Journal 9-29-2010
Today was the final day of the three-day MCC social work conference. I haven’t been able to journal for the past few days because of this conference. The conference had both positive and negative points. That is all I will say at this point.
The MCC social work conference Day 1.
On the first day we woke up at 7:00 we left ICSA at about 7:30, hopped in a rickshaw and headed to the Egmore train station. There we got tickets for Tambaram and were headed toward MCC by 8:00. We got to Tambaram around 8:45 and made it to the registration desk at MCC just before 9:00. We reluctantly paid the 300 rupee per person registration fee then went into the conference hall where we were firmly ushered to the second row of seats. We sat in these seats for over two and a half hours through opening ceremony and the chief guest’s, Ms. Vidya Dinker, speech.
At 10:30 we had a 30 minute tea break and photo session. Then we sat back down in the second row for another two hours. The two talks that occupied this time block were some of the best of the entire conference. They dealt with Development and climate change. One speaker was an Australian professor, Dr. Frank Tesoriero, and the other was an activist and independent journalist, Mr. Nityanand Jayaraman. At 1:00 we broke for lunch until 2:00. After lunch we made our way back to the same seats and sat through another 2 and ½ hours of talks. At 4:30 we had another tea break, and then we sat through half of a dance performance before we ducked out and hopped on the 45 minute train ride back to Egmore.
As soon as we got back to ICSA we rushed to the room where we can connect to the internet with a weak wireless signal. There we quickly downloaded as much additional information for Matt’s project as we could before the wireless disappeared around 7:30. Our task was to create a research poster that was worthy of presenting at an international conference. We took a short break for dinner at an Italian restaurant down the block. Then continued to compile information about food sustainability in Tamil Nadu for the rest of the night. I got done with my portion at about midnight while John and Matt stayed up till 2:00 am putting the finishing touches on the various different sections. The story behind the poster is this… Anne Walter had asked us to present two posters at this conference. We were under the impression that because this was fairly large international conference and a local college, the poster session would consist of posters on research in the field of Social Work. After much stress and tension among the group we decided that it would be inappropriate to present two posters because only one of us had the data and background information for a project. If attempted to create two posters, the second would have to be on ideas that we had for our future individual research project. We concluded that this would make us look like fools in front of important international professors, especially because we have not had internet access and therefore have not been able to do any background research in the fields related to our possible topics. We settled on all contributing to turning Matt’s food sustainability project into a poster.
Day Two of the MCC conference
When Matt and John went to bed at 2:00am on Tuesday morning we had the whole poster completed on our various computers. This turned out to only be the beginning of the struggle. At ICSA we have no printers and no Internet. This lack of technology infrastructure posed several problems for us. It mean that we could not print off documents and prepare the poster and finish it in advance and it meant that we had no way of getting the portions that Matt had written off of his Ipad and onto any of the other computers. Our only option was to try to solve these problems at MCC the next day before the poster session that started at 12:15. We woke up at 7:00 and made it to the conference at 9:00 just before it started. Matt and John skipped the first two hour session from 9 to 11 to try to solve our technical problems and get our poster printed off. They ended up sitting in the woods behind a guest house to poach wireless access from the Davidson college students, they got caught and ended up making friends with some member of the Davidson faculty. This meant that Matt had successfully sent his documents to John. From there the dudes went to try to find a printer. They tried and failed to use the library printer, john unfortunately caught 45 viruses on his pen drive and computer from using a computer in some department. But eventually he managed with great difficulty, a lot of help, and several paper jams to print off the various pages that make up our poster. It must have been at least 25 pages… mostly of text… unfortunately.
Matt, and later, john returned to the conference each with different sections of the poster. We were able to assemble it during tea break and part of the following session. Finally, our poster was complete about 3 minutes into the poster session.
I am not sure what the average poster session in India looks like but this one looked like a 6
th grade art show. Our poster looked incredibly out of place covered in text and tables.
Some of the other posters completely lacked text and looked something like this.
Others had text that was intended to be meaningful
Smiley faces and sad faces were featured on many of the posters. They were used on to show the reaction that you were supposed to have to words like rain and global warming.
I was shocked and completely surprised that this was the type of poster session that these college students had put together. I am still not sure if it was supposed to be an art show or if this is a standard social work poster session. Our poster was very out of place. I am proud to say that we had actually put research, time and substance into it.
The most disappointing thing about the poster session was that none of the “speakers, or professors made it around to see our poster and give us input on future directions for Matt’s project. We had to approach some of them later to ask them for feedback.
On the previous day we had been asked if our group would perform at the cultural exhibition that was going to be held on Tuesday. We had said yes but we didn’t want to sing a song because we had the impression that this was a serious scientific environment in which a lion king song would be way out of place. We though about trying to cancel our slot on the list of performers, but after calling Shoshana and asking for advice we decided to change our performance from a song to some environmental poems. Leah, John and I had to go search for an internet connection during the two hour afternoon session, so that we could find and copy down some poems to read. Again the lack of internet access is really a hassle. We found Dr. Sam who was extremely helpful and let us use a computer in the zoology office. We copied down three poems. The one I was going to read, was called epitaph on the world by Thoreau. It goes something like this.
Here lies the body of this world
Whose soul at last to hell was hurled
…. (I cant remember a couple of lines)
When it died, when twill arise
We only know that here it lies
It was a really dark poem, but I got a ton of applause, probably because I am white… (the race thing is really strange and backward here.)
Poems were also really out of place at the cultural show. Most of the performances were dances and skits. All we had were poems so we just went with it. The other American schools didn’t perform or present posters at all.
We finally made it home (to ICSA) around 7:30 we were all pretty exhausted from the busy night before and from sitting and listening to speakers all day.
I could go on for another two pages about the various speakers at the conference… about how several speakers made powerful negative statements about countries governments and technologies, and about how none of the speakers cited any credible sources (one professor even cited Wikipedia). Apparently in the field of social work it is ok to make outrageous statements against America, globalization, the Indian government, and “the west” without having to provide a single shred of evidence that your claims might be well founded.
I did get some valuable information from this conference. The most important thing I learned was that the Indian government has both a good and bad side. In many cases the Indian government provides the means for people and communities to survive, but in other situations the Indian government is responsible for killing people, stealing land and forcing families into extreme poverty.
The third day of the conference
By the third day we had invested so much time and energy in this conference that we were all burned out. I personally wanted to leave more than anything in the world. My butt literally hurt from sitting for so many hours over the past three days. I found it hard to pay attention to the speakers and I continued to take issue with the fact that no real research or data was presented at the conference to back up the claims made by the various presenters.
In conclusion, I cannot consider the conference a scientific conference at all. It was much more of a really long meeting to encourage social workers to become activists.
I really hope I don’t sound too negative by saying all this about the MCC conference. But I am just going to tell it like it is. I would definitely not recommend sending students there in the future. It had some value, but was not worth the enormous amount of time that we invested in traveling to, attending and participating in it.
These are our truthful closing thoughts on the conference. I asked “Team India” to sum up the conference in one word. In no way is this meant to be offensive to the organizers of the conference or to Anne Walter who requested that we attend. Because this is my journal I find it important to log our feelings about the past 3 days.
Katie- Unexpected(ly boring)
Matt- Elementary
Paul- Taxing
John- Overdramatic
Leah- Repetitive
While we have been back at ICSA we have been going to a really good Italian restaurant every night for dinner. Last night was our fourth and final night at the restaurant. It was also our last night together as a group until travel break at the beginning of November.
Just for fun here are some pictures from the past couple of days.
(beards)
Our daily commute.
