The Workshop

After taking advantage of a free lunch at the conference, I went out on my own. This is not something that I am known for doing. As a matter of fact, I may have gone somewhere that my classmates haven’t been! You proud?

The Workshop is a “mall” in the center of the city. After having been to the Gateway “Theatre of Shopping!”, this was quite a stark contrast. It was full of seemingly locally owned shops with the exception of the cell phone places and a couple of what we would call anchor stores such as Pick-and-Pay, a local grocery store.

It was odd. All of a sudden and for the first time in my life, I realized that perhaps I was the only white person around. At that point, I looked around and could see no others. This didn’t affect my perception of my personal safety, but it caught me off guard. I think that what I found odd was that nobody around me seemed to care; that is I was not a spectacle to be looked at, I was just different and it seemed that only I was aware of it. That is not what I would have expected somehow.

I think that I must be shopped out because I bought nothing but a nail file (which I had previously been unable to fine in the small random stores around the hotel). This too is good.

Perhaps seeing the conditions at that “orphanage” has made it difficult to continue to seek out more “stuff.”

Who knows . . . .

Day Two of the Conference

This morning, I again attended two sessions. The first was Recasting Social Work: Human rights and political activism and the second was a group of four speakers discussing a range of topics.

Linda Briskman describes hereself as an academic activist in the Austrailian context. She spoke quick passionately about the current state of respect for human rights around the world, particularly in in a post 9/11 context. Being from Austrailia, she used examples violations as it related to asylum seekers. It was a real eye-opener to hear the stories of asylum seekers who would be imprisoned for indefinite periods of time, often years for no real reason. Once again, it was clear that my world is so very small compared to the realities that are going on around me. Again, I was humbled by my ignorance.

The second session included a discussion of attachment disorder and Employee Assistance Programs. Let me explain the format of the conference. Apparently, people are invited to submit abstracts of research or articles and if selected are allotted 15 minutes to present. Generally there are four presenters, following by a time for questions. For this session, two presenters did not show up so were heard about attachment theory and a discussion of EAP programs vs. Wellness programs and the confusion that is created between the two. I am not yet sure how the presentations are grouped because these two did not seem to related at all. Both were interesting, but with only 15 minutes, neither could be adequately addressed. Such is the life of an international conference I suppose.