crossed the finish line.

No sooner had I come to a stop than my body convulsed through more emotions than a pregnant women. The first moments of elation and relief were followed quickly by a surprising burst of emotion. It proved hard to explain exactly why I was sobbing to the man tasked with cutting the electronic chip from my sweaty trainer. Finally my body decided that lightheadedness and nausea were the most appropriate response to the abuse I had heaped upon it in the preceding hours. Manon was all set to record my triumphant return to the Arc de Triomph but decided to switch off the camera as I found the nearest patch of grass and curled up into a fetal position, my face turning a lighter shade of pale.

Thankfully, about 30 minutes later all functions seemed to have returned to normal and I was able to hobble back to Isabelle’s, another kind colleague who provided both a much needed bath and some long awaited fine French wine to toast the occasion. Unfortunately, this was the first time I actually managed to meet up with my Zambian colleagues who had spent the preceding three hours standing near the finishing line holding a banner made specially for me by the team at N’gombe. They had watched a bunch of Africans romp home in close to 2 hours to claim both male and female titles, another 5,900 participants sprint, jog, walk and hobble across the line in slightly slower times but had still managed to totally miss one solitary Irish man in his Zambian dress collapse across the line.

Oh well, maybe they can catch me do it all again next year!

PS – Donations still very welcome, final funding update shortly.

PPS – Check out the YouTube clip for a video taste of the day

First up there is the small matter of 26.2 miles or more appropriately whatever that translates to in kilometers along the byways and boulevards of la belle Paris, all to be completed in my siziba, the tribal dress of the Lozi of Western Zambia. This is one particular ball where I will be very dissappointed indeed to see more than one person sporting the same dress!

I am delighted to say that through the generosity of many of the readers of this blog as well as friends, colleagues and family, over 7,000 euro is already on it’s way to the very neediest of N’gombe compound, Lusaka. If you have contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you are still sitting on the fence, the paypal link is about 3cm to your right. Go on! I promise it will be the most worthwhile thing you do with your mouse today!

Assuming that I am still able to walk, on Monday I move with my Zambian colleagues to the INSEAD business school in the suburbs of Paris for the final component of my year’s placement under the PEPAL programme (www.pepal.org).

Avid readers of the blog may remember that we gathered here a year ago to launch the 8 or so partnerships between private sector volunteers such as myself and HIV organisations from across the globe: Cambodia to Kenya, Ukraine to India, not forgetting little old Zambia of course.

I am fascinated to see how the projects have progressed, which ones have found common ground upon which to build useful partnerships that exchange ideas, values and skills and which have found the chasm between private and not for profit, between developed and developing just too much to bridge.

Back as I am to a full time job in a developed country far away from my project partners, the respect I have for those many partnerships who didn’t have luxury of spending the full year together but had to try and work together remotely has only deepened. Only four weeks back, I find it harder and harder to connect with the realities of life back in Zambia, both professional and personal. Try as I might, it is hard to escape the simple fact that the very orbits of our worlds take us in vastly different directions.

It will be wonderful to spend time with my Zambian colleagues, to reflect on the year past with them and the other partners. As I unpacked my things last week I came across the beautiful book of rememberances that the team in Zambia had prepared as a leaving gift and I concluded that it is now the proudest pocession of my career. I really hope that this final week together can help us all chart a course that ensures there are more than just fond memories in our future.