An Angel made my day!

It's been a while since I have blogged. Been busy, of course.

Today, I took on the role of the Official Unofficial Photographer, again. There's an International Conference of Regional Centres of Expertise (RCE) for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) today and tomorrow and there was also a ceremony to celebrate 40 years since the laying of the foundation stone for USM. So basically, I was "running" in and out and it got hot and I got sweaty. So, when I got back to the Conference from the foundation stone ceremony, my shirt was out, my top button off, my hair plastered with sweat ... and two angels said I looked handsome. One of them actually has a name called "Angel". So, that made my day! Thank you, Angels.

Guess which one is the "Angel".

So this is the handsome me, photo taken by the Angel. The ladies told me to look macho.


Now here's the serious stuff. About 100 participants from 34 RCEs representing 15 countries are putting their heads together at the USM campus discussing ways to save the World. I was able to meet some "old" friends from my previous meetings (Ziole from Brazil who are I met in Halifax; Harold, Zinaeda and Brendan from Nayoga; and a few others) and got to know a few new ones. Am in my office waiting for the official reception/dinner at the EQ (am much cooler but not showered yet, so I hope nobody complains about me being smelly during dinner).

In the afternoon was a short ceremony to remember the laying of the foundation stone for the Penang University College (predecessor of USM) which was carried out by Tunku Abdul Rahman (first Prime Minister of Malaysia) on 7th August 1967. The foundation stone was actually layed in Sg Ara and it is still there but efforts are being made to bring it to the USM Campus. There were some interesting snippets of memories told from the people involved with the early formation of USM including the lobby from Penang people to get the current campus (which was formerly a British Military barracks) and they succeeded because Tun Abdul Razak decided that education is more important than warfare. Another juicy information was that the British sold the military camp to USM for just one dollar. And the Japanese gave a loan of 13 million dollars (big money those days) to help build USM.

This is a replica of the foundation stone (made with styrofoam) at the DTSP

Now I got to go do some more serious work.