Carbon coffee

Breakfast with Sam, a friend and colleague who's visiting from Australia. Sam is a forest carbon specialist and we worked closely on the regional community forestry project that I managed from Cambodia. Battling through the challenges of bribery and sexism in Vietnam, reticent counterparts in Indonesia and a morass of donor rules and regulations, Sam was wonderful on that project and it would have been damn near impossible without her. She enjoys visiting the UK office as she doesn't have to keep odd hours in order to talk to colleagues. And we enjoy her visits as her Melbourne tastes ensure we land in the best coffee shops. A drawback of being in the UK office for Sam is being asked to make an urgent trip to Liberia to help with a technical forestry issue on the project I also visited last year. We're all lending pieces of field kit so she can be well equipped.