Meetings

Every meeting starts with a group song, a prayer, and a "clap" (a "clap" means someone gets up and leads us in some form of chanting and clapping that lasts anywhere from 5 seconds to a few minutes). Today we had an all day retreat/planning meeting to talk about goals for the clinic for the next year. The clinic is still pretty new and growing quickly (they hired ten new staff in the past month) and the staff is all quite young (the clinic directors are probably mid-30's) so its fun to be part of something so new and dynamic - and actually feel like I have something to contribute. We took breaks in the middle of the meeting to play games (that's what's happening on the right - "Simon Says"). One of the guys in clinic borrowed my camera so they could put pictures on the web site (their IT department = one person) so sorry some of these are blurry but its fun having his view of the meeting and his fellow staff members. We were at a little retreat place about 15 minutes outside of town - which we got to by (surprise!) squishing all 52 staff into 3 vans - its very fuel efficient. They have a LOT of meetings (which are generally not the most efficient things) but the monotony is relieved by lots of joking and clapping.