Let me apologize for my long absence. Aside from taking another more successful run at a relatively non-digital family Christmas and vacation time, I have made a deliberate choice to maintain an unusual level of non-verbal reflection and discretion in preparing to travel to Egypt and serve as an election observer there with Democracy International for the constitutional referendum this week.

I’m on my way back to the U.S. now, passing through the purgatory of one of those Northern European airports. I am very grateful for the invitation from DI to serve again as an official volunteer observer after my intervening experiences in other roles in relation to observation missions in Kenya. Likewise I am grateful to my fellow taxpayers for funding the effort and the hardworking staff and volunteers who made things work as well as possible in my estimation.

Likewise, I am especially grateful not to have been arrested, given that some of my friends and colleagues doing similar U.S. democracy support work in Egypt in recent years have had their lives interrupted by being prosecuted. I hope this is a good sign for the future, but I wouldn’t want to read too much into my limited experience in this regard yet. The election was what it was, and as described by DI, and I saw a piece of it, and got to meet and interact Egyptians in a variety of contexts, almost all of which were positive. I continued my learning process, mostly from the people I was around, and will endeavor to reflect that here going forward. I hope Egypt will have more and bigger elections and I hope that I will be able at some point to go back and see the process continue to progress.

In the meantime, I promise to get back to punching away on democracy in East Africa promptly.

Update: Democracy International press release and preliminary statement.