Costs & benefits

Hi all

I’m writing this from Frankfurt airport. My plane is delayed and I just found out my Uncle – the closest person I have to my Dad, who died when I was a kid – has had a heart attack back in Australia. I’m feeling desperately far away and there is nothing I can do from here. So I’m writing to distract myself – forgive me if it’s not so coherent.

So I’m back from Darfur again – after a distinctly different experience to being there on my own last month. The undoubted benefit of traveling with a government delegation is the ease of logistics. Traveling alone I ended up at one point stranded without accommodation after a plane diversion landed me somewhere other than where I was supposed to be –  there were no such concerns on this trip. No need to battle to get meetings either – everything pre-arranged.

But these benefits come at a real cost.

No quiet one-on-ones with people who are too scared to speak about what is really happening in front of a big group. No time to just sit with people. To just be –  and let the conversation flow from there. Everything runs to schedule and if something that is said leads someone to want to raise another issue, there is no time because there are another 50 people waiting for you to arrive at the next stop on the schedule.

It’s no one’s fault – it’s inherent in the nature of such trips. The contrast was just so striking because the Special Envoy went to a number of places I had been alone just a couple of weeks before. From a book writing perspective though, the trip was enormously useful, because I really did get to be with the Special Envoy and his staff 24/7.

My flight is being called to board . . . more later, Bec