so, about that training

My 'team' , from L-to-R: Susie (medical - doctor), Paddy (medical - nurse), Santosh (medical - doctor), and Me (non-medical - log). We're happy because, well, we're the best! (we were the only team to get 8-of-8 on one of the quizzes)

The first few days we worked in kind of 'ad hoc' groups. They'd split us up whenever they wanted us to tackle something in teams, but mostly the first few days were plenary sessions.

The last few days, however, they split us into 'operational' teams, each with meds and n-meds, to tackle what they call the 'case days'. These days they'd use real MSF scenarios (that actually happened) and have us work through to solutions. This was everything from assessment on initial setups for landing on the ground and having 100,000 refugees in front of us in Afghanistan, to building a medical 'caravan' to deliver medical aid to remote Columbia (with appropriate security concerns). We had to become familiar with what sort of resources we'd have in the field, what sort of conditions were/are present, our local staff, etc. Then, we'd present our solutions in plenary, to be discussed/analyzed/torn apart by the other groups and the facilitators.
For many of these modules, they'd split our ops groups out, and pull us n-meds (non-medicals) into a separate room to discuss specific concerns, while the meds dealt with theirs. Then, we'd all get back together in our teams and come up with solutions that were appropriate given both aspects of the team's concerns.

All told, the training was intense - lots of learning, lots of discussion, lots of thinking and working. We spent a lot of time focused intently on the problems or issues at hand. Burning up the braincells. I was very impressed at the whole group - very rarely did folks slack off when it came to the training contents. It was hard, sometimes, especially when you considered how little sleep most of us were getting, but the whole team really buckled down and kept at it, for all 13 hours of every day. Very inspiring.

Of course, with such intense work comes intense play. But, i think that i've already touched on some of that. ciao for now.