The Sphere Effect

It is around 5.30 in the morning and I have snuck downstairs so that I won’t wake up my room-mate at such an ungodly time of the morning. I am SO awake right now, which is very unfair as everyone who knows me, knows that I am not a morning person and that I would do anything to just be able to sleep in another five minutes, and then another five after that.

Jet lag is horrible. I find that I am very awake in the morning and at around 2 in the afternoon I start getting sleepy. Last night at about 6.30pm I thought I would have a half hour power nap before dinner. Well the last I knew of that was at 3am this mornng when I woke up bright as a button. Sigh….

Switzerland is very cold compared to Perth (which I believe is sweltering in yet another heat wave at the moment), but it’s not as cold as I thought it would be. Yesterday I was able to go outside in just a tee-shirt and a fleece, and I am very disappointed to find that there isn’t any snow except for a couple of dirty unmelted patches in a couple of places on the grass.

Dauntless, I dutifully gathered up a few piece of muddy, snowy ice yesterday to make a couple of snowballs to throw at my unsuspecting fellow MSF colleagues. The looks of shock and the subsequent snow fight was very gratifying to a snow deprived aussie. Europeans do NOT expect to have dirty snow thrown in their face or dumped down their backs. hehe

I am the only person here who speaks English as a first language. There are 13 students and various teachers, and most people speak french as a first language. Fortunately there are at least four of us who don’t really speak french, so we do get to have some good conversations.

I am very envious of people who seem to be able to flick between three and four languages without even thinking about it. My french is so basic that I can only understand one word in about five, and that only if the person is speaking slowly. On the first night I was sitting at the dinner table with three french girls who were talking around me, and one of them finally looked at me in concern and asked if they were speaking too quickly for me. I had to laugh and say ‘honey, I have no idea what any of you are saying at all’, at which point they flicked back to english, fortunately for me.

I think I am probably the hardest person for everyone to understand, although I have tempered my Aussie accent (I think) and I am trying to speak veeerrry sllooowlly. Apparently zey understand me best if I try to speak with a freench acczent. (which I don’t do very well at all).

I think you have to be a certain kind of a person to do this sort of work, and I find (as I have found before) that I really, really like every single person I have met who works for MSF. People are very friendly, very interested in you, and very concerned about humanitarian issues - which fits in well with me as it is what I want to talk about.

This will be the beginning of the second full day of the course, which is really a duplication of the welcome days that I have already done in Sydney, with an extra section which concentrates on Logistics. Therefore a lot of what we are being told, I already know, although it is told from the MSF-Switzerland perspective. It’s still very interesting to me though, and yesterday we watched a three hour video on the birth of Humanitarianism and how it has evolved over the last 100 years or so. I found it very, very interesting, and I really do feel that I am finally about to start in the career sector I should be in.

We also watched a movie/documentary on Rwanda on Sunday night, called ‘Sometimes in April’. I have never before had such a clear picture of what happened in Rwanda in 1994, and at the end of the movie no-one could even speak to each other but just quietly got up and went to bed without even saying goodnight to each other.

Anyway sorry for waffling on so much, but there is no-one else to talk to at this time of the morning, and I just thought I would write. Much more came out than I expected, oopss….. .