I should be reachable in the afternoon. (How to contact me)

It’s nice to be back after a week of travel to the U.S.-Mexico border. We learned a lot on that trip—only some of it surprising—and I plan to start moving my notes into a coherent outline today.

Since I’ve been away, there are a lot of check-ins to do at work today: a weekly staff meeting, sit-downs with staff on the programs I work on, and about 45 emails still unanswered from the past few weeks (I tried, but failed, to get to “inbox zero” over the weekend). Some of that planning will center on the visit to Washington later this week of Colombia’s President.

Later in the day I want to update my database, my reports library, and our new inventory of aid programs to reflect what’s in the 2017 federal budget, which was signed into law at the very end of April. I’ve now pulled relevant text from the foreign aid, defense, and homeland security bills and narrative reports, and there’s a lot of updating to do.