Saturday evening

No photos this time. Maybe tomorrow after I visit (the old) downtown with Alvaro, one of my colleagues here in Bogota at SENA. This week was full of work meetings and we are getting the balls rolling on our "EFE" program (Education for Employment, or EPE in Spanish: Educacion para el Empleo). The coming 6-7 weeks will be busy....

During the week of February 11 to 15 we will have a regional meeting with colleagues from the three Andean EFE program countries: Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. The meetings will be hosted in Lima. I will be going with three of my colleagues of SENA: Ximena, the Director in charge of industry and international partnerships, Elsa, who manages a lot of the labour market studies, and Bibiana, the sub-Director of the SENA operations in Cartagena.

Right afterwards I will go to Cartagena together with Sandra, who assist in the international team of SENA all partnerships with organizations from the USA and Canada. On February 18 and 19 we will visit the training center for mining & agriculture where Bibiana works. On February 20 we will go with Bibiana and a few other colleagues of SENA Bolivar to one of the two "pilot" communities. We will drive south from Cartagena for probably 5-6 hours to Banco Magdelena, where we will stay for a few days. Every day we will hop in the so-called "chalupas", fairly sized river speedboats. I will make sure to make photos to use for future blog posts. We did this the first time in November, so I will be prepared this time. The "pilot" community is called Barranca de Loba. We will meet with the city's authorities, with artesanal miners and with small scale farmers in order to do more extensive data collection to better formulate our project "indicators", the aspects for which we would like to measure a possible change after the four years of our program in 2017.

Back from the visits to Cartagena and the Barranca de Loba community I will have a week in Bogota before Sandra and I will fly to Barrancabermeja where we meet Bibiana and colleagues again. From there we will fly or go by chalupa again to the second "pilot" community called Santa Rosa del Sur.

We will do the same also to a third "pilot" community in the province of Antioquia. But you will be able to follow all these field visits through blog entries during the next 6-7 weeks.

During "Semana Santa" at the end of March I will fly a few days to Pereira in the famous "Zona Cafetera". That will be a few days R & R for me: Rest & Relax. I want to see if it would be a nice place to bring Mary, Hilary and Mark in December. Of course I will also take them to Cartagena.

I am hoping that Mary will be able to visit me here for a few weeks in April......

Tonight it is a Saturday evening. I just went to see the movie ARGO. Recommended.