I’m leaving Monday morning for an 11-day visit to Colombia. We’ll be doing field research in two regions of the country, plus a couple of days in Bogotá. It’s shaping up to be an incredible trip, though there’s never enough time to do things as thoroughly as one would like.

That’s four days from now. Over those four days, I need to finish a draft of a big report based on our mid-August visit to the Mexico-Guatemala border. I’m already up over 6,000 words, and I think a barely workable first draft is about six hours away.

Once that’s in the bag, I plan to put in many hours of “desk research” about the two Colombian regions I’ll be visiting, so that I can get the most out of our scheduled interviews. All that, plus 11 hours of meetings scheduled for today and tomorrow, packing for the trip, and spending some time with my family over the weekend before I go away.

This is all to say that, because of that workload, this site may be barely active over the next two weeks. I’ll try to post from Colombia, though for security reasons I won’t post from the regions I visit until I leave those regions.

As of today, though, I need to put on hold things like posting news links. I’ll actually be traveling quite a bit in October: Colombia twice, Florida, Los Angeles, and maybe New York. So my posts here will probably be sporadic for a while.