Learning with God

This week has been the longest week of my life, it seemed like the weekend was never going to arrive. The reason is that I completed an entire semester worth of work in a week on top of all my other classes too, so everyday I was in uni by 8.45 and didnt get back til 7 or 8 in the evening.

This is all my fault, for talking myself on to the graduate course, and committing myself to the workload. Introduction to Peacebuilding, one of my graduate courses, ran a special week-long workshop with Jan Oberg, a visiting scholar from the field, where we discussed the issues in conflict zones, ranging from Kosovo, Burundi, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia etc. All this required lots of preparatory work and research on my part just to keep up with everybody else since they all seem to have completed their masters and PhDs, and there is little ol' me still completing my undergraduate course. The workshop ran from 8.45 to 4.15 and then a film would be shown to highlight some of the key issues we'd discussed that day. Since most of the people there were post-grads, they didnt have any other courses to attend, but I still had to keep up with my weekly schedule and be at the workshop too. Jan made special arrangements and allowed me to come and go between my other classes, which basically involved a week of scooting from one place to another and getting half an hour for lunch. Jan, aka God, is a truly inspiration person whose achievements in the field earned him the Peace Prize in Italy. He's established a peace foundation doing work in conflict zones at the grassroot level and helping warring factions to resolve their differences. All too idealistic, I hear you say, but his achievements demonstrate that such things are possible if necessary investments are made. He's organised a meeting between Croats and Serbs with UN backing and managed to get them to not only talk to each other, but actually to build a working relationship thereafter and now the participants consider themselves friends.

I had so much work to do though, and the Japanese Language classes were getting more and more difficult. We had homework to complete everynight for the next morning, so after coming home at 8, and cooking dinner, I'll have to sit down to study hiragana, grammar and sentence structures. Then I have to do all the reading for the workshop, and all the reading for my next day's classes too. Most nights I didnt get to bed til 3 or 4, then I was up again at 7.30 to be in uni for 8.45. So it went like that for the whole week, and by Wednesday, I was completely shattered. Friday seemed like such a long way away. It finally came, and Friday proved to be the best day so far because I got news of the scholarship, had a lovely lunch which lasted more than 30 minutes with my academic adviser, and there was even a party thrown in for all the hard work we did in Jan's workshop. The picture is of all the people left standing after the tiring week, we lost some along the way and some people went home to bed, but we had a good time. God even offered me a voluntary position working for the foundation in Sweden when I return from the Far East! Now that, my friends, is networking at its best.