All together again!

We're all together again, with no more business trips in the foreseeable future. What a novelty for all three of use to spend time in the same place! William was quite happy to see me Saturday morning, making Greg kind of jealous. When Greg returned from his two weeks in Delhi, it took William about two hours to warm up to him and give him a hug. I got one immediately :) Not that we're in competition or anything :)

The major feat today was unpacking almost all the boxes. Only two types of boxes remain: china, because we don't have the bottom half of our china cabinet yet, and desk / craft stuff, because we don't currently have appropriate storage stuff. We also have yet to hang anything on the walls, because we have to find out what "policy" is on that. Now we're ready for the final shipment to arrive (end of March).

The Vonage is also installed, so you can now reach us on a 512-area-code number. Email either of us for the number, if you don't have it. Apologies go to Beth and my parents - William was playing with it before we put it out of his reach and accidentally called them at 1PM India time (about 2:30AM DC time). Oops!

My pet project right now (aside from continuing to try to get the house-construction finished) is trying to find a local NGO that would accept an intern from SAIS for the summer. I have some good leads (two foundations, a women's development organization, a school for handicapped children, and a land-right's NGO). Now I'm faced with a chicken-and-egg scenario: do I pick one organization and work with them to create a discrete project and then work with SAIS to identify a student? Or should I have SAIS identify a potential student, see which organization s/he is interested in, and then hope a structured program can be developed.

The other issue is funding - SAIS has money for the airfare, Greg and I think we can host the students (have to double check at work), but then the student needs some nominal funds for local transportation and lunch. When I was in Japan, I received such a stipend from my think tank ($30/day - barely enough in Japan!), but funds are so short here. We'll see if I can pull this off, but at this point I'm hopeful!