Day 4 In the company of Marilyn

Dear family and friends,
today has been a long day. Before starting with today let me tell you a bit about what happened yesterday evening. A person called Tim who runs a professional band came and gave us a lecture on Oxford. his speech was titled Drink, Sex and Death. He highlighted the history of the city punctuated with anectodes that were very well researched. We learnt that the city was in fact controlled by the university. The most interesting fact was how a war broke out as a result of a petty fight outside an Ale house. In those good old days Oxford was known for it 's booze, women and debauchery. well the lecture was so much fun.



Now let me come to today's story: I was up very early to do my readings. With a lot of interest i read three articles and rushed to the toilet. today I beat the queue and got in for a nice hot shower. I had a good breakfast, guess what i had, yesds you got it right baked beans and potatoes. the most exciting thing today was the boiled eggs. i was reminded of the eggs we used to eat in Kathmandu and on the train to Calcutta.
The first lecture was on globalization and forced migration. Since I understood is well i was able to think with the speaker. I was eager to learn the western perspective of the phenomenon, and rightfully so i the speaker gave a good outline of the happenings. Yet i missed Prof Victor Louis, who foretold these things way back in 1994 when i was still in College. this was followed by our work in small groups.

We discussed four articles on forced migration in order to prepare for a debate. the theme of discussion was, " a borderless society " In our group we spoke about how it is possible to have a society without borders. When money has no borders people should not have borders as well. We also dealt with discrimination of countries and the legitamacy of the very existence of borders.

After this we started to prepare for the debate. We had to defend our topic, we used all that we read and tried to strengthen our arguements.

after all the reading and discussion I headed straight to the library. found some interesting books but did not find the time to read, I just made a not of them and started my long walk. As i went i took my Solly my southafrican classmate along. We passed by a flea market where he immediately bought a cd player for his family. We passed by the tower that you see on top, it is oxford's oldest building it is about a 1000 years old. then we passed by a beautiful christ church college.

We soon reached the beautiful Thames. Today we wanted to stroll by the river so we got of the bridge and started the long walk. As we walked we met Ms Marlyn Skantz, a woman who was watching birds. She taking a summer course at christ college on the the Philosophy of politics. When she heard that i was from India she immediately said, " i have met your Mother Theresa, I have worked for her" She also said that, " Mother Theresa always said , if you need to work for the community you first need to take care of your self, then your family then your community then you can come for service.

We spoke a lot she had six children one was a lawyer, another was a doctor, one was a nurse anesthetist, one was a social worker, one was an architect/builder and one was into hardware/making CDs. Wow she had her whole family covered with professionals. She claimed that she never chose what her children wanted. the only instruction she gave to others was, "when you are out there be good and love others" it seems tha ther mother told this to her, "how can i not be nice to others when my mother as said so"

The discussion went on from the Present Pope to Obama.
Coming to her husband, he was taking a course on history of dectective stories. She was 76 years old and i guess her husband was a bit older. I learnt a lot from her, she invited us to stay with her if we ever visited Minnesota.

Well i need to get prepared to go to class tomorrow so i will stop for now