Arrival in Vilnius
Door: Jolijn
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Jolijn
12 Oktober 2016 | Litouwen, Vilnius
Today, Wednesday 12 October 2016, I got up at 4.30 AM and travelled by bus and train to Schiphol, and then by airplane to Vilnius, Lithuania. I am here to participate in an expert meeting of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Highest Attainable Standard or Physical and Mental Health. The theme is: the right to mental health. Of course I am very proud to be invited to this expert-consultation. I will be giving 2 presentation in the next 2 days.
I am still exhausted from my recent activities: A couple of days ago I have published my personal testimony on gender-perspective and mental health care (see https://tekeertegendeisoleer.wordpress.com/2016/10/07/my-personal-perspective-on-gender-and-mental-health-care/ ). This is quite an intense milestone, but I hardly had time to digest my feelings afterwards. On Monday 10 October in the evening I gave a course in The Hague/Wassenaar, where I lectured to a group of 40 lawyers specialized in forced psychiatric treatments on implementing the UN CRPD. So it has been a busy week, and I haven’t had much time to recover from all these intensive activities. So I was still very exhausted this morning, when I got up after another (too) short rest. I was close to a zombie, but some coffee made it better :).
I arrived around 14.15, and then Lina, an ENUSP-colleague who lives in Vilnius, came to pick me up from the airport. That was very nice. We immediately sat down for a cup of coffee and started talking about many things. Then we took a minibus, and dropped my bags off at the Reformatai Park Hotel, and then we went sightseeing in Vilnius. Lina led me around. I saw many churches, cathedrals and other impressive buildings. And we visited the “re-public on the other side of the river”, which is a district with many artists and students. Vilnius is really nice, with a wealthy diversity of buildings, beauty and history. The University is 400 years old. It was really nice to walk around. There are several statues of angels hidden throughout Vilnius, which was the work of an artist after Communism fell. I saw an angel statue with rollerblades sitting on a roof :D I loved it of course.
In the evening, Lina and I had a nice dinner at my Guru, which is a soup-and-salad bar run by survivors of addiction (although they don’t advertise that). It was nice and cosy, and the food was also nice. Afterwards, Lina walked me back to my hotel.
In my room, I have done some more work, and mainly prepared my presentation for tomorrow. It will be about gender perspective, and it will be my first presentation on this topic (since I used to avoid gender-issues earlier). So my 10-minute speech tomorrow will be a milestone in this regard. It will be about topics of general interest (not only my personal story). And I hope I will be able to focus, and not feel lost and lonely due to traumas, which is in fact why I have chosen to express my personal experiences on gender-perspective and mental health care in a separate publication (so now these feelings have a time and a place to exist, and they don’t need to dominate my presentation). I think this will work, and I am expecting that I can give a successful presentation on gender perspective tomorrow.
And it may be a good idea to have a good night full of sleep now. So that’s what I’m going to do now :) Goodnight!
I am still exhausted from my recent activities: A couple of days ago I have published my personal testimony on gender-perspective and mental health care (see https://tekeertegendeisoleer.wordpress.com/2016/10/07/my-personal-perspective-on-gender-and-mental-health-care/ ). This is quite an intense milestone, but I hardly had time to digest my feelings afterwards. On Monday 10 October in the evening I gave a course in The Hague/Wassenaar, where I lectured to a group of 40 lawyers specialized in forced psychiatric treatments on implementing the UN CRPD. So it has been a busy week, and I haven’t had much time to recover from all these intensive activities. So I was still very exhausted this morning, when I got up after another (too) short rest. I was close to a zombie, but some coffee made it better :).
I arrived around 14.15, and then Lina, an ENUSP-colleague who lives in Vilnius, came to pick me up from the airport. That was very nice. We immediately sat down for a cup of coffee and started talking about many things. Then we took a minibus, and dropped my bags off at the Reformatai Park Hotel, and then we went sightseeing in Vilnius. Lina led me around. I saw many churches, cathedrals and other impressive buildings. And we visited the “re-public on the other side of the river”, which is a district with many artists and students. Vilnius is really nice, with a wealthy diversity of buildings, beauty and history. The University is 400 years old. It was really nice to walk around. There are several statues of angels hidden throughout Vilnius, which was the work of an artist after Communism fell. I saw an angel statue with rollerblades sitting on a roof :D I loved it of course.
In the evening, Lina and I had a nice dinner at my Guru, which is a soup-and-salad bar run by survivors of addiction (although they don’t advertise that). It was nice and cosy, and the food was also nice. Afterwards, Lina walked me back to my hotel.
In my room, I have done some more work, and mainly prepared my presentation for tomorrow. It will be about gender perspective, and it will be my first presentation on this topic (since I used to avoid gender-issues earlier). So my 10-minute speech tomorrow will be a milestone in this regard. It will be about topics of general interest (not only my personal story). And I hope I will be able to focus, and not feel lost and lonely due to traumas, which is in fact why I have chosen to express my personal experiences on gender-perspective and mental health care in a separate publication (so now these feelings have a time and a place to exist, and they don’t need to dominate my presentation). I think this will work, and I am expecting that I can give a successful presentation on gender perspective tomorrow.
And it may be a good idea to have a good night full of sleep now. So that’s what I’m going to do now :) Goodnight!
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Je kunt nu ook Smileys gebruiken. Via de toolbar, toetsenbord of door eerst : te typen en dan een woord bijvoorbeeld :smiley
