Week II has begun

The first week has come and gone. As a treat the getaway weekend on Pining was planned and ended up a great success. Fully enthused and relaxed, yet not so fully rested we now enter week two.

The first day has already passed by. Time seems to fly here in Kuala Lumpur. Teams picked up where they left off and continued with interviewing, data collecting, organizing, writing, planning etc. As has been explained in previous blogs (except for last weekend) we really work hard, and it is not just that we work hard, we might even work too hard. We are so eager to learn about our topics, understand Malaysian culture and business and please our companies, that we collect too much data and spend too little time working it all out. It is quite distinctive when our professor tells us to watch out and not forget to relax. But all that been said and done we have relaxed and indeed time for hard work has come again. After all, we were raised as ARP-ers by our commissie to deliver quality and that is exactly what we will do; deliver great quality reports, and better yet, deliver great quality reports that we thoroughly enjoyed writing!

Today no special activities were planned as we had to recover from our relaxation weekend. We did have our weekly group dinner and DV (deelnemersvergadering). Today, entirely in theme… Zamen-Zen… this was done in one of the hotel restaurants. An authentic Chinese Muslim meal followed by a nice ‘chilled’meeting. Before I continue, it must be mentioned that this week is not like all other weeks of our Malaysian and Indonesian tour. As explained by Bouchra we are all given a day to be dagvoorzitter, and this week, it just happens to be so that the entire medical-research team has a day to be dagvoorzitter.Making this the medical-research week, and I can tell you right now, it is going to rock :). I thus started with the Zamen-Zen Dag and concluded the day with a medical quiz that taught us things about AEDs, Rogier, and Type B ambulances that we never knew before…

Today was also the last day that two of our teams are with us as they leave in the early morning hours to fly to Kalimantan, Indonesia, to continue their research in the jungle. Malaria pills have been taken, good-byes have been said and a reunion is set for next Saturday in Jakarta. And a happy reunion it will be! (Sad to say that then our next group will be in Singapore…but April 16th we truly will be whole again!) Even though we have been working so hard together for such a long time (commissie since April and us deelmeners since September), it seems that we still get to know each other better every day. You might think we would yearn for a break, a moment alone. But not quite, we are sad to see the group temporarily break. However, I know that even this painful, devastating and torturous week will be survived, after all we are indeed a royal family.

Tomorrow we continue with our next medical day….. the Ongelovelijke O-Moment Dag.