About three thousand mosquito bites in but nothing beats this first day!

 

The day started super early half because my stomach is finally starting to realize it's in a foreign country and half from anticipation of our first session. With all of our stuff in tow (including an emergency stash of medications,oral saline to stay hydrated, 120 CDs with some instructional guides, two ultrasounds and our extra projector because it's always good to be prepared!) of course we checked the existing projector yesterday and we checked it again this morning and everything worked fine..and then at game time as it always happens the projector connection stopped working! Long story short crisis averted and everything went very nicely. It was a bit of a surprise to us to see that the session today was kicked off by an inaugural ceremony with the president of DMC along with multiple other medical directors. It was a very warm welcome for us and they even made mention that this is the first session like this of its kind, meaning from a topic perspective as well as the first type of session organized by the younger generation (though with a lot help) and all female at that and we received gorgeous flowers! The principal even went so far as to say how proud he was that we as American born Bangladeshis came back to do something like this. It was really incredible to see such hospitality, but why am I surprised? In this most hospitable country you cannot go anywhere without being offered  a delicious cup of tea and my favorite, toast biscuit (pronounced tozt beescoot). 

The feedback was wonderful. The physicians were engaged and excited and grateful. What we probably could have done better is to get the instructional material to people earlier but the list of participants came much later. It meant spending a great deal of time on some basic concepts but overall people picked up the concepts quite quickly. 

We are energized by this good start and look forward to what lies ahead! There are a few people in the critical care department who have stood out as interested in becoming trainers themselves and ensured that they would pursue continuing medical education (CME) seminars to retain what they learned.

The flowers we received today.