Workshop is over

I'm sitting at home. It's Friday morning. I'm supposed to be working but I decided to spend the morning doing some personal/professional emailing/research that is not directly linked to my job but close enough.

Yesterday was the last day of our regional workshop and it was a lot of fun. I led a session that went very poorly and led a session that went very well.

The first of my two sessions was aimed at getting the nurses from the region to come up with lists of support that they need to improve their ability to provide care. We got the list you would expect: further training, more human resources, more equipment, etc. It went ok I guess but wasn't a lot of fun.

The second session was a session I through together in all of 15 minutes with some help from my dear wife. It was to be a clinical refresher for the nurses and it went very, very well. It was the nurse's last session of the week and they seemed the most engaged, probably less due to my great presentation ability and more because it was immediately relevant to them where as other sessions were for planning purposes.

I put together a powerpoint presentation for this session. Each slide was just a bunch of questions and the nurses did all the work by answering the questions with and for each other (well... I guess I did talk a lot but you know).

The best part was that my direct supervisor (who we met for the first time this week and is well published and well regarded in optometric public health work) received very good feedback about the session. So at least she knows I'm not a total doofus.

Since yesterday was the last day of the workshop (today the doctors and nurses are having a business meeting for the regional eye care workers' association - to which we were forbidden to go as we are outsiders and have no business being there) we had a banquet.

The food, as goes the food here, was ok but not spectacular. What was spectacular was the fact that the different countries without prior planning all got up and did a dance or song. It was a lot of fun to watch them. Three of our students (all from different countries) started things off with a very good dance based on dances done here in our home country.

There were some silly things and some really nice things done. Eventually many people started to dance just to dance and Nicole, being one who dances, tried to learn the dance but quickly became lost as she was just trying to copy someone who wasn't really trying to teach.

It was another one of those experiences that goes in the memory as THE memory of a trip:
1) Sitting on roof top in the West Bank looking around saying "I can't believe I'm here"
2) Sitting in the back of truck on top of cases of glasses driving through rural Honduras listening to the frogs saying "I can't believe I'm here"
3) Getting on a tiny little banana train in Honduras saying "I can't believe I'm here"
4) Walking along the street with Nicole in Moldova knowing that one day I'll marry her thinking "I can't believe I'm here with her"
5) Sitting in a tiny little cubicle with a sweaty, stinky Romanian kid and a patient in Romania with a bunch of rude Quebecers running hearing Nicole whisper "I can't believe you can stand to be in here!"
6) Riding in a rickety van hearing gunshots while in the West Bank thinking "I can't believe I'm here"
7) Walking through a checkpoint to enter the West Bank hearing distant gunshots and sharing in the humilation of an entire people group thinking "I can't believe I'm here"
8) Standing in our hotel room in South Africa and seeing the most beautiful sunset ever thinking "I can't believe I'm here"
9) Watching Eskimo dancing in Nome thinking: "I can't believe I'm here"
10) Standing on a little Alaskan Island looking out over the Bearing sea and seeing Russian land thinking "I wish Nicole was here"
11) Seeing Zumi and the Good one in Romania with Nicole's family thinking "I can't believe they're here"
12) Being with Nicole, Zumi and the Good One in Chesty Krumlov (not the correct spelling but what we call it) thinking "I can't believe I'm here"
13) Watching all these dedicated professional people being proud of their cultures and their homes and performing for us partly to be silly and partly to show us their talents and cultures thinking "I can't believe I get to be here."

Nicle's and I will probably repeat our movie date tonight and go see something silly and then we have a weekend of working as we didn't get much done this week as we were at the workshop.

We're happy. Very happy although this is not what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Its a step in the right direction and we just need to make the most of our opportunity (i.e. do research, publish papers, and make a good impression).

As all the emails I receive say,
Cheers.