Thursday's Sessions

So today was the first day for all of SFU to participate, and did we ever! Morning started off with a cup of FT coffee, some speeches and then we jumped right into chapter cheers! SFU was up first, and we were all decked out in our prison wear (white shirts with black stripes and black pants) and we did our version of the jailhouse rock:

Get up in the morning ready to rock!
Got to get to class cause its 7 o' clock.
Theres a cool new club at the SFU jail
With our ideas on board its never gonna fail....
Lets rock........lets rock.........
Everybody on the SFU block... doin' the EWB rock

If I understand correctly, there should be some video footage somewhere on the conference 2010 website, though I haven't seen it yet. Definately try to find it if you want to see some killer coreography.

Next up was a set of speeches by Mark Hemsworth, George and Parker to set the stage for the conference. I was chatting to Parker later about the conference and we discussed how this one was so much more informal than the Waterloo conference. He had an interesting point though, I love the style where we have tons of time at meals to seek out and chat with other chapter members and OVS, however if this was my first conference I would feel a little lost by the openness.

Afternoon sessions revolved around our overseas strategy. I participated in the SA AVC (Southern Africa Agriculture Value Chains) workshop, as this is where I had some experience from my JF placement in Zambia. We had a killer role play, it was probably one of the most fun things so far at conference. I got to play an NGO worker who interviewed farmers and tried to get them to play a role in the sorghum value chain. Challenges were similar to the ones we faced while actually in Zambia, including excessive beaurocracy among other things.

Alfred had an amazing speech after lunch, during which he educated us on CLTS (Community Lead Total Sanitation). It was super effective, I think he managed to 'trigger' most of the audience. I was happy to have a chat with him after on effective workshop facilitation, he had an interesting perspective to add on engaging everyone. Alfred seems to be a big fan of the opening -- its the best chance to grab everyone's attention and he uses it to the max. That being said, he uses participation and interaction, combined with outrageous comments to keep everyone paying attention througout his talk also.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the things I love about this conference is the openness in the plan. I had some great chats about our overseas work over lunch with Hans, as well as managed to catch up with Danny and some other NO staff. We had time in the evening to prep for our MOE (a huge SO event across St. Johns tomorrow morning that I should probably be sleeping in preparation for) and got a good chance to check in with our delegation and see where they were all at. There were a series of open discussions that followed which were an interesting (albeit uncharacteristicly formal) way to discuss some of the dialemmas facing EWB over the next couple years. I had an interesting chat with some chapter communications reps.

The evening still left a couple hours for socializing, (between about 11 and 2) which was a great chance to catch up with past Zambian volunteers and drink Castle. We even sung the Zambian national anthem (while holding a very legitimate Zambian flag) to great applause of the other EWB members who were still awake.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a great MOE, as well as the AGM. Haven't had a chance to form some questions for the board or the CEOs, but I plan to do that tomorrow afternoon. Wouldn't mind spending a bit of time prepping for the Global Engineering session on Saturday either, but we will see how time goes. So far conference has been insanely busy, though super productive too!

-Mike