Welcome to my Joburg Blog!

Hello friends and family!

So, as you know, or have recently discovered, I am now off to Johannesburg, South Africa for the next step in my ever-varied career path, and have been advised/compelled/guilted into starting up another blog so that people can check up on me and what I am doing there. So enjoy!

A few words of introduction: I will be working in Joburg for an organization called CIVICUS, whose link you can find to the right of this posting, along with a link to the website dedicated to the project I will be working with: the Civil Society Index. Instead of trying to explain everything here, I thought it would be way easier (for me...) to provide the links to the websites, and those of you who are interested in learning more can check them out. Please feel free to let me know what you think, or if you have any questions! I cannot profess to be an expert yet, but I have been working as a consultant for them since September 2007 while waiting for my work visa (as many of you know) and so have a sense of what is going on and what I will be doing.

In a VERY small nutshell, CIVICUS is an international organization working to promote, develop and advance civil society around the globe. My project, the Civil Society Index (CSI) has several goals, including developing a database of civil society of every country, capacity building within civil society, etc... As the Spanish-speaker on the team, I will be in charge of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a variety of English-speaking countries. Thus, in addition to the desk work I will be doing from Joburg, I will get to travel around a bit to give workshops, etc... in various places around Latin America, Africa, and hopefully Asia. I will, of course, keep this blog updated with my trips and work and what is going on.

Thus, in short, I imagine this blog will be documenting my life in South Africa, which I am anticipating with great relish as I have heard many a wonderful thing about the country, but also my work-related travels around the world.

Just a note: I will not be posting many pics on this blog--- it will be pretty text heavy, unless Blogger.com can figure out a better and more efficient way of uploading and placing pics within a blog post. For those of you on Facebook, however, I will continue to post pics up there. So not to fear: there will be visuals available, if that is your bent. Just don't expect too many of them here.

So have fun, and check back every week or so. I will do my best to update regularly. You are welcome to nudge me if I get slack. And please don't be shy to post a reply, or drop me an email once in a while. I want to know what everyone is doing too!!!

And with that, i end my first posting on what I anticipate will be a great adventure. I will be leaving Saint John, NB on Tuesday, January 22nd, arriving in Joburg on 10am on Thursday, January 24th. From there, I hit the ground running, with a big CSI workshop being held in Joburg starting the next Monday, Jan 28th.... yikes! So wish me luck, and keep in touch!