A shorter blog this evening as time is short. Tomorrow is our Board of Trustees meeting at which, amongst other matters, we want to spend some time looking more closely at the options for getting involved in
China. There’s lots of details of the September team visit on the BMS website but tomorrow we’ll want to look at the policy details of how we place people, where they can go and what kind of skills we need. It’s the kind of agenda item that ticks the ‘enjoyable’ box!
Tomorrow evening (Wednesday) I’ll set off for a 10 day visit to Bangladesh and India. Margaret Gibbs, our regional secretary for Asia went yesterday and I’ll catch up with her on Thursday in Dhaka. We’ll have 3-4 days meetings with our partners at a conference centre outside of Dhaka the Capital, where the agenda is looking at how our work might develop in the next few years. We’ll also catch up with our BMS colleagues in the country.
Early next week (Monday 30th) I’ll go to Kolkata (Calcutta) India, then to Delhi on Thursday and back home on 6 December. I’ll try and blog as I go along, though that will be more difficult in the first few days.
In the meantime, I leave you with proof that wisdom comes with the passage of the years. Tonight I slipped into our local supermarket to buy two Christmas puddings for BMS colleagues in Bangladesh. I did something similar about eight years ago when I visited BMS colleagues Philip & Rosemary Halliday in France in early December, only on that occasion I didn’t have time to go to the supermarket and instead took the pudding we’d bought for Christmas Day at home. “Mental note – buy a replacement when I get back”. Historical note – forgot to buy the pudding and had a very deep hole to dig myself out of on Christmas afternoon! Ah well, I lived to tell the tale – but only just!
David Kerrigan
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