After this post I will be up-to-date again and will try to go back to blogging at more regular intervals.
From Boston, I headed straight to London to work in our London office for a week, doing a training on monitoring and evaluation and finally meeting the lovely people who work in that office and who I Skype with all the time but hadn't met in person. It was a good week of work--some new angles on programs we run, a better understanding of the way European donors work as compared to American donors, some interesting conversations on how well humanitarian aid works and just generally a nice time working in a big open office with lots of light and nice people.
I might have been working during the day, but I used my evenings to go out and see London, which I hadn't been to before except for a whirlwind day there when my grandparents took my sister and I on a week-long bus tour of England, Scotland and Wales my senior year of high school as a graduation present. So I was excited to see London. In some ways it felt very familiar--the quick trip there, trips to elsewhere in the UK, time in South Africa (which has distinct Englishness in places at times), and, more than anything, having read so many books and seen so many movies set there.
Except for an evening that I met up with a good friend of Anthony's for dinner by the London School of Economics (where he's a student) and a dinner out with several people from work in the Angel area of Islington, I mostly just wandered around in the evenings, taking advantage of how late it stays light.
Right on Bedford Square, Bloomsbury: I want that room, those bookshelves, those books. You know, I'll just take the whole house actually....I have a soft spot for Georgian architecture.
On Friday night, I walked across the Thames to the Tate Modern, which stays open late on Fridays.
In addition to a large performance art piece (not really my cup of tea) they had a number of great photography exhibits: New Documentary Forms, Diane Arbus, the war in Afghanistan, and the recent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (very much my cup of tea).
The photo exhibit of the elections in the DRC, by a South African photojournalist named Guy Tillim who began his career in the 1980s covering popular uprising against white minority rule, included one of the actual ballots. According to the sign by the ballot, "The Congo Democratic series was made in Kinshasa during the 2006 presidential elections, which followed successive civil wars that devastated the Democratic Republic of Congo. This multi-party election, the first in 46 years, was particularly fraught, with some 3,400 politicians contesting the 500 seats in the house of assembly, and 33 presidential candidates. ‘The ballot was an amazing six-page poster-size document with pen pictures of all the candidates that were hard to recognise,’ Tillim recalls. Tensions ran high in the capital between the two frontrunners, Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba and their supporters. According to Tillim, ‘young men in Kinshasa fought battles with police … as they tore down and burned election paraphernalia."
Can you imagine? I feel like it really puts some of the debates we have in the US about voting specifics into perspective...
I walked back across the Thames and went to Soho to try to find something to eat. Too bad everything remotely in my price range had closed 8 minutes before I got there...except the crepe place! A white chocolate crepe? Why, yes, thank you.
On Saturday, I headed to the Portobello Road market in Notting Hill.
There were a few cool things (see pictures above), but on the whole I wasn't that impressed at first--lots of people, lots of junk. And then I found it. The dress seller. Selling some of the literally exact same dresses from my favorite clothing website modcloth.com at a fraction of the cost. I practiced really admirable restraint in only purchasing two. I really could have walked away with at least 10 or 15. No joke.
I went to the travel bookshop that Hugh Grant character's bookshop is supposedly modeled after in the movie Notting Hill but was not impressed with its Africa section, or how seriously the store clearly took itself. That's what being in a movie will do to you, I guess.
I left Notting Hill and walked through Holland Park, heading vaguely in the long-way around direction of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
And on a whim, I went into Daunt Books, right on Holland Park's main strip of stores. You would not believe their Africa section, which I kindly donated the rest of my afternoon to. This wasn't the standard guidebooks and "what's wrong with Africa" books, either--this was novels, memoirs, histories. The good stuff. Daunt Books, you have my heart forever.
When I finally managed to stumble out, it was clearly to late to make it to the V&A Museum (which closes at 5:30), so I went with plan B: walk through Kensington Gardens, a quick trip to see Herrods, the tube to Hampstead Heath, a walk around the health, and dinner on Hampstead High Street, followed by a little BBC in my hotel room to put me right to sleep after a long day of walking.
Sunday morning it was freezing and pouring, but when I finally convinced myself to set out walking to the Columbia Road Flower Market, I was glad I had.
Then I actually did manage to make it to the V&A Museum. I can't think of a better way to spend a cold rainy English day. Especially since there were TWO South African photography exhibits, one a single photographer who chronicled decades of apartheid and one a variety of contemporary South African photographers on topics ranging from security guards in Johannesburg's wealthy suburbs to gay men in rural areas to portrait photographers in an urban park. If you have time, definitely look at this page about the photographers in the second exhibit, a fascinating and wildly diverse bunch. It also has some of their photographs from the exhibit on it.
When I was done and it was close to closing, it was still cold and still rainy so I succumbed to the day and sat in a cozy cafe drinking coffee and reading, ate fish and chips at a gastro-pub for dinner and went pack to the hotel to pack for my trip to the Netherlands the next morning.
I spent 3.5 days in the Netherlands, 3.3 of the them in a conference center. A beautiful conference center in a beautiful woodland in a beautiful country, but a conference center nonetheless. It as a major monitoring and evaluation conference and I learned a tremendous amount, much more than I had at the other conference in Boston. This was partly due to the fact that all of the panels were centered on case-studies, so automatically people were there presenting their successes and failures to common M&E problems, not just rehashing the same problems. But there will still a fair number of people present who were so far removed from the realities of my day-to-day work in the field as to be almost irrelevant, no matter how great their ideas were.
I slipped out late one afternoon to take the bus to Amersfoort, the little town closest to the conference center. It was pleasant in that quintessentially Dutch kind of way.
And that's about it--I left for Kenya the next day, which is a whole new blog post...
From Boston, I headed straight to London to work in our London office for a week, doing a training on monitoring and evaluation and finally meeting the lovely people who work in that office and who I Skype with all the time but hadn't met in person. It was a good week of work--some new angles on programs we run, a better understanding of the way European donors work as compared to American donors, some interesting conversations on how well humanitarian aid works and just generally a nice time working in a big open office with lots of light and nice people.
I might have been working during the day, but I used my evenings to go out and see London, which I hadn't been to before except for a whirlwind day there when my grandparents took my sister and I on a week-long bus tour of England, Scotland and Wales my senior year of high school as a graduation present. So I was excited to see London. In some ways it felt very familiar--the quick trip there, trips to elsewhere in the UK, time in South Africa (which has distinct Englishness in places at times), and, more than anything, having read so many books and seen so many movies set there.
Except for an evening that I met up with a good friend of Anthony's for dinner by the London School of Economics (where he's a student) and a dinner out with several people from work in the Angel area of Islington, I mostly just wandered around in the evenings, taking advantage of how late it stays light.
Right on Bedford Square, Bloomsbury: I want that room, those bookshelves, those books. You know, I'll just take the whole house actually....I have a soft spot for Georgian architecture.
On Friday night, I walked across the Thames to the Tate Modern, which stays open late on Fridays.
In addition to a large performance art piece (not really my cup of tea) they had a number of great photography exhibits: New Documentary Forms, Diane Arbus, the war in Afghanistan, and the recent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (very much my cup of tea).
The photo exhibit of the elections in the DRC, by a South African photojournalist named Guy Tillim who began his career in the 1980s covering popular uprising against white minority rule, included one of the actual ballots. According to the sign by the ballot, "The Congo Democratic series was made in Kinshasa during the 2006 presidential elections, which followed successive civil wars that devastated the Democratic Republic of Congo. This multi-party election, the first in 46 years, was particularly fraught, with some 3,400 politicians contesting the 500 seats in the house of assembly, and 33 presidential candidates. ‘The ballot was an amazing six-page poster-size document with pen pictures of all the candidates that were hard to recognise,’ Tillim recalls. Tensions ran high in the capital between the two frontrunners, Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba and their supporters. According to Tillim, ‘young men in Kinshasa fought battles with police … as they tore down and burned election paraphernalia."
Can you imagine? I feel like it really puts some of the debates we have in the US about voting specifics into perspective...
I walked back across the Thames and went to Soho to try to find something to eat. Too bad everything remotely in my price range had closed 8 minutes before I got there...except the crepe place! A white chocolate crepe? Why, yes, thank you.
On Saturday, I headed to the Portobello Road market in Notting Hill.
There were a few cool things (see pictures above), but on the whole I wasn't that impressed at first--lots of people, lots of junk. And then I found it. The dress seller. Selling some of the literally exact same dresses from my favorite clothing website modcloth.com at a fraction of the cost. I practiced really admirable restraint in only purchasing two. I really could have walked away with at least 10 or 15. No joke.
I went to the travel bookshop that Hugh Grant character's bookshop is supposedly modeled after in the movie Notting Hill but was not impressed with its Africa section, or how seriously the store clearly took itself. That's what being in a movie will do to you, I guess.
I left Notting Hill and walked through Holland Park, heading vaguely in the long-way around direction of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
And on a whim, I went into Daunt Books, right on Holland Park's main strip of stores. You would not believe their Africa section, which I kindly donated the rest of my afternoon to. This wasn't the standard guidebooks and "what's wrong with Africa" books, either--this was novels, memoirs, histories. The good stuff. Daunt Books, you have my heart forever.
When I finally managed to stumble out, it was clearly to late to make it to the V&A Museum (which closes at 5:30), so I went with plan B: walk through Kensington Gardens, a quick trip to see Herrods, the tube to Hampstead Heath, a walk around the health, and dinner on Hampstead High Street, followed by a little BBC in my hotel room to put me right to sleep after a long day of walking.
Sunday morning it was freezing and pouring, but when I finally convinced myself to set out walking to the Columbia Road Flower Market, I was glad I had.
Then I actually did manage to make it to the V&A Museum. I can't think of a better way to spend a cold rainy English day. Especially since there were TWO South African photography exhibits, one a single photographer who chronicled decades of apartheid and one a variety of contemporary South African photographers on topics ranging from security guards in Johannesburg's wealthy suburbs to gay men in rural areas to portrait photographers in an urban park. If you have time, definitely look at this page about the photographers in the second exhibit, a fascinating and wildly diverse bunch. It also has some of their photographs from the exhibit on it.
When I was done and it was close to closing, it was still cold and still rainy so I succumbed to the day and sat in a cozy cafe drinking coffee and reading, ate fish and chips at a gastro-pub for dinner and went pack to the hotel to pack for my trip to the Netherlands the next morning.
I spent 3.5 days in the Netherlands, 3.3 of the them in a conference center. A beautiful conference center in a beautiful woodland in a beautiful country, but a conference center nonetheless. It as a major monitoring and evaluation conference and I learned a tremendous amount, much more than I had at the other conference in Boston. This was partly due to the fact that all of the panels were centered on case-studies, so automatically people were there presenting their successes and failures to common M&E problems, not just rehashing the same problems. But there will still a fair number of people present who were so far removed from the realities of my day-to-day work in the field as to be almost irrelevant, no matter how great their ideas were.
I slipped out late one afternoon to take the bus to Amersfoort, the little town closest to the conference center. It was pleasant in that quintessentially Dutch kind of way.
And that's about it--I left for Kenya the next day, which is a whole new blog post...
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