Africa Reloaded

So I did decide to stay on and move on at the same time. After an amazing vacation in Europe, last week I returned to Africa to take on a daunting mission: becoming the Congo media and information officer for a large humanitarian aid organization.

Luckily, the beginning of my assignment coincided with an advocacy and external relations workshop that they were holding in Nairobi, so here I was, learning about my new Congo job in Kenya and meeting new colleagues from across Africa and the US. It is now my last night here, and I am standing by the pool at the fabulous Silver Springs Hotel, bracing for a flight to Kinshasa tomorrow.

As hundreds of names of people, locations and programs are flying by me and flooding my new outlook inbox I am slowly getting ready for what will certainly be a CRAZY job. Since Congo is just about INSANELY BIG, it is actually considered not a country, but a region, with each province a sort of country on its own. I can already see myself criss-crossing this 2.4. million km2 territory, setting up a whole communications machinery and dealing with everything I could have ever imagined in ‘field work’. I am quite exhausted only at the thought of it all, but soooo excited to see all these places and help give those tens of millions in need a voice out there (yes, exactly, I am already learning the message, not to mention that my head is pretty much full of organizational jargon and strange acronyms). I am certainly pumped up by the Americans delivering this workshop (I felt a bit like back in class at Columbia, with this very forth-coming, hands-on-oriented approach, of which I had grown a bit apart in the last few years.)

It was all, actually, so professional, that I have been working some 12 hours a day (OK, with short breaks for the hotel gym and Masai shoe shopping). I was also thrown in cross-continental conference calls, with both staff around the world and journos interested in covering our work, that I am totally feeling part of something really BIG.

I can only hope I'll be safe and healthy in this momentous new chapter of my life, and that some day I will look back on it all and be convinced I made the right choice(s). See you in Congo!