In Summary...

The Symposium 'Disaster Management and Social Work': Topics discussed -
1. Importance of being prepared even before emergency occured.
2. Role of social workers during disaster management is to value add. Hence social workers' role should not be limited to only during the recovery stage; but throughout the whole process starting from prepardness.
3. Having a recognised body to train a group of committed social workers to deploy when there was a disaster? Current situation is that social workers often go with their own faith organisations or individually since there was no such organisation to do the co-ordination.
4. The aftermath of disaster - monitoring the use and distribution of resources and aides.
5. Importance of networking and collaboration to enhance sharing and transferrance of knowledge and expertise.
6. Social workers to advocate for change to happen.
7. Knowledge Management - through the use of IT? Such as blog, wikipedia etc?

My after-thoughts:
- Felt that it was quite an interesting symposium..but thought that people from the EPU should have attended too.
- Agree about the importance of being prepared and having a trained pool of social workers trained in disaster management.
- Agree that social workers could do more instead of limiting their 'job scope' to the recovery period after the disaster happened.
- Was just thinking why didn't our SASW do something to train a pool of social workers who specialised in disaster management?
- Social workers to advocate for change: what is the limit and boundaries? Are we supposed to do that in a Country binded by laws and regulations like Singapore? When Civil Servants cannot even write in to the forum...let alone advocate for change?

The delegates:
1. I was amazed at how distracted the Philipinnos were. They were talking among themselves throughout the whole symposium. Even during the workshop Cheng Leng was distracted by one of them who asked her about places of interest in Singapore!
2. Amazed with one of the Japanese delegate who so delicately plucked his eyebrows!!! OMG!! No joke! His eyebrows were VERY delicately shaped to an arc shape!!
3. 1 one of delegates from Malaysia 'impressed' me for being too complacent!!
4. The delegate from Kenya (he was one of the presenters at the symposium and the co-founder of COSW) was rather charming. Haha..
5. The delegate from India (he was also one of the presenters)...I found him quite a humble and nice man..
6. The delegate from Hong Kong (also one of the presenters)..also very humble and nice man.
7. The Hong Kong ladies were pretty nice people too!

Seri Pacific Hotel: overall quite pleased with the hotel except for the atrocious broadband rates. It was also quite out of the way from shopping centres because it was located at the business district. I seem to have a good pally with KL hotels.. haha.. because I slept very soundly and comfortably throughout all nights!! Same when I stayed at Berjaya Times Square Hotel last year!

Places to shop: Berjaya Times Square, Sungei Wang (more 'complex' there so must be alert, but I felt safe there!), Mid-valley, KLCC, One Utama (too far we did not have time to go there....)

Things to look out for:
1. Taxi drivers who did not want to go by meter...and take only RED cabs, even if those other colour cabs agreed to go by meter...
2. The airport! Had to take terminal train to departure hall so make sure you arrived at the airport earlier so that you would not miss your plane!!
2a. Don't bother looking for the escalators..just take the lift!!
3. People who wants to jump queue at taxi stand...don't give them face!!