But I Just Got Here!

Claudia, my replacement, arrived yesterday from Germany. This is her first MSF mission and she is excited to be here but nervous that she and I have less than two weeks to train together. She became slightly more nevous when I informed her that I was kind of planning on a little holiday beginning next Saturday, but that I was confident that we would have more than enough time together.

The schedule for her first day was intentionally relaxed as Claudia, Ard and I went for a swim at the Otter’s Club, had dinner at a Thai restaurant and watched Chelsea beat Tottenham on television. Not exactly what one would expect when they join MSF. Claudia and I also spent a few hours at the office, where we covered quite a few topics and I was quickly able to get a sense of her skill-set. It’s pretty clear that one week of training will be more than enough.

Booking my flight back to Canada proved to be a somewhat bittersweet moment for me. I’ve quickly settled into life in Colombo and have found it to be a pretty interesting and comfortable existence. While my year with MSF in Pakistan was probably about three-months too long and my nine-weeks in Zambia was just right, it would have been nice to have had more than five-weeks in Sri Lanka.

I’ll be flying out of Colombo in the early morning hours of Thursday, January 24th. I’ll change planes in Dubai and Frankfurt before arriving in Amsterdam for the night. My flight the next day to Vancouver doesn’t leave until the middle of the afternoon so I’ll be able to spend the morning meeting with people at the MSF office. I’ll arrive in Vancouver on the evening of Friday, January 25th, which will give me a couple of days to recover before returning to work the following Monday. It’s not that far away, but before then I still have a lot of training and a bit of holidaying to look forward to.