WHOlights from Week #1

Here are just some of the highlights of my first week interning at the World Health Organization:

(1) Sending personal emails to the WHO heads of TB management in China, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

(2) Sipping beer at a bar overlooking the Rhone River while meeting dozens of other UN interns from all over the world. Yeah weekly Intern Drinks!

(3) Attending a panel discussion at the WHO coordinated by the Imbrocks. The discussion, entitled "Blossoming in Geneva," addressed the challenges and opportunities that arise for families whose spouse(s) have extensive duty travel, and offered numerous creative solutions.

(4) Declaring the official name of our open-office space "The Runway," since the arrangement of our desks and the continous flow of people strolling through our hallway in their finest attire resemble something not unlike America's Top Model. I may start making cards with the numbers 1 through 10 so I can score the friendliness of the staff's greetings as they walk by.

(5) Attending the official Intern Induction, learning about the history, governance, and structure of the WHO, and getting answers to questions about the WHO that I never even thought I had. (Side note: the ratio of female to male interns at the WHO is roughly equivalent to the exchange rate between Zimbabwean dollars and the Euro, which is, precisely speaking, a gazillion to one.)

(6) Being taken out to dinner at a delicious Indian restaurant in the heart of Geneva by none other than the Chair of the Green Light Committee himself, Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee, along with his wife, Mercedes, and two other members of STB. We were also treated to gelato afterwards, and got a chance to walk along Lake Geneva chatting with them and picking their brains.

Salmaan, Mercedes, Maria, Morris, Amy, and myself.

Amy, Salmaan, and myself at the restaurant.

(7) Meeting a prison reform activist and documentary photographer for Partners in Health who was in Geneva en route to West Africa. He would soon trek from Ivory Coast all the way down to South Africa, taking photos of prisoners and their conditions.

(8) Attending the church's weekly Bible Study for twenty- and thirty-year-olds and diving into deep discussion with people I'd just met for the first time.

(9) Walking 1.5 kilometers through the woods in the pitch-dark from one bus stop to another. The bus goes to the second-to-last stop but ceases to go to the last one (my stop) after 8pm. This necessitates a 20 minute walk through desolate fields and creepy forest, not to mention hopping the roadblock that marks the Switzerland/France border, whenever I'm returning home late in the evening. Definitely separates the men from the boys.

And I -- I took the road less traveled by.