Back to school

Hello Everyone.  It's been a couple of days since our last post, so a little recap.  Hamidah and I attended a lecture (yes, I'm actually learning something too and it's not really full time school - only 1 lecture - but its a start! :)) on Monday night, hosted by the Internation Federation of Red Cross and Red Cresent Societies at the Japan Society - a side event to the UN General Assembly meetings happening now.  The talk was on Polio eradication and its part within the Millenium Development Goals.  The keynote speaker was Dr. Margaret Chan, the Secretary General of the World Health Organization and the panel and guests included the Secretary General of the Red Cross / Crescents, Minister of Health from Afghanistan, President of the Afghan Red Crescent Society (both Afghani reps were women by the way!), Director of Programmes from UNICEF, Executive Director and CEO of Nigeria's National Primary Health Care Development Agency and three high level individuals from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (who was a former US Ambassador), Rotary International, and the Global Alliance Vaccines and Immunizations.  Yeah it was pretty crazy!  And for those of you keeping score at home, we have eradicated polio in about 99% of the world's population, but the last 1% is going to be hard.  We are talking about some of the most remote (or hostile) places in India, Central Asia (hostile refering to Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan) and Africa.  It will be a hard and expensive road to complete, but would be one of the best gifts to leave to the children of the world, by eradicating the virus from the world!