November | 2013 | Had we but world enough and time…

So, when I last posted on here, I was busy setting up a Situation Room at work, bustling about supporting our team with the Typhoon Haiyan response in The Philippines. Since then, a lot happened very fast.

My colleague P was already out in Manila, and the scale of the disaster rapidly became apparent in the media, so we were all hands on deck.

There were all sorts of dramas – things like the media reporting that it had been 6 days and no aid had come through, people were starving etc. What they don’t mention of course is that all the roads were blocked, and a second tropical storm came through, leaving the airport underwater, and the seas were too rough for a lot of boats to come in, so naturally it’s incredibly hard to get any aid in anywhere! But that’s not quite as interesting as a headline…

Anyhoo, rest assured we were all working as hard as we could, and on Thursday night P emailed me to say that she thought they might need me over there too. So on Friday morning, I got up early, checked my email, and found that sure enough, I had been approved to go, with instructions to get on a plane as soon as possible.

I spent the whole of Friday 15th bustling about at work filling in HR forms, medical forms, insurance forms, and writing up some handover notes so they could backfill my post while I was on secondment, and after getting poked, prodded and vaccinated, I was deemed fit to travel and booked onto a flight for Saturday morning. Continue reading →

Well well, it has been an exciting week!

So, some work-related context first: My manager C (now ex-manager) and I developed two water and sanitation e-learning courses on behalf of several NGOs in a consortium. It was a beasty piece of work that got bigger and bigger, and ended up taking us about 2 years to do.

However, we’re dead chuffed with the final products, which are available online here if you fancy taking a look (the courses are called Technical Project Management for WASH emergencies, and Information, Education, and Communication for WASH emergencies). We also managed to produce them onto CDs, and in French, and the feedback from staff out in the field has been fantastic. However, even better was the fact that we got shortlisted for an e-learning award! We presented our courses to the judges back in September, and were invited to the very swanky e-learning awards dinner to find out if we won. Our category was for ‘Excellence in content production – not for profit sector’, and there were 5 other organisations/companies who were shortlisted in our category. The ceremony itself is all very elegant and formal – black tie, including a champagne reception and a 4-course dinner at the Mariott hotel in London (Ooh-er Mrs!). The e-learning company who developed the courses with us very kindly paid for our tickets to this shin-dig, as well as putting C and I up in a hotel in London for the night. Continue reading →