Aaaandd, I'm back! Blog content, as requested.

Okey dokey, the long-awaited Africa's Marketplace Revolution photos and webstory are up. As you know, for the last several months we have been living, breathing and sleeping LEAD's 4th Annual Conference, and now its all over.

You may have heard that we, yes, did have some challenges. The highlights include having our venue (Monrovia City Hall) attempt to charge us $10,000 (USD) for what was previously agreed to be a small fraction of that, and we also (all in one day, and only three days before our first guests arrived) discovered that 1). Madam President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was scheduled to be in Nigeria the day of her plenary address and could not come 2). the Auditor General John S. Morlu II was scheduled to be in NYC the day of his plenary address and could not come and 3). the Metropolitan Plaza Hotel where we needed 17 guests to stay (and I had personally made 6, count them - SIX - visits) had failed to reserve more than three rooms.

Those were the big challenges, are there there were countless smaller ones, nevertheless after chatting with people who were there, and after reviewing the conference evaluations we are happy to declare it a success! The plenary sessions, panel discussions and workshops were very well received, leaving guests with lots to think about, lots to chat about, and lots to take home and apply to their farms, businesses, work elsewhere. We've been receiving plenty of requests for copies of the workshop presentations, and they'll be available at LEADinLiberia.org... just as soon as I figure out how.

Anyways, I'm off today - feeling sick with a bad cold since Friday - but I wanted to share with you the photos (below in three parts) and the story (below all that) that I put on LEAD's website which tells more about the conference and lets you hear from conference guests themselves just how the conference went down.

Now my main priority will be LEAD's mentoring program; a topic for another day, but I'm happy to tell you that it is being liked to LEAD's NEI business training course, which has now met twice. Much excitement is already being developed for mentoring and I'll fill you in with the details soon.

As always, your continued encouragement, prayers and financial support (and blog comments!) are very much appreciated; without which this work could not continue.

Cheers, Derek

Oh, I almost forgot: photo cred. to Kris Vander Stelt on most of the below photos. Thanks Kris!