Annual review meeting

Board members for our planning authority and us, the secretariats, came to a lodge at the outskirts of Lusaka for our annual review meeting. We discussed about what we have achieved in the year of 2011 and what kind of activities / projects we should focus on this year.

I needed to make a presentation about our use and application of GIS in 2011 and proposed GIS activities in 2012 at the department. There are variety of things that I want to do by using GIS, including GIS training to the staff here, improving our GIS database, collecting and creating necessary shapefiles for our jurisdiction, and so on. As I only have a little longer than a year left here, I should consider which tasks need to be prioritized before starting new projects.

I guess the annual review meeting was a success. There were so many issues that needed to be discussed... Of course I learned quite a bit from the meeting, but, to be honest, I was glad when the two-day long meeting was finally over!

GIS workshop was postponed!

Since last November, my colleague and I had been working quite hard to hold a two-week long GIS training from the end of January to early February. Twenty planners / planning assistants / surveyors all over the country were supposed to come to Lusaka for that. We even wrote a training material (more than 130 pages long!) so that the participants could practice using GIS on their own even after the training. We were about to place an order for the printing when we were informed of BAD news...

The training has been suddenly postponed until the end of next month because an administrative issue occurred. The worst of it was that it might get cancelled if the situation did not improve by a certain day. Although I knew there was nothing we could have done about it, I was really sad and disappointed about the decision. It was scheduled to start within a week!

I had been very busy ever since we started to organize the event. Besides from writing the training guide, I visited some professionals / offices to organize the event and deal with issues, as well as submitted a proposal, just to name a few... I was so ready for it.

I really wished we could have hold the training as we planned. Though, at least, I was able to learn how it is to work in a developing country in a hard way. I only hope I could react better if a similar thing ever happens to me next...

New Year's Resolution

Happy New Year!

So many things happened to me in the year of 2011, good and bad things alike. Overall, though, I think I am enjoying my life in Zambia and glad to have an opportunity to work as a planner here.

As the life in Zambia is so much slower and I have more time here, I have a lot of things that I want to do this year:
- To complete the Luangwa IDP
- To start the Kafue IDP project and finish the inception report as well as the status quo report
- To improve the GIS database at the office
- To make the DPPH GIS training a successful one
- To continue the GIS workshop at the office
- To study GRE in order to apply for grad schools
- To start learning a new language (preferably French)
- To travel to Tanzania and Mozambique, etc

But I think my new year's resolution will be to stay healthy. It is very simple but I think it is very important since I need to be healthy to achieve all those things mentioned above.

Anyways, I hope the year 2012 will be a prosperous one for all of us...