Proceed with caution

Made the flight to Ziguinchor. After a short mishap with my plane-side luggage being left behind on the tarmac overnight (groan!) . Today I was reunited with all three pieces. My faith in Senegalese luggage handlers restored. My hotel has an amazing view of the Ziguinchor river. This picture of the modified port is even more romantic at night - the only time anyone actually sits outside to eat and socialize. Tonight is salsa night at the hotel's club. Looking forward to that.

A pair of overly affectionate mosquitoes made a special appearance at 3 a.m. this morning to remind me that I had had enough sleep and that it was time to prepare for my first day on the job. After months of rolling blackouts and then a solid month without power and uncertainties about the leadership of the peace process, the staff had understandably lost some of the wind in their sails, especially when they compare the staff strength and comforts of the teams in Dakar.

The minute I walked in the door, I found myself on the morning's agenda to make a full pitch to the entire staff about the strategy and what lies ahead in the coming months. Thank you mozzies!

I must say that I am very honored to have a staff with such a rich experience in community organizing and intimate knowledge of the key players in the conflict here. The presentation went very smoothly with lots of nodding heads and smiles of recognition of work they have done before but never associated it with mapping a path to an actual peace agreement. Not surprisingly, the only difficulty came when I underscored the need to have a common understanding of recurrent terms as basic as peace process, conflict resolution, conflict management, and peace accord.

These expressions are terms of art in the peace community in which I learned them, but the way they are lived and understood in this theater is evidently very different. As a practice, I want to avoid prescribing meaning to expressions like peace, conflict, and resolution because when you have lived in Africa's oldest conflict for the past 28 years, you have probably heard these terms batted around by dozens of international organizations who disembark with fancy tools and talk to implement a two or three-year project and then leave with the situation more or less the same as they found it.

One observation the staff made was that conflicts here have been handled and managed but rarely resolved. Another was that any progress toward a cessation of fighting has never been consolidated. All these terms are laden with lots of political promises and suggest that the local population has been kept at arms length, restricted from participating in mapping the path to peace. Bridging the gap between distant observer and architect will be our first order of business.

Looking forward to the weekend. Monday, the government has promised to install two new diesel powered generators to provide the city with steady power. Things may be looking up. I hope someone remembered to buy the diesel. Night.