August 2011 Newsletter
FROM OUR DIRECTOR The past two months have seen many of our major activities taking place. In addition we have had the National Biomedical Engineering Conference in Darwin which attracted 250 registrations. Of course the weather was perfect for our visitors and they probably think it is always like this! It was good to have a range of additional meetEngineers without Borders pre- ings held in our office and sented with $4840 from Northern to meet some of the naDivision Engineering Excellence tional representatives. As a Awatrds Donation consequence we are about to have our first Biomed College Board member from Northern Division, Julie Woerner. Tragically one of our Fellows was killed in a freak motorcycle accident recently, Geoff Miller. We offer our condolences to Geoff’s family at this sad time. See further information in this newsletter. Many thanks to those who supported the Engineering Excellence Awards including sponsors, entrants and guests on the night. I saw many a good looking member of the Blues Brothers on the dance floor! I look forward to next year and we already have our first expression of interest to nominate!! Start thinking about your projects now so that you have plenty of time. Engineering Week and Science Week were big activities for the Division. How many of you have seen the dinosaurs around town on your smart phones? They are still there! Probably some of the footpath stickers have been souvenired by now but the images remain. A highlight for me this month has been a visit to Timor Leste. I travelled there with the Darwin Chorale to participate in a concert with two Timor Leste choirs which was a wonderful experience. These two choirs have spent the past two weeks in Darwin and we have performed twice more, in Darwin during the festival and then in Katherine. It was a good opportunity to meet with the engineers in Dili that we have been supporting for eight years now. In addition I met with three Engineers
Without Borders employees and presented them with the proceeds from our Excellence Awards for the water and sanitation project in the mountains. They were surprised and pleased with the donation. These two groups of people met at a breakfast meeting so developed a new set of relationships which we hope will lead to better opportunities for both. The other project success was the delivery of 10 boxes of maths text books to the Dili Institute of Technology which had been donated by former maths teacher Rose Hagan. A big thank you to Rose and also AirNorth who allowed 10 chorale members to have free excess baggage to take them over there! The librarian at DIT writes: ‘I am writing to express our gratitude of the books to the DIT (Dili Institute of Technology) Library on August 2011. For your information the books have been catalogue onto database computer program to facilitate our students and lectures in teaching and learning process. It is our hope that this support will continue in the future not providing second hand books but also other equipments in other to help their need. Thank you very much for the attention and cooperation. Your sincerely, Geraldo Belo’. Darwin engineers Brian Forester and Greg Mariager attended the breakfast meeting and met the local engineers as well. Nominations for the election of our new 2012 Division Committee have now closed. We received VERY FEW and so the positions will need to be filled now as casual vacancies. Bronwyn Russell Antonio Brigido Correia, Chief of Staff, Ministry of Infrastructure meeting Alex Ford, EWB Asian Coordinator in Dili
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More photos from Timor Leste overleaf