The 2007 Michigan Development Conference

So i've arrived.After 15 hours in a four door sedan with luggage and plastic bags jostling us around, we reached Michigan. We're here for the Development Conference which is held once a year at the IICD school in Michigan. All of the Development Instructors from Massachusetts and California have come to brainstorm about you guessed it "DEVELOPMENT"! I'm so tired. We've been working like crazy. There have been lectures and meetings and presentations and I haven't slept in er.... I don't know how long. Monday I gave a presentation on education in Angola. Today, I'm giving a presentation on the African American experience in America in an interpretive poem. Our main task at this conference is to update the DMM system which is an educational data base containing the courses Humana uses to train it's teachers at the Teacher Training Colleges. So we are busy creating and uploading files. The work is tedious. We do this from 9am to 10 pm minus our food breaks. On the up side the food is fantastic. I'm usually first in line. It's also great to meet all of the Development Instructors from the schools in the US to hear about their experiences with the program or in Africa. It's interesting that we have all totally segregated ourselves here. The Americans and other English speakers (all seven of us) stick together like glue. The Brazillians, all twenty something of them are a team and the Japanese and Koreans have formed an alliance. To an extent things are segregated on the mountain by nationality but this is an extreme version. Its interesting to observe, there are a few floaters people who are sole representatives of there perspective countries, but for the most part, we separate. Ok, i'm supposed to be working.....