The nation's capital

How is it that it takes two weeks to catch up from being away from work for one week? This is a paradoxical phenomenon that I can never quite understand, but there it is -- I am still recovering from Chad. My inbox is still a twisted, tortured, disorganized muddle of red messages. The black messages haven't been filed; they just have little colour-coded flags attached to them in some half-hearted attempt to look organized.

The problem was compounded by our trip to Washington D.C. earlier this week. A whole team of us was despatched to DC to brief our masters... er, I mean donors. I was brought along for Chad, the Central African Republic, Liberia, and Chechnya.

Preparing for the trip was incredibly stressful, and occupied much of last week. The first briefing I gave was awful. I was so afraid of the political landmines that I wound up speaking in platitudes about how very concerned we were about Chad, what with the war and all. By the time we got to CAR, though, I was back on track, and the following day, I was on fire. I gave the best briefings of my life. So all in all, not a bad trip.

It was my first time in the capital, and for some reason I couldn't get the West Wing out of my head. Maybe it was all the time we spent getting cleared through security on Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe it was the fact that the skyline is dominated by iconic DC landmarks, most of which are visible from the runway at Reagan International. Maybe it was the business cards with the fancy golden embossed eagle clutching arrows and a bushel of wheat. Or maybe, just maybe, it was striding breathlessly through the halls of government buildings barking out talking points to people who were too important to pause for a single moment.

DC is certainly a company town. Everybody works for the government, and everybody wears their political stripes on their shoulders. There's a certain homogeneity about it, even considering the bitter bipartisanship. I had a long working lunch with a young desk officer, and as he was escorting me out of the building, he asked me what I liked best about working for my organization. I said it was the chance to work every day with people from literally all over the globe, each with a unique political, cultural and social perspective on the way the world ought to operate. He smirked, glanced sideways at me and said, "Yeah, we don't get that here."

All that, and I didn't actually see the White House. I guess this isn't so surprising, considering I have lived nearly three years in New York without actually seeing the Statue of Liberty or going up the Empire State Building. But still, when I go back, I really need to make an effort to see it.