meetin' important folks

Went to a meeting yesterday with Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi. He had a forum on the Mississippi Reconstruction Fund, which is a private fund set up to supplement government aid to victims of the storms (Katrina and Rita). There was an auditorium full of aid workers, city reps, FEMA people, and others - you mention money and people show up! Everyone was complaining that there isn't any good coordination happening amongst all these various groups, and that there were too many different "task force" groups spread out over the Gulf Coast that weren't communicating with one another. They thought maybe they should create a central body that would help collect information about what groups were doing what kind of work in what cities, and everyone could go to that central location to find contact details, assessments, meeting times, etc.

I thought to myself, "The UN was doing that by Week Two after the tsunami, and no one is doing that here yet, six months after Katrina." Crazy.

Colonel Kurtz

One of my first assignments was a tough one: Like Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now", go upriver and retrieve a Colonel-Kurtz-like ex-warrior gone native. One of my camp managers lives on the very edge of civilization, in a forgotten neighborhood in Katrina's wake, infested with gnats and still thick with storm debris. He sees himself as the savior of the community, flying solo and living with a survivalist mentality. The problem is that as long as he's representing our team, he's gotta play by our rules. Since he can't play well with others, I'm afraid I had to look him in his war-glazed eyes and pull the trigger.