Half term = a full week!

In conversation with one of my friend's recently, I made the startling observation that when most people are busy I tend to be free and when most people are free I tend to be busy! Thus, it was no surprise that the recent half term week was one of my busiest so far; in the space of a week I had spent time in Stoke-on-Trent, West Bromwich, Rugby, Coventry and Birmingham, staying with an entirely different family each day.

My week began in Stoke-on-Trent where I met such a wide range of interesting people। Firstly I met a GP who is originally from Gujarat and was part of a government medical team which was dispatched to a region of the state which was devastated by an earthquake in 2001. He gave his harrowing account of how all the team had was an ambulace and their medical kits and so even though they could hear cries of help from beneath the rubble, they were powerless to do anything; people were dying all around them and there was nothing they could do! I also met a recently retired university professor who was Dean of his faculty in Baroda university for over 30 years. He told of how Baroda is the only university in Gujarat in which the medium of teaching is English (thus giving these students a distinct competitive advantage over their peers who are not so well versed in the language). Even the family I stayed with had an interesting story to tell, having narrowly missed being caught up in the tsunami which ravaged much of Sri Lanka and Southern India in 2004 by just one day!

Likewise, almost every place in which I go, I meet such a wide variety of people with different backgrounds, of different ages, with different origins and with different thoughts and views that I naturally end up becoming a lot more open- minded. And, for a Londoner, that can't be a bad thing......