Greetings from Cairo!

After leaving Singapore, I traveled here to Cairo for an Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO) Regional Working Group meeting and to work with some Egyptian researchers collaborating on my research on climate change and the Nile. That work is progressing well; in particular I am working to incorporate some results from regional modeling efforts being done by a PhD student at En Shaims University in Cairo. At the ENTRO meetings, I presented my analytical framework as well as some initial results, and conducted an afternoon workshop on the modeling tools I am using. There was a great deal of energy surrounding these presentations and this work, so I came away from the meetings somewhat energized.

Then, June 24 I traveled to Gothenburg, Sweden to the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists' annual meeting, where I presented some work on comparing the economics of water and vaccination projects. The conference was fabulous! The Swedes organized a sensational event with good food, excellent plenary speakers, and a neat social program which included a 2-hour boat trip to the quiet nearby island of Marstrandt. Gothenburg itself is not a particularly old city, but it has a nice feeling in the summer when the sun lingers for long hours in the sky. I discovered a nature preserve just behind the Botanical Gardens where I ran on soft ground again for the first time since leaving Chapel Hill. My legs immediately felt much better! In Cairo, I have to limit myself to the treadmill as the streets are dangerous for pedestrians and the air quality in the city is too degraded.

I also saw Joe Cook again at this conference. He was in our research group at UNC and now is an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Besides Joe, I met many people doing very interesting work and hopefully created some contacts that will lead to other opportunities in the future. We'll see. For now I need to just buckle down on my dissertation, do some writing, and plan my teaching course for next spring.

And now I am back in Cairo for ten days of more work on the Nile and on a rural sanitation project assignment that is just a short term deal for the time being. I do not know too much about that one but will be getting more information over the coming week. The final stop on my trip will be Addis Ababa for a week; I return to the US July 18.