Back in Beijing
on Tina's Journal (China), 23/Jun/2009 13:20, 34 days ago
I arrived in Beijing on Saturday in preparation for a training course beginning Monday. It really does feel as though I am a million miles away from Simao. This part of China is so different to where I am based in Yunnan Province, even the people look different. When I was out doing some sight seeing on Sunday I noticed that people weren't staring at me as is usually the case and it was interesting to note how many foreigners there were. In fact, it was nice to be able to walk around and sort of be invisible again. When I was here in February there weren't so many tourists wondering around.The last two days I have been busy at the VSO Programme Office working with some other volunteers on a training programme which involves how we can get our partners, basically the people we work with, which for me would be Simao Teacher's College, to think about and measure how inclusive they are. People are excluded because of unequal power relations and VSO recognises that inclusion is an aim that can never be achieved fully but we need to work towards it. My task after this training course is to run a workshop at the college with teachers and college leaders so that they may assess how inclusive their organisation is and how they could become more inclusive. I won't be able to do this until the new term starts in September and look forward to it. This week's course runs until Friday and I fly back on Saturday.On Saturday night I received a text from Lesley who is back in Simao, telling me that they had had a small earthquake. I was pleased I missed that. Luckily there was no damage, but I think that as I am now living on the 5th floor I would have felt it.Yesterday was my birthday and a few of us volunteers had a little celebration in Ritan Park. It was nice to see Tessa again, a volunteer working on the HIV/AIDS programme who arrived on the same intake as me in February. She's also come to Beijing to participate in the training.