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DAI Global Tenure Awards - Baigal Darambazar

March 02, 2023

Baigal 25 years


Video Transcript


Celebrating Baigal Daramabazar

When did you first meet Baigal?

Ann Kinsley: When did I first meet Baigal? I honestly can't tell you the day or the first time I met Baigal. And I think the reason why is because she is a fixture of DAI. I feel like she's been a part of DAI An integral part of DAI since I've been here. She is our voice of reason, she is our contracts fountain of knowledge. She is the person that remembers every contract that we reference even till today. So it's just been much in the same way DAI has a logo and it's always been that logo, Baigal has always been with us.

Zan Northrip: I can't actually remember how I met Baigal because I just feel like she's always been part of - even at the core of - DAI. And I know that wasn't always the case though, because I know we got better after she came to work in the main office in Bethesda.

Travels with Baigal!

Heather Robertson: I have two favorite stories, they involved traveling with Baigal, which I got to do a lot between 2015 and roughly 2020 when we were doing a lot of field procurement trainings together as trainers. When we first launched the field procurement training in Ramallah Palestine, she and I and Matt Busby would create our content during the day, in the afternoons and then spend our evenings at a print shop in Ramallah printing out the material for the next day. It was a bit of a scramble. You really get to understand how somebody thinks about policies and procedures and how to interpret contracts. When you're literally making up training content on the fly and working our way through what, why do these procedures and policies even exist in the first place? and then we went to East Africa together. We were in Kenya and Rwanda doing trainings there and, traveling with somebody from Mongolia in East Africa was a fascinating experience. Most of the immigrations officials really didn't understand where Mongolia was, what her passport said, it was a little bit like traveling with a space alien. We had wonderful trips together to Jordan, East Africa, Palestine and, she and I spent a wonderful afternoon and day visiting Petra together and it was a very special memory for me, Wonderful to travel with

Zan Northrip: But the story I would like to share is just I was amazed the first time that I traveled with Baigal and I believe it was to Haiti might have been to the Philippines first but the first time I traveled with her and we were going to try to solve an issue that we were having with the with the senior CO contracting officer in the mission. She just shined on that trip and could relate to that CO and she just immediately tuned in to what the CO's concerns were and just spoke directly to them and this very quiet, very assured way that I think really communicated to the CO that that we understood them and that we could we could do the action that we needed while still making sure that those concerns were acknowledged and respected. I have always thought of her since then as sort of the CO whisperer of DAI DAI. And I would advise you if you have

Thank you Baigal!



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