DES

Dar es Salaam, my new base.

A hectic day that reminded me a lot of days in the Phnom Penh office in Cambodia, of rushing about and having productive but back-to-back conversations in drowsy tropical heat.

Lots of talking, hand-shaking, introductions, and putting faces to names. I conclude that people do not look like their profile pictures on WhatsApp. However on social media we are probably all guilty of rolling back the biological clock 5+ years to a date on which we looked particularly dapper in a suit or carefree on a beach (my blip photo from circa 2018 is a case in point).

I was hoiked out of a meeting on a budget extension to be taken for lunch by Lawrence (sort of second in command in the country programme) and Richard (who will be my closest counterpart in the Tanzanian part of the landscape in his role of field coordinator for southern Tanzania). It gives me untold joy and relief that in my new job I only need to keep roughly abreast of big budgetary issues, as opposed to my previous role of being accountable for the nitty gritty of large sums of money, without the time to ever catch up.

A chicken curry, pineapple juice, more meetings and an activated SIM card later, I’d packed a lot into Day 1. At sunset I went with Julian, the other Brit attached to the Tanzania office, to Coco Beach in Dar es Salaam, for a bottle of Serengeti Light. Immediately I started thinking about apartment rentals as close to the beach as possible. At the weekend I will be exploring the districts of Dar for the liveability factor.