The Big Visit

For a four-day week, this sure didn't feel short! Hard to believe it's been a week already since I last posted, but with good reason. Last week was crazy.

In addition to the normal hustle and bustle, I found myself covering for the Facilities Manager while he is on vacation, getting ready for the arrival of a new officer that Stephanie and I are sponsoring, working with an advisor from our regional support center, and wildest of all, preparing for a visit from Richard Holbrooke - the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Being acting facilities manager doesn't put all that much of an extra burden on me as the staff are very competent. It's mostly just more to pay attention to, although we did have a partial roof collapse at our motorpool to contend with due to the lingering snow. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Getting ready for the person we're sponsoring was fun, but knowing what it was like to arrive in a strange place in the middle of the night, we wanted to make sure everything was perfect. This mostly involves making sure the house is ready and that there is some food available before they get here. Then when the guy arrived, I went to the airport to meet him and made sure he was settled in at home.

The new guy is very cool and Stephanie and I both get along with him well. The nice thing is that he lives only a couple of blocks away from us - which is great since so far, we've been the only ones in this part of town. Part of being a sponsor is also to help get the person settled in at the embassy and around town. We've had fun doing that as well since it gives us another good reason to be out and about.

So being a sponsor is more fun than work in my book. It's just unfortunate that this experience coincided with the Holbrooke visit, which was unmistakeably work-ish. It's no secret by now that Special Representative Holbrooke has been on a whirlwind tour of the region over the last week, so Dushanbe was by far not the only embassy scrambling to prepare for a quick visit.

Preparation included making sure we reserved the appropriate rooms at the Hyatt as well as setting up a control center (basically a fully equipped impromptu office) for the staff to work from, not to mention putting together comprehensive transportation planning for the trip. There are an amazing number of moving parts involved with a visit like this including coordination of access to the airport and the presidential palace for the meeting, as well as making the most of public diplomacy opportunities - not to mention arranging security for the entire visit.

The visit was only scheduled to last from an arrival Friday evening to a departure Saturday morning but it had most of the embassy hopping for over a week. Fortunately, everything went more or less smoothly, and we handled several unexpected schedule changes and special requests without a hitch. I even got to enjoy a free breakfast at the Hyatt on Saturday morning. The only hiccup (which was not our doing) was when the group prepared to leave and had a problem with arrangements at their next destination. Suddenly, my stint at the Hyatt changed from a four hour day to an eight hour day. Still, at least I was stationed at the Hyatt and not at the airport in the rain.

Finally around 3:30pm we got the 'wheels up' notice and were able to shut down and go home. Saturday night, we blew off some steam at the embassy Valentine's Day party - better known as 'The Love Fest' and then went on to a friend's house for some more dancing. We had a great time and it was a much needed release after a rather tense week.

Today, the weather finally cleared after a couple of weeks of rain and snow. It was actually a rather warm and beautiful day. We took our sponsoree around town to help him get familiarized with the area and to do some shopping at the bazaar. On the way I was able to snap some photos:

The town hall...

A car with some interesting cargo...

And a tandoori sambusa oven at the bazaar...

As the weekend winds down, I have no doubt it will be another busy week as I need to catch up on things that didn't get done while I was tied up with the Holbrooke visit. Since I'm leaving for my conference in Washington next Saturday, I really need to get everything in order.

And finally, the most amazing thing is that as of this weekend, we've been here for 6 months!! It's hard to believe we're already a quart of the way through our tour. In another 6 months we'll already figuring out where to go next. And so the adventure continues.