Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Dinner With a Diplomat
We capped off our busy day with a dinner meeting with Hal Howard, the Southeast Asia Environmental Affairs Officer with the U.S. State Department. We met with Hal to learn about how the Embassy can provide assistance with our conservation efforts. We explored a number of ways that we might be able to collaborate to advance clouded leopard and felid conservation. In fact, Hal will be meeting next month with teachers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to talk about environmental education in the region and may be able to provide contacts to explore new opportunities to share our educational materials.

We really enjoyed hearing about Hal’s life in the diplomatic services – a fascinating life of rotating three-year postings around the world. He recently joined the Thailand Embassy after postings in Iraq and Peru. We especially enjoyed our “small world” moment with Hal when we learned that he once worked as a paramedic in Tacoma and Gig Harbor, CLP’s home base! We were supposed to wrap up dinner with my sought after sticky rice, but they were all out for the night so we enjoyed some coconut ice cream instead. Not sticky rice, but not bad.

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