Thursday, June 25, 2015

Peacekeeping? Keep walking, keep talking!

As you may guess by now, the field trip to Kosovo was super intense; emotionally as well as physically. In this post I just want to highlight the physical intensity. I am using a fitness tracker which keeps track of my daily movements and counts my steps. Here is the summary of the 10 days in Kosovo including travel days:

In 10 days I had 54 hours of sleep, made about a 103000 steps, which equals to a total distance of 78 kilometers. On average this means about 5.4 hours sleep per night, 10000 steps a day, which equals to an average distance of 7.8 kilometers per day.

Yes, field work is physical work, a place where theory meets practice and practice obviously requires some movement. But actually, it's not about theory, it's not about practice; it's about meeting people! And where do you meet people? Everywhere and anytime! The following graph illustrates this nicely:


Night time was obviously party time, followed by a quick nap, only to be ready for the excursion a few ours later. 

We truly enjoyed the Kosovo trip; the nightlife, the day-life, meeting people in nightclubs, meeting  people in official settings during the day, and meeting people at home. 

In other words, keeping peace means talking to people and in order to talk to people you need to walk to people. Thus, keep walking, keep talking! 

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