Coburg Chronicles 6

Who likes to work on a Sunday! The poori breakfast, a load of news papers, catching up what was missed during the week on various issues and definitely a quick nap in the afternoon. All this was just in the imagination and sounds too regular. But today was a day for faculty meetings. It was at the spectacular home of Dr Claudia, located on the third floor a beautiful apartment with views on three sides. Huge windows and a neat balcony.

Before that we took a quick trip to the church of the 14 saints. Not too far away, was an old catholic church built in honor of 14 saints. Each saint was responsible to take care of an ailment. The only person I could recognize was St Jude the hope of the hopeless. No doubt that the

Imagine a dozen social work faculty members from diverse cultural, ethnic, linguistic backgrounds from Chile to Chennai gathered around a table to reflect the process of the summer school and to come up with ideas of collaboration in future. Believe me 5 hours is just not enough.

Positive ideas flowed about the Summer School. So creative suggestions were also tabled to improve the next one when it is attempted. The theme was quite impressive and invited a new dimension of thought departing from the clinical approach to Social Work. Inclusion and Human Rights need to be part of our social lingo. And, it was actually happening. Many years ago when we were planning the Specialization of Human Rights in Social Work, we had people laughing at us. Now minding that and working on it has helped us a long way in the process. In India, we have a long way to go.

Coming back to the ideas of collaboration, the plan was to bring out a publication, carry out joint research and also advocate for Human Rights based approaches to Social Work and concentrate on advocacy on systemic issues. More than 15 ideas popped up. Each one was interesting and relevant. As usual not all were practical. But there was no need to worry about the practicality of it right now.

It would all be compiled and circulated shortly. For me this was a confluence of ideas and a good chance to initiate a dream project; tell the story of social work around the world. The emergence of it and how it has diversified and contextualized itself to situations. The ideas was well received and I really hope to be working on it very soon.

It was now dinner time hence we tried to wrap up the business. But as we all very well know the business session surrounded the dinner as well. We could not stop with our ideating minds till we actually departed.