Dear Family and Friends,

today was the second day of class. It gave me a real sense of what it means to study at Oxford. First let me tell you about the city a bit.
This is a city with plenty of old buildings. When you step inside thelarge imposing castle like doors you feel like you are in the 15th century. but when you enter the class rooms they are so high tech. with all the equipment that you need.
the streets are filled with cyclists who race their way. Men and women casually dressed and trying to take it easy since it is their summer holday. this building you see is right outside my campus. looks like a greek theatre, I really dont know what it is but jus thought of its photogenic features and clicked.

The place is so crowded with tourists, they do it the japanese way, stop at a building click click click, and the next. You will find tour operators who shout, "sight seeing, of the Old City, we will take you into the colleges and show you a piece of the history, come in , the next bus departs at 12:20. Sure enough the bus departs at 12:20.

The door you see is of Baliol. i will keep you guessing if you dont really know what it means. and the river is ..... you got it right, it is the Thames, pronounced as TAMES.


Now coming to the academic part of it. Today after a sumptuous breakfast of baked beans, bacon, fried bread, corn flakes, wheatabic and orange juice we were forced to learn.

Today's theme was centered around understanding forced migration. Prof Roger Zetter, gave a great lecture in the concepts and theory of forced migration. the elaborated on the ideas and issues that confront the areas of forced migration studies. Though many of us felt that it was hard core theory, it gave us a background to put things in perspective.

We then went into our groups. as you may have known in Oxford teaching and learning in done in what they call Tutorship. that is people learn in small groups and and the strength really lies in the one on one method. So as soon as we got here we were assigned groups with eminent tutors. My tutor is Dr Jean Francois Durieux, a man who has had many years of experience with the UNHCR and was also the chief of mission to Burma. He reminds me of Barry Hart my professor at EMU for Identity.

As you may understand we had a load to read the previous day, we were also given some time to read in class. Then we the students posed questions while the tutor tried to clarify them.

Later we were taken to the Library of the RSC. it was a great place. so many titles (30,000) on refugees. In loyola we hardly have 20 books on refugees and i am doing my doctoral studies there. what an irony!! we learnt about cataloguing and searching on oxlib and oxlis.

In about an hour we returned to the class to continue the session on understanding forced migration. we dealt with the Legal approach accompanied with James Hathaway's article. tomorrow we hope to continue with the Anthropological and Political approaches.

at the end of the day we are so tired that we really want to hit bed soon. But we have a film show at eight so i am heading for dinner and will get back just in time for the show.