Yes, you're allowed to check Google Maps to see where Bissau is located...

Hi all,
Great to hear from some of you, and hope there are more updates on their way! I got a later start on the interning, after spending some quality time at home and at my Yale college reunion. I hope MPA/ID reunions are like this one: they basically set up a tent in a courtyard, and fill it with food and an open bar around the clock for 3 days. Who can complain?

I made it to Bissau almost 2 weeks ago, and was picked up in a fancy white UN SUV to go to the World Food Programme office, which features 24-hour generators, A/C, internet access… pretty cushy. The rest of the city, not so much. There is neither free food nor an open bar. It’s a small city, and moves at a slow pace, but has a nice feel to it. I’ve got a beautiful apartment in one of the nicest neighborhoods, with reasonably consistent electricity and faux sinks/toilet/shower that really do look like they’re connected to running water, even though they’re not. The photo is the view from my porch this morning, out onto a little plaza. I’ve spent a fair amount of time just walking around the city, down by the port, through the little winding alleys of the main market, past the 1-km-long lines of taxis/buses waiting for gas to become available, through the old Portuguese quarter, past the bombed-out former Presidential Palace (and I too was shooed away by guards when I accidentally walked past the President’s current office, although there were no AK’s involved), through the dirt-road neighborhoods... I’ve also been on a massive quest to find street food, although so far it’s limited to the Nescafe cart guys, some women selling “donuts,” and hard-boiled-egg-and-mystery-paste sandwiches (very tasty, if mysterious). But after a confirmed case of cholera was identified inside the city limits yesterday, I might reconsider my enthusiasm for street food altogether.
Work’s interesting so far, pretty much a daily example of why and how it is hard to “measure” or “evaluate” anything at all. There’s a lot of counting of how many people received food, and a lot of speculation about whether/how it encouraged some desired outcome (sticking to HIV/AIDS or TB treatment, school attendance, healthy pregnancies, agricultural rehabilitation, building community infrastructure), which is virtually impossible to quantify. Won’t be running too many regressions this summer. I’m looking forward to making some field visits, starting next week, to see the projects in action. Have been learning more Portuguese, so that I can manage the basics of greetings, market bargaining, and small talk, but am still a bit mystified by the multilingual staff meetings, in which each person speaks in turn in his/her preferred language (English, French, Portuguese, local Portuguese creole…) and the others listen politely despite varying degrees of understanding each language.
Anyway, that’s more than enough from me…