Why we spend so much time in embassies

A courtesy visit looks like the least productive thing a small foundation can do with an afternoon. There is tea. There are photographs. Nobody signs anything.

What it produces is a name. When a mentee's application arrives at an embassy months later, it arrives from an organisation someone there has met, rather than from an unknown body in Apo. That is the whole of it, and it is worth the afternoon.

The pathways we are building take years and most of them will not work. The ones that do will have started in a room like the one in these photographs.