“LIfe is all about contacts!”
Life is all about contacts’
I met 32 new friends from all over the world when I coordinated a workshop at IRRI for the Communication for Social Change Consortium. The hotshots of the development communication field were there and I was able to closely interact with them. It was so cool! They were all PhD holders but I could call them by their first name and email them if I needed anything in the future. That’s the advantage of being the coordinator, aka utusan, for one week. As Peter da Costa of University College London told me,
"Duday, life is all about contacts!"
The most popular, of course, was Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, the Bolivian filmaker and author of the book "Making Waves". He looked like Don Corleone but he was such a sweet, outspoken, and inspiring person. All the other practitioners and academicians from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Caribbean, and North America were there too and I learned from observing and listening to them. I was also encouraged to learn Spanish since a lot of important reference in the field of development communication are in this language and have not been translated. I told Alfonso that next time, I’ll try to talk to him in Spanish.
I have not digested everything I heard because some ideas were really new to me. It was good that the PhD students from Devcom - Pam, Jenny, Ike, and Rica - helped me understand what was going on.
Although I did not get paid for my two-week work - which included everything from airport transfer to renting a jeep so they could go swimming to helping buy orchid fertilizer - it was worth it because 32 doors of friendship and opportunities opened for me. Plus, I got pasalubongs from some of them: a wooden jewelry box with a Nativity scene from Peru, an intricate hair band from India, a green parrot from Bolivia, a colorful red magnet from Colombia, a silver bracelet from Argentina, and a Tiffany’s key chain from the US.
Kindness truly pays off.
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just to give you an idea which countries were represented: US, UK, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, India, Nepal, Jamaica, Zambia, Ghana, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Philippines
