Lanyard

Today I participated in a technical session in the auditorium at the conference centre. Before I presented, which went pretty well, my colleague from Communications was alarmed that I wasn’t wearing a branded lanyard, so she intervened just in time.

The session was about connectivity in landscapes and how we can better recognise areas of high conservation value that aren’t currently under official protection. There was a nice crowd including some familiar faces and the afternoon paved the way for some further collaborations. It’s a pleasure being in this network of people working on transboundary conservation issues as there is automatically a sense of unity and less territoriality between organisations. As I always conclude, the highlights of my role come from my interactions with these people.

Apparently Eric Clapton came to Harare once and played at this venue, although today we had frequent power outages which threatened the prestige of the much touted summit, especially as we’re waiting for some government bigwigs to show up for the more formal parts.

To celebrate moments of levity in the evening we sampled some Zambezi beer, a Zimbabwean brand.