Kurdish National Day - New Year Celebrations

We had the most interesting day yesterday - we were invited to the Kurdish National Day. The Kurds don't actually have a recognised homeland - they were orginally part of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. You can read about Kurdistan here.
A social studies teacher at one of the schools I go to, who is Kurdish, invited the Cognition team that work at that school along for the day. The event was held in a 'zoo park' which actually was a very sad place - the animals were being kept in terrible small cages and the zoo itself was in disrepair. The park area was a large grassed area with trees for much needed shade.
They played music and we all eventually joined in dancing - Brian even got up and danced! There must have been over 500 people there - mainly men. They come to Doha without thier wives to earn the money. There were other nationalities there as well but we were the only westerners. We felt so wamrly welcomed that Joy, got up on stage and sang Pokarekareana. We joined her in song! They loved it.

Beetles

I thought I would show you this beetle that we stumbled upon out in the desert a week or so ago. I leapt in the air and screamed as I wasn't expecting to see something so big crawl out from under the rock! What do you think it is Ash - it was black with white dots on its back
We haven't seen many insects. There aren't even any cockroaches in this apartment building - thank goodness!!

Water, water, everywhere ...

......well not water that you can drink anyway. I thought I would show you our system for drinking water - we buy these large 25 litre water bottles for around $4NZ. We bought a pumping mechanism that we attach and voila fresh? drinking water. Not the same as just turning on the tap though. The tap water is desalinated and not so nice - full of things we're not sure about!
I'm drinking a lot of green tea and my favourite drink - lemon and mint blended with sugar and ice - divine. And of course one of us is keeping up their coffee intake......No points for guessing who that might be.

March already...

Golly it's about time I put something on my blog - it's been a while. Mr Brain seems to have had more time lately to spend composing ... hence the kiwi desserts entry.

Work has been progressing well - it's good to see some of the teachers putting into practice what you suggest and being happy to see you when you visit them again. A big step is getting schools using their 'grunty' IT infrastructure - they run around with flash drives infecting computers with their viruses! instead of saving onto the network to print etc. They're not really into sharing!! I have shown teachers how to record their student's talking (practising their English), with one making use of Voicethread, simple digital stories are being made, Activboards are starting to be used and two or three have had a play around with simple webquests. I love these two drawings - simple but cute, very Arabic.

I have been occupied organising my workshop at an ICT conference held last weekend. There were a few of us from work who presented which was good. It was only the second time that this particular conference has been run - the first time they have had hands-on workshops. They were very successful as it gave the teachers a chance to 'learn by doing'. There were a number of teachers from the schools we work in who were able to come - a great opportunity for them to hear the message about 21st century learners.
The food was excellent. They supplied breakfast as well as a huge lunch - lunch seems to be the main meal of the day here. It was free for teachers to attend. The presenters were invited to a meal at the Ritz, which was also a treat, the night before the conference. The overseas presenters were staying there - lucky them.