Day #9 – back to FAST

Dawn broke to a very pleasant surprise.  There was power.  The nominal time for the DHA to have no power is 6-7 in the morning.  This morning, hey! When you pressed the lightswitch, you got light!  Nice way to start.

We started the day with a traditional Pakistani breakfast of eggs and French toast.  The toast was pre-sweetened – the egg batter having some sugar in it – so no syrup was used.  There were two kinds of toast though – regular and spicy.  The spicy was pretty neat – but sweet and heat in the same bite!  After a cup or two of tea, we packed up and Bakhtiar took us over to Shezhad’s and we split up.  Julie to go do hospital visits with the rest of the team and Tom and I to return to the National University for another agile day.  Shezhad accompanied us for the day and so it was quite nice.

We did pretty much the same program as last week with a couple of changes – Tom updated the slide deck so there was less swapping and switching between computers, and we tightened up our presentation approach.  Shezhad also tightened up the Rotary pitch based upon the response from the crowd last week. We again had about 150 people, more students than professionals this time, but still some.  Again, the only volunteer to sing the invocation was a young lady, so much for that preconceived notion of inequality.  I still find the female students more reserved than their male counterparts, but that is true in many US universities as well. About 6 slides in the power went off and the switch over period was non-trivial in terms of time.  After a moment or so, I figured I needed to do something, so since the laptops were on battery and were still vivid, I just kept presenting and promised to show them the slides later on.  I did refrain from wandering around the stage, just so I would not end up falling off J (that would be bad form).  After about 5 minutes, the auxiliary lights came on, but the AV guy had inadvertently taken the remote for the projector with him and we had no way to restart that.  So I continued and promised to catch them up on the slides later.  Eventually the remote came back in and we got the visuals back up, but no one missed a blink.  The power outages are so much ingrained in the society at this point that except when there is an occasional glitch in the switch over , no one notices them.

We had a good 3-3 ½ hours and then did lunch (pizza hut).  The chancellor came swirling in towards the end and we sat for another 10 minutes talking about the University, who he was, his team, his background, and all that.  He seemed much more positive and engaged this week (maybe cause his exams were over).  We presented a stack of agile books to the University and met the librarian (who wore a burkah, though not a black one).  There was a moment of concern as to what the americans would say, and so they explained her credentials to us before introducing her.  I find it funny how sensitive they all are here as to what we think of their dress.  I have been lent a Punjab dress outfit and when I wear it here, apparently I pass as a local.  There is a sect of lighter skinned folks form farther north and apparently until I open my mouth I am transparent to them.  There is indeed a certain amount of “the dress makes the man” in all of this, but where does it leave being the identification of success level of the individual and start being socio-economic prejudice?

After presenting the books, we went upstairs and had the advanced seminar.  There was a larger crowd this week, but we had changed this program slightly as well so that we relied less on the slides and more of a free flow of ideas.  Instead of the coffee game, we estimated how long the tea break would be (it was put into the 21min bucket and actually too 30, so probably should have been put in the 34min bucket, but then that would have probably stretched too).  We reduced the amount of discussion before the game and played all three iterations and it was great.  At the conclusion of it all, we spent some time answering questions and making contacts and receiving more wonderful gifts and taking pictures.  Then we went off to Max’s for dinner and discussion.

I never did hear how the hospital visits went, but I heard they got to play with eyeballs (not really).