I Was Dining by the Nile....

What a day, what a day, what a day. Today a lot of hard work by a lot of people paid off, and none too soon. For me, the day involved a meeting with the Commanding Officer, a talk to the scientific crowd and more personal chats with selected scientists. My mantra throughout these meetings was to let our lab be the screening stage for new diagnostics, that when we came with something, to have faith that we'd done our homework and take our assays into the field with confidence. Without today's exciting results, I can imagine those words looking a little hollow. Oh sure, the science was sound and we'd done all the testing we could do, but the cat ain't dead til you open the box, as my pal Schrody would say. Here's a note to you tech-taskmasters: 1 prayed-for positive trumps 50 predicted negatives any day. Any time techs are excited about an assay, you know you're on to something good.

The new virology leaders here are Ce & Ca, a husband wife team from Argentina. Ce runs the lab whilst Ca does a lot of migratory bird collections. Ce has one of those infectious personalities that everyone ends up being drawn to: everyone on the compound waves, smiles and says hi to her, the ground crew bring her flowers etc. She's been a real treat to work with the last few days. This evening, after all the work and meetings were done, she and Ca took us to the Grand Cafe in downtown Cairo to have dinner by the Nile (Ca has mastered the Cairo driving rules in record time). It was awesome to finally get a good look at the city. We drove past the Citadel, the City of the Dead and through the nicely watered and expensive living section called Maadi. There we dined at the Grand Cafe and watched the sky slowly fade to dark as fishing boats and sailboas swung by. Despite the fact that I have meetings both tomorrow and Monday. I declared work-time officially over and ordered a nice big ice cream. Yum, nothing like ice cream to take the heat off whilst sitting by the Nile.