Goodbye Germany…Hello Rome…Ciao Rome

Okay…I know it has been about one month since I last wrote something, but that doesn’t mean at all that nothing happened. Actually it has been quite the opposite.

After 6 great weeks in Lyon I got back to Germany on the 12th of August where I entered the very final phase of my preparation to go to Madagascar, which included an amazing reunion with my friends from Konstanz and 2 very special weeks in Bremen.

Last weekend it was time then to see my family and friends goodbye, so we had a nice dinner at my place before my mother took me to the Frankfurt airport early Monday morning. Finally I headed off to Rome where all the interns were about to get an intensive orientation training in the headquarter of the World Food Programme beginning on Thursday.

Arriving in Rome 3 days before the official programme started, I had enough time to see my Italian buddies Fabio & Monica. They showed me the beautiful city of Rome in 2 days and they took me to non-tourist spots which I never would have found without their local knowledge. To me Rome is like one giant museum…almost everywhere you look you will find something interesting and it became one of my favourite cities by now.



On Wednesday the other interns arrived and I would like to introduce them quickly. Sebastian & Eva are going to work for the School-Feeding-Project in Burkina Faso, Katrin & Lieke are assigned for project monitoring in the city of Mongu in Zambia, Valentin & Tabe will take care of the IT- and procurement tasks in Laos…and off course there is my Dutch mate Tuli who will join me for the internship in Madagascar.

So our training began on Thursday morning with a tight but very well organized schedule. We had all kind of seminars, varying from how to become a good story teller for WFP, a security in the field briefing to visits of the WFP Situation Room and library. To me the most valuable event was having lunch with Haladou Salha from Niger. He has been working for 4 years in Madagascar and was very keen about telling us about it. Especially him but also the other WFP staff were extremely nice and helpful towards us interns. We had sufficient time to ask as many questions as we wanted which I don’t take for granted at all, giving the fact that they have been quite busy themselves.
The training ended Friday evening with a little farewell event and the obligatory group picture and the overall “we finally want to start our internship”-mood!


We will leave in a couple of hours to our different destinations and I am glad to have been given the chance to get to know better Alex, Patricia, Christiano and especially my fellow GEPers 2007. Take care and you will here from me next time from Antananarivo/Madagascar!

MGG Fabi