Belgium Part I

I arrived in Brussels at 8 thirty and made my way via Kortrijk via two trains. I asked people where am I and where do I go many times, with the result that my journey was wrong-turn-free and peaceful with just a minimum of anxiety (if that wasn't there I would think I was dead).

By ten o'clock I was at Focus Hotel, which nobody could tell me how to find, but I figured it out. It was within a kilometer of the train station. It was a very night Bed and Breakfast, in which every room was designed by a different artist; my room was designed by a dancer. Neato. And the breakfast included liverwurst, which I ate every day. In the end I started making sandwiches of liverwurst and this spreadable white cheese--oh baby.

Monday the owner drove me a professor from KTU (who is famous, all my students know who she is (author of social work text books), though I didn't till then) to Kathos Hogeschool (~College). How do you like that last sentence? I'm an English teacher.

They had a really neat thing going on: Kathos International Classroom. All the foreign exchange students, their own prospective exchange students, and their students who have been on exchanges get together in a big auditorium and listen to a lecture on Some Global Topic. That's an hour and a half. Ours was about global finance: World Bank, IMF, and so on. Then we were separated into groups: seven of the poorest countries, and the eighth group was the World Bank. My group was East Timor. The World Bank had 1000 units of money to distribute as gifts, and 1000 as loans, and we had to try to get some. We had a half hour to prepare, so we went to the library to find out stuff about East Timor. Guess who was elected our group's speaker. My speech went something like this:

East Timor is a land rich with resources, opportunities, and manpower, all of which are wasting away. We have petroleum, which is not being refined. We have natural gasses too, also untapped. We have gold, un-mined. And meanwhile, we have a population, half of which is unemployed. Let us put two and two together!

Besides this, 85% of our trade is imports. What little money we do have in East Timor is on its way out.

Lend us 150 so that we may build a petroleum refinery. This will put our resources and our people to work, and the profits from this will both pay back the loan and expand our industry into other potential exports, natural gasses and gold. This way we may balance our imports and exports.

Also, we ask for 15 as a gift, so that we may endow upon our people the skills and competences that will allow them to begin the construction and manning of the refinery, to make them feel like human beings again, and give them the will to be part of society and part of the world.

I’ll find out the result of the contest soon.