The Dinner

Dear Friends and Family,
Today was the beginning of the last week of Summer School. The last week was filled with legal debates and analysis of the laws pertaining to the refugees in the international scenario. The most important learning from the last week was applying the laws to the case studies on granting refugee status. The interesting simulations and the discussions that followed enabled an understanding of the processes that were involved the dealing with forced migration.

With the beginning of the new week we began to deal with issues of well being. I was actually waiting for this week because I thought i could contribute more and and also wanted to learn more from the shared experiences of other interventions around the world. Even before the week began, Mioara, a social worker from the US said that "next week we will have a lot to say". It was as if we were waiting for this to come.

As the week started, and as we were meeting after the week end the first discussion was not on well being but on "what did you do over the week end" a barrage of replies came out. I went to the Bath, the Stonehenge, London some even dared to go to Scotland. After listening to those wonderful stories people were in fact tired after a week end of celebrations.

Finally we did get to the discussions on well being. We actually had to analyze two articles related to the topic. One was on research on well being and the other was on the experiences of implementation of a program in Iraq. The most interesting part was the analytical questions that followed. For example, "How does the described intervention conceptualize threats to the Iraqi population?" A loaded question that made the reading analytical and shred it thread bare to understand these issues.

After similar questions were discussed we were able to share with our own experiences with our group members. This was followed by a session on Well being by Dr Jason Hart. The lecture led us to a discussion on deep controversies of the role the psychosocial interventions played in politicizing the masses.

In the afternoon we discussed the lecture and then went into another set of readings. This time it was about what i had already read for my PhD, Karen Jacobsen's article on research methodology. The article that we read was a critique of her work and a reply to the critique by Karen Jacobson. With a lot of sharing we moved on to another lecture to wrap up the day.

With the academic exercises over, it was time for me to leave to Nick's house to cook for the family. I volunteered to cook Indian food for them. The menu was , rice pulav, chicken gravy, cauliflower manchurian, and aubergine chutney, and soup. I had all i needed, i even checked on the recipe before i left my room. I took my Japanese friend along with me because he loved indian food. Even before leaving the told me that he wanted to get back before 8:00 pm to watch the movie that was being shown. But after we went there he became my assistant cook. He all the veggies, the chicken and even the garlic. I was doing all the other work. I was cooking for 7 people and there were confusions about the quantity of ingredients. It actually appeared to be a lot, Kieta my japanese friend told me that it was too much . But at the end we found that we had very Little left over except for the aubergine chutney. In fact the soup, Flo's special was the best, it struck the right beginning.

It was quite late when i finished food. We had to get back because Kieta had a presentation to make this morning and had to prepare for it. So we got back evaluating the day's experience.