Em.'s In & Outs

This week I spent travelling around Central Canada in a quest to figuring out more about my upcoming internship. It started in Montréal from monday-wednesday, where the Canadian Institute of Foreign Service provided a group of development workers of all ages with applied, hands-on examples of intercultural communications. Our group was very nice, it was facilitated by Jocelyne, the Director of the Centre for Intercultural Learning herself, I met a quatuor of interesting men off for a project with Développement International Desjardins (a great potential employer for all interested in microcredit!) in Haiti, as well a girl that took the International Baccalaureate at Garneau CÉGEP a year before me. World is small! I enjoyed most of the training sessions, and they honestly were useful to provide a framework for analyzing cross-cultural encounter. We were brought to experience a life exerience of the Boal Theater of the Oppressed, which I heard about so much in Brazil. I was nevertheless bewildered at the luxery of the whole training; three nights in an executive suite, with generous daily allowances and a 35$ reiumbursement for dinner! Food for thought... Besides that I took my nights off to have an excellent evening with my aunt Jozée and to see my good friend Greg, which took me out to witness in person the official ending of the smoking era in restaurants and bars in the province of Québec! We went bar hopping in the Village, on larger-than-life outdoors patio at the Saint-Sulpice, on a rooftop with an amazing view and spas at the Sky Bar and then to enjoy a great show at Mado's drag queen house!

After the CIL training ended, I grabbed a ride with a Guinean colleague and his very funny Québecer counterpart; they have been working on contracts together for 13 years, and their down-to-earth, pragmatic and sociable mentality gave me some hope for the future in such a career. I was dropped off in Ottawa to continue with a WUSC-specific training. I was surprised to see that many staff from the CECI came all the way from Montréal to meet and chat with their new interns. Their warmth and welcoming will be remembered. Even if the time was getting lenghtly, the training was useful and to-the-point. I can now say that I understand more about how things are going to happen next year while on placement with Uniterra – what seemed at first like a bureaucratic puzzle now appears more intelligible. We were given a very dynamic session on public engagement, which really gave me the taste for getting involved with my home community when I get back. The highlight of the two days : we watch a short video realized by the U.S. Peace Corps, and it was talking about how 5 of them contracted HIV AIDS during their overseas assignment. None of them got it in a careless one-night stand; they all were in a long term relationship with someone they got to trust, then their guards went down, and now, they're dead. Food for thought...

On Thursday night I was lucky enough to catch my busy friend Sara. We went for dinner, and a walk around downtown Ottawa (or, sorry, at least twice throughout it). She was off to Cuba for a semester (see her blog) and I feared I would not see her again for years. It was great to reconnect with each other's projects and thoughts. Speaking thereof, I also saw MEG, Zoé and Nathalie during this past week-end in Montréal. It was honestly so strange because everything seemed all natural; walking around in this beautiful, vibrant city I will one day for sure make my own, going out for a movie, smoking shisha, attending to the tam-tam jam on the Mont-Royal, having ice cream in the Jean-Talon market, ... to then come back to MEG's place to finish packing, shower and take a 4 hours sleep to catch the airport shuttle. Here I am now in Neward, New Jersey, after having gone through the nightmare of U.S. customs, waiting for my next connection which will lift me up in the sky for a fair 16 hours before I meet with Stephanie and Chris in Hong Kong!