Chaired my first meeting today! I've solidified my mysterious placement into the role of the International Stakeholders' Coordinator, and today I brought together a ton of the international organizations present in Kosovo and basically said so what are your plans for 2017 re: countering violent extremism, who here can help, and please reach out to me to make sure the govt knows what you're doing and to reduce redundancy. Lots of the questions/complaints/criticisms about our program should be addressed by adding me, so I'm feeling cautiously optimistic!

Kosovo is weird in that they have great laws and strategies on paper, but at some point in the implementation process, things get screwy and you lose buy in from people you need to make things happen. For example, the Ministry of Education basically threw up their hands this past year and said you want us to do too many projects so we'll do none of them because we don't have the money or donor support... which is completely wrong because organizations are begging to chuck money at them, they just didn't want to do anything other than collect a salary.